OpenAI and Anthropic say AI has overturned the ETH, and decades of computer science research are said to be outdated
An AI Breakthrough Has Made Decades of Computer Science Research ‘Irrelevant’
OpenAI and Anthropic said this week that AI has overturned the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH), an assumption underpinning a large amount of theoretical computer science research; the proof has been published and awaits verification. The two companies published the proof in natural language and in Lean machine-checkable format on GitHub, and researchers have not yet independently verified or fully understood it. The ETH assumes that the solving time of certain problems grows exponentially with scale; Daniel Lokshtanov of UC Santa Barbara estimates that about 50 papers need to be redone or shelved, and other researchers say work from this year has become irrelevant. OpenAI has invited the UC Santa Barbara researchers who originally proposed the hypothesis and an MIT scholar to organize a peer interpretation, and has committed to funding related conferences. Researchers say the result does not directly affect existing cryptography, but should put some cryptosystem designers on alert.
The two companies say AI has overturned the ETH, and multiple researchers are re-evaluating papers and cryptographic assumptions accordingly, presenting the result's impact on theoretical computer science.