Chinese scientists use homegrown LLM to solve world-class math problem - Global Times

A Shanghai-based AI lab has told the Global Times — a sentence that announces its own genre — that Chinese researchers have cracked a 'world-class mathematical conjecture' using a Chinese AI model. The conjecture is not named. The model is not named. The lab is not named. But the nationality of the model makes the headline, which tells you precisely which part of this was considered the achievement worth verifying first. The breakthrough reportedly came via a 'general-specialized fusion' technical path: four words assembled in an order never before witnessed, describing a thing no one has yet described.

What we do have is human-machine collaboration, a phrase in the great tradition of 'co-authored' — somebody did the thinking, somebody got the credit, and the somebody with the GPUs is rarely the somebody with the chalk. One detail does sound solid: two research teams at Peking University completed formal verification of the proof using their self-developed SHEAF framework. Verification, in other words, performed by two teams at one university, in one country, with tooling they built themselves — not a hostile auditor turning up with a red pen, but not nothing either. A proof that survives formal checking is a proof that survives formal checking, which is more than most AI announcements manage on a Tuesday.

Then there's the framing: the first time a *Chinese* model has done a world-class conjecture. Not the first model. Not the hardest conjecture. The first time the right flag was flying. That's a scoreboard entry dressed as a theorem, and it lands in the Global Times, a paper whose business model is precisely this announcement. The conjecture remains unnamed, so no outsider can gauge whether it was a Himalayan peak or a speed bump the department had been chewing on since the pandemic. We'll find out when someone writes it up properly — presumably in between the next three press releases.