Shock, vindication, regret: Scientists react to AI roiling life’s work

OpenAI and Anthropic each said on Monday that one of their AI models had disproved the exponential time hypothesis (ETH), the long-held claim that some problems can be solved only by trying nearly every possible answer. Hundreds of studies in computer science and biology rely on the hypothesis, and the three computer scientists whose careers centered on it reacted with shock, vindication and regret. The reported result, if confirmed, would undercut a foundational assumption of computational complexity theory.

San Francisco – For decades, three computer scientists built their careers around an idea about the limits of what computers can do. Artificial intelligence may now have shown it to be wrong: OpenAI and Anthropic each said on Monday that one of their AI models had disproved the “exponential time hypothesis” ETH . The hypothesis holds that some problems are so hard that computers can solve them only by trying nearly every possible answer. Hundreds of studies in computer science and biology rely on it.