David Turturean, a recent MIT graduate and a member of the technical staff at the startup lab Physical Superintelligence (PSI), used early access to Anthropic’s Fable 5.2 model to solve an 18-year-old problem about quantum computing.

“I’m totally accepting the idea that this might be the last paper I ever put out,” Turturean, who deferred plans to pursue a master’s at MIT’s prestigious computer science and AI lab to join PSI, told TechCrunch. “In a few months, like, why would you even put out a paper?”

The problem in question, the Aaronson-Ambainis conjecture, concerns the ability of quantum computers to solve problems faster than classical ones. Scott Aaronson, one of the two researchers who posed the problem, writes that he doesn’t quite understand the proof but that he believes it’s correct because it was autoformalized in Lean, a coding language for math, and explained by a team of top researchers with whom PSI shared the solution.

The solution appears to close the door on one avenue quantum computers could follow to solve certain difficult problems at high speed, but not all of them. “It’s a negative result that allows people to know, okay, we’re no longer looking there,” Turturean said.

More broadly, it reflects the upheaval in the scientific world caused by AI problem-solving.

“A proof of full [Aaronson-Ambainis conjecture] was one of the last remaining open problems in quantum query complexity that everyone seemed to agree was centrally important,” Aaronson, who described himself feeling satisfied, awestruck, disappointed, and fatigued by the news, wrote.

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