AI models need moral support to make discoveries

One recent development in AI is its ability to solve some long-standing problems in mathematics. In 2024 and 2025, this was a trickle: once or twice a year somebody would say that an LLM came up with a proof, and then everyone would argue over whether that counted as “real” mathematical innovation. In 2026, it’s a flood. Almost every day I see some new LLM-produced mathematical result. Prompt “engineering” Perhaps the most curious thing about these AI discoveries is how easy the prompting is. The strategy for prompting Claude Mythos to come up with a cryptographic breakthrough appears to be just asking “hey, please come up with a breakthrough”, and then checking in every few hours to say “keep looking for something important, I want you to solve a genuinely hard problem”. It’s amusing to read this and remember how in 2025 everyone was obsessed with “prompt engineering”. At the time I was something of a heretic for saying that prompts didn’t matter that much, but in hindsight I was…