‘hello there the jacobian conjecture is false thanx’: why a tiny social media post has mathematicians rethinking AI

akinbostanci / Getty Images As millions of people were coming down from the excitement of the FIFA World Cup Final at the start of this week, a different kind of excitement was building within the mathematical community. Levent Alpöge, a mathematician working at the artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic, made a very casual announcement on X that he had found a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture, a very old and well-known problem in a field of mathematics called algebraic…