OpenAI just posted a 67 page paper titled "The Exponential Time Hypothesis is False." Here's what that means in plain English. Picture a wall of light switches and a list of rules like "switch 3 OR switch 7 must be on." Find a setting that follows every rule. That puzzle is called 3-SAT. The brute force way is trying every combination. Every switch you add doubles the work. 300 switches means more combinations than there are atoms in the universe. For about 25 years computer scientists have assumed you can never escape that doubling. You can be clever and shave some off, but the blowup is baked in. That assumption is ETH, and a ton of other results are built on top of it. OpenAI claims an algorithm that still blows up, just slower than ETH says is possible. What it doesn't mean: - It doesn't prove P = NP - It doesn't make every hard problem easy - It doesn't break Bitcoin. Turning SHA-256 into one of these puzzles takes tens of thousands of switches, and at that size this method is far slower than plain brute force. Huge if true. It's a preprint and nobody has checked it yet. Watch what the complexity theorists say over the next few weeks. xitter.cf/rrwilliams/status/2114…