Two mathematicians used large language models to discover counterexamples to long-standing conjectures, automating hypothesis generation and testing with minimal guidance. The article calls this “brute intelligence,” where AI runs iterative search loops to tackle any problem framed like a math exercise. It argues we’ll need to reshape tasks into testable, calculable formats for AI to industrialize discovery across fields.

This article breaks research down into trainable habits: choose your own problems, broaden your reading beyond trends, write and log every idea, and tighten your experiment loop with solid tooling. It also stresses purposeful exploration, scrutinizing outputs by hand, and building a generous network to compound learning and productivity over time.