An internal model at OpenAI has produced a claimed refutation of ETH! Russell Impagliazzo, Mohan Paturi, and I have been asked to help organize an open and independent examination of this claim. 1/4

The "Mathematics in the Age of AI" era has become the "Mathematics in the Age of Blog Posts" era.

🇭🇷 Garry Kasparov: "The grandmaster title has become inflated" Garry Kasparov on how chess has changed over the years and the growing number of grandmasters: "Eight, nine, and ten year old children are now beating grandmasters. Perhaps that means that not all grandmasters today are 'real' grandmasters. On the other hand, this is nothing unusual. When I was a child, it was very difficult to compete against adults who were more complete players. That meant it took a long time to reach chess maturity. Nowadays, children start playing chess much earlier. They can study games on their computers. They play a lot and gain experience that way. They receive online coaching. But we have to admit that the grandmaster title has become inflated. In the past, you knew every grandmaster by their first name. When Walter Browne received the grandmaster title in 1971, there were only two of them. He told me that there was a big debate at the time about whether the other person really deserved the title. He was the World Junior Champion, but that was about it. And do you know who that second person was? Karpov. I have absolutely no idea how many grandmasters there are today. Perhaps there are around 2,000, which doesn't mean I'm downplaying their achievements." 📷 Lennart Ootes

One day, Edward Nelson woke up and realized that infinity might not be real. It left him in an existential crisis. He was, he said, “like an infant in my crib reduced to counting on my fingers.” quantamagazine.org/what-can-…

Mike was my colleague at Berkeley, and he's been fairly skeptical of deep learning's trajectory for years. Most scientists are skeptics, and it can take a big shock to get someone to consider a possibility that goes against the anchoring effect coded in our DNA. I too was somewhat of a skeptic until ~6 months ago, and people ask me all the time why I joined Anthropic. It started in April, when a friend I've known for 20 yrs messaged me saying he'd be in the Bay Area in a week, and he suggested we meet up. I invited him to my house for dinner, and he told me he had just joined Anthropic. He said the models were becoming increasingly more capable, and he believed both that they'd soon be smarter than him and also that all intellectual work would be highly devalued in the near future, and lastly that society was not at all ready for what's coming. I'd of course heard claims similar to this before, but not from a friend I'd known for this long, and who I trusted, at my dining room table. It was the initial shock needed to destabilize my own anchoring. Also, I've been fortunate to work with and/or mentor many smart people in my life (e.g. Fields medalists, a 4x Putnam Fellow, IOI first place winners, etc.), so I feel pretty calibrated in recognizing very smart people, and this was someone who is definitely very smart and with impressive such credentials. So, it was hard to ignore this friend saying the models would be smarter than even him in particular. After that dinner, I decided to do an informal survey, calling and meeting up with a lot of my friends who now work on improving model capabilities at these frontier labs. They all agreed with that first friend. These were all people I'd known 10, 15, 20 years, who mentored me, or I mentored them, or we met professionally in academia. These are people I trust, and their beliefs on this topic were consistent. I then spent a whole lot of time understanding the missions of different companies, and talking to current and former employees and people in leadership. I read Dario's (long) essays and watched videos on YouTube of company leaders being interviewed. Anthropic's stated mission "to ensure that the world safely makes the transition through transformative AI" felt like exactly the right guiding principle to handle such a society-disrupting technology, and everyone I spoke to at the company was very aligned with this mission. It's easily the most mission-focused place I've ever been at, and everyone takes the work extremely seriously and with a profound sense of responsibility. And now here I am. And being on the inside, the pace of progress has surprised me more than I first imagined. The moment that pure mathematicians are in, to me, is just a microcosm of what I predict a much larger of society will be grappling with in the not too distant future, and I really hope our leaders and the general public internalize sooner than later just how significant a moment we're in.

Hearty congratulations to Navanethem "Navi" Pillay on being awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize! From defending anti-apartheid fighters to serving as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and leading international tribunals, her lifelong dedication to justice, dignity, and international law is a profound inspiration. A historic moment of pride for the global community and people of Indian heritage worldwide. #NobelPeacePrize

🇦🇷 Faustino Oro: "I train around six hours a day, almost all on my own" Faustino Oro on his training routine and why he prefers studying with engines over books: "Training with coaches helps you a lot, but I think most people are also largely self-taught, learning more on their own. In general, I train around six hours a day, and almost all of it is on my own. I've never read a book. Technology and engines have taken over so much that I feel it's almost easier to learn with engines. Nowadays, with engines, you can study a thousand things that you perhaps couldn't before, whether openings or other aspects of the game. I think it's much easier to study with an engine. It's not that I haven't read books for any particular reason. I just find it easier to learn with engines, and I don't particularly enjoy reading either. So I find it easier, and I actually enjoy learning with engines more." 📷 FIDE

New FIDE ratings are out and Elo deflation is real. I have been discussing it with fellow players, and a lot of top players have echoed it too. Here is my take, 1. Inactivity is protected. In tennis, ranking points expire after 52 weeks, so if you stop playing, you slide down. In chess, you can sit out for months and keep your rating, and active players end up paying for it. Tennis rankings aren't perfect either. They measure results, not strength, points depend on how far you go, not who you beat, so a lucky draw earns the same as a hard one. Elo at least weights opponent strength. But tennis rankings reflect recent activity, which chess lacks. 2. Color bias. White scores better, but Elo ignores color. In team events like the Olympiad or leagues, one player can end up with more Whites/Blacks than another. It's small per game, but it adds up. And look at the top 100, a rating means far more today than it did years ago. I don't know what the solution is, but something is clearly wrong with the system. Every ranking system in every sport has flaws, but these are two major ones that can clearly be fixed or improved.