OpenAI and Anthropic claim to disprove ETH, upending theoretical CS

OpenAI and Anthropic say they have disproved the exponential time hypothesis, a 27-year-old premise behind much complexity and algorithm research. The proofs are on GitHub in natural language and Lean, but remain unverified; OpenAI is rallying researchers from UCSB and MIT to unpack them.

• ETH held that solving problems takes exponentially more time as they grow
• Proofs were published on GitHub in text and machine-checkable Lean
• UCSB's Lokshtanov expects ~50 of his papers to become 'pointless'
• OpenAI pledged to fund a conference on the result