OpenAI’s model says it broke a law computer science trusted for 25 years. The proof passed a computer check, OpenAI says.
If it’s right, the limit everyone accepted was never real. People just stopped looking past it.
Watch the video below first. In 40 seconds you’ll see why this is not just another AI headline.
The law is about a puzzle called 3-SAT. You get a few hundred yes-or-no switches and a list of rules, and you need one setting that breaks none of them. Every new switch doubles the options. With 300 switches, trying them all would take longer than the universe has existed.
For decades the best minds in the field found tricks that made it a little faster. None of them got far. In 2001 Russell Impagliazzo and Ramamohan Paturi turned that into a law: this puzzle has a speed limit, and no algorithm will ever beat it. Nobody could prove it. Almost everyone believed it.
So they built on it. If your problem could crack 3-SAT, your problem was hopeless too. Hundreds of papers in scheduling, graphs and logic stand on that one belief.
Now an internal OpenAI model says it found a way to go faster than the law allows. And the people checking the proof are the ones who set the limit: Impagliazzo and Paturi, with MIT’s Ryan Williams.
If the proof holds, every “this can’t be done faster” built on the law has to be checked again, one by one. It won’t make hard problems easy, and it doesn’t solve P vs NP. It means experts were wrong exactly where they felt safest.
If it fails, the law survives. But a machine got close enough that the law’s own authors had to sit down and check.
@Rhoxbt that climb changed my opinion beyond why everyone obsessed can do with pace left break climbs switch backs always gentle incline to discover them always
A Chinese builder turned a GPU into a walkthrough hologram, and the thermal path is the part people can't stop watching
Most hardware is shown as a spinning render or an exploded diagram, pretty to look at and useless the moment you want to know why a card throttles.
He rebuilt the card in Blender from the teardown data, then projected it as a volumetric model you can walk into at room scale:
> Model: every component placed from real board photos and measured dimensions
> Simulate: heat flows through the die, the vapor chamber and the fins over time
> Project: the whole thing renders as a light-field volume, not a flat screen
• What you actually see standing inside it
> The hotspot forming on the die and crawling outward, at real timing
> Airflow splitting around the heatsink, stalling where the shroud blocks it
> Power delivery lighting up stage by stage under load
• Why the hologram beats a diagram
> You walk around the back and see the thermal path nobody photographs
> A different fan curve re-simulates and replays in the same volume
> The failure mode is a place you can stand in, not a line on a chart
The full card renders and simulates one load cycle in about seven minutes.
And the part that broke my brain:
Every review explains throttling with a temperature graph and a bar chart.
He put the heat in a room and let people watch the hotspot migrate.
Same card. One of them you can walk around the problem.
The hard part was never modelling the hardware.
It was showing the thing that only exists while it runs ↓