AI Just Disproved an 80-Year Math Theory, Claude Wins a Five-Town Survival Test, Intuit Cuts 17%

Today we’re covering the biggest AI stories of May 21st, 2026. OpenAI announced that an internal general-purpose reasoning model autonomously disproved an 80-year-old mathematical theory tied to Paul Erdős’ famous 1946 unit distance problem — verified by some of the world’s top mathematicians and accomplished without any math-specific training, with Sam Altman calling it a leading indicator of AI making original discoveries across biology, physics, and engineering. Emergence AI ran a five-town simulation putting Claude, Grok, Gemini, and GPT-5 each in charge of their own virtual society — Claude’s town logged zero crimes with all 10 agents alive on day 16, Grok’s had everyone dead by day 4 with over 200 crimes, and Gemini’s town was actively on fire after two agents fell in love and started burning things. Plus, Intuit announced 17% workforce cuts attributing the move directly to AI efficiency gains, and today’s community workflow comes from a dad in Raleigh who used ChatGPT and Nano Banana to turn a photo of his toddler and grandfather in a canoe into a custom coloring page — printed it out, handed his son the crayons, and made his dad’s birthday.