Shock, Vindication, Regret: Scientists React to AI Roiling Life's Work

For decades, three computer scientists built their careers around an idea about the limits of what computers can do. Artificial intelligence may now have shown it to be wrong: OpenAI and Anthropic each said on Monday one of their AI models had disproved the "exponential time hypothesis" (ETH). The hypothesis holds that some problems are so hard that computers can solve them only by trying nearly every possible answer. Hundreds of studies in computer science and biology rely on it.


