capability progress

A mathematician (Alvaro Lozano-Robledo) posted an AI-generated illustration of configurations disproving the Erdős unit distance conjecture (made with ChatGPT); someone then asked an AI image tool to make variant images "inspired by" the pattern, and the model's reasoning trace claimed it saw "hidden text" reading "you are loved immensely" in the purely mathematical pattern — a hallucinated/confabulated perception, reposted as a striking anecdote. Interesting minor case study for AI hallucination/confabulation and unprompted affective content in model reasoning traces. Mathematicians using ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking to help produce and verify a construction disproving Erdős's unit distance conjecture, with a generated illustration of the resulting lattice graph in the complex plane. Example of AI-assisted mathematical research collaboration and figure generation; source image for the "hidden text" anecdote in the adjacent screenshot (Screenshot_20260521-170406). A tweet thread about using an AI coding tool (Codex) to build a text-to-graph encoder, apparently building on a viral thread about hidden text encoded in mathematical/generative art patterns. Playful, tangential AI-tooling content rather than safety-relevant. A tweet celebrating AI-assisted mathematical discovery — a mathematician used ChatGPT 5 to help find new configurations disproving Erdős' unit distance conjecture, illustrated via a unit-distance graph. Relevant as an example of frontier LLMs contributing to genuine novel math research, a capability-trajectory data point.

OpenAI's Greg Brockman announcing "First Proof," a new benchmark testing AI models on unpublished, unsolved-in-literature research math problems — reporting their model found likely-correct solutions to 6 of 10 in a week. Relevant to Nathan's capability-progress tracking; a significant claimed jump in genuine novel-research capability rather than benchmark memorization.

Zvi Mowshowitz criticizing Google DeepMind for releasing Gemini 3 Deep Think — a model with dramatic capability jumps across ARC-AGI-2, IMO, IPhO, IChO, and Codeforces — without publishing a system card or safety explanation, on the grounds that it was merely a "runtime improvement." Directly relevant to Nathan's AI governance/safety interests: a documented case of a lab treating major capability gains as exempt from safety disclosure norms. Follow-up to the previous tweet — Google walked back its earlier claim that no safety evals were needed for Gemini 3 Deep Think, saying evals were in fact run and would be shared, blaming a "communication issue." Part of Nathan's tracked thread on lab transparency practices around capability jumps.

Follow-up tweet to the ARC-AGI-2 benchmark screenshot above, highlighting that Gemini 3 Deep Think's jump from 45.1% to 84.6% came alongside an 82% cost reduction in under three months — a data point for rapid capability/cost-efficiency progress relevant to Nathan's AI-timeline tracking.

Benchmark tracking screenshot showing ARC-AGI-2 scores jumping from near-0% (initial 2025 baseline) to 84.6% (Gemini 3 Deep Think, Feb 2026) within about a year, with Claude Opus 4.6 at 68.8%. Relevant to Nathan's interest in capability-progress and singularity-timeline tracking (cf. Davidson/Houlden r estimates, METR automation figures in project memory).

Chollet announcing ARC-Prize-verified benchmark results showing Google's new Gemini 3 Deep Think scoring 84.6% on ARC-AGI-2, well above Claude Opus 4.6 (68.8%) and GPT-5.2 (52.9%). Notable capability-progress data point for Nathan's AI timeline tracking, and shows Gemini leading Claude on this benchmark at this date — useful context for cross-lab capability comparisons.

A tweet reporting a new state-of-the-art score (85.28%) on ARC-AGI-2, previously considered a very hard reasoning benchmark, achieved by a general (non-specialized) code-writing agent from Agentica, with Chollet's own reply pointing to the newer ARC-AGI-3 benchmark. Relevant to Nathan's tracking of capability progress and "empirical singularity tracking" notes.

A rapid-fire weekly AI-industry news recap (late January 2026) covering Musk Industries merger, "clawdbot" explosion and Anthropic's response, Tesla pivoting to Optimus robots, Kimi K2.5, Google Genie world model and AlphaGenome, funding rounds (Anthropic $20B round, OpenAI $100B/$750B valuation), Intel-Nvidia chip production, Figure robot autonomy, and Apple's lip-reading acquisition. Useful as a dated snapshot of the pace-of-AI-progress discourse Nathan tracks for singularity/capabilities timelines, and notes Anthropic's own "clawdbot" product and funding context.