OpenAI Announces Its 'Next Major Model' Astra by Dropping Solutions to 10 Open Math Problems

My take: OpenAI presented Astra yesterday, described as its next major model, in a way I had not seen before from this industry: publishing ten complete solutions to mathematics problems that had been unsolved for decades, each result formally verified in Lean 4 and available on GitHub for independent review. The total token cost to generate all ten results was approximately $2,000.

What sets this announcement apart from a typical benchmark is exactly that Lean 4 verification: these are not figures from an internal test where the same company serves as judge and party, but mathematical proofs the academic community can confirm independently. That gives it a different level of credibility than most model announcements.

For those of us who work with analysis and research: this is not a mathematical curiosity. It is evidence that AI models can already function as agents that work for hours on deep research problems, not just short tasks. The question is which complex analyses in your work you postpone for lack of time, and whether it would be worth tasking an AI agent with one.