Wednesday, 28 October 2026

The Exponential Time Hypothesis is false, say OpenAI and Anthropic

OpenAI published a preprint and Lean proof claiming an internal model found a sub-exponential algorithm for 3-SAT, refuting ETH (Impagliazzo–Paturi, 1999). Hours later Anthropic’s Levent Alpöge posted a Claude result dated the same day, 16 October: a deterministic 2^o(n) 3-SAT algorithm found with 14M output tokens and no human input, also formalised in Lean 4, plus a 2^{O(n log log n / √log n)} bound for counting solutions.

It is purely asymptotic: one estimate says it only beats brute force once n exceeds 10^10,000. But a large body of conditional lower bounds rests on ETH. Impagliazzo, Paturi and Ryan Williams are leading an independent review (no NDAs, unpaid), and OpenAI has agreed to release raw data and fund a conference.

TechCrunch · OpenAI preprint (PDF) · Anthropic formal-math repo

Also claimed: Kakeya in every dimension, and Yang–Mills exists

The same OpenAI release claims a proof of Sogge’s 1991 local smoothing conjecture in all dimensions, which would settle the Kakeya and Stein restriction conjectures too (previously known only in 2D, and Kakeya in 3D as of 2025). Lean proof included.

In physics it claims a rigorous construction of 4D quantum field theories including QCD — i.e. pure Yang–Mills exists, half of a Clay Millennium Problem. OpenAI says it won’t claim the prize; David Gross’s group is withholding the AI material and writing it up themselves. Treat all three as claims until reviewed.

The Next Web · Interesting Engineering

GPT-6.1 Terra: mid-tier price, Astra-level agent scores

OpenAI’s new mid-tier model ($1/$5 per M tokens in/out) reportedly matches GPT-6 Astra on Agents’ Last Exam at a tenth of the price and runs 3× faster; Terminal-Bench 4.0 jumps from 21.5% to 50.3% over GPT-5.6 Terra. OpenAI still recommends Sol/Astra for the hardest coding work. All figures are OpenAI’s own. Available now in Codex and the API as gpt-6.1-terra.

Interesting Engineering · OpenAI

Unzeroed KV pages leaked other users’ context on Workers AI

A model of how two individually reasonable assumptions combine. Cloudflare configured GLM-5.3 with a 1M-token context but a 681k-token prefill KV pool. In SGLang’s disaggregated mode, an oversized prompt was marked rejected and swapped for a one-token placeholder, but the admission queue only checked finished. Prefill sent one KV page; decode had reserved eight and attended over all of them — seven still holding earlier users’ data. 155 responses affected.

Their tests checked HTTP status, not output correctness. Fixes are upstream in SGLang 0.5.20–22, plus per-transfer checksums and a plan to formally verify the transfer protocol.

Cloudflare

Build a reasoning model from scratch: 11 hours with Sebastian Raschka

Eight videos starting from pre-trained Qwen3 0.6B in PyTorch: generation with a KV cache, a maths-answer verifier, inference-time scaling, GRPO for RL with verifiable rewards, training analysis and distillation. Code-along, small enough to run locally.

Ahead of AI

The oldest GUI app that still runs on Windows 11

Unmodified winner: FreeCell, a Win32s binary from February 1993. A November 1992 NT pre-release CD Player also starts, once a helper DLL fakes a CD drive. Anything earlier dies on ABI archaeology: pre-mid-1992 NT builds used a draft PE format and cdecl for system calls, so under modern stdcall arguments are popped twice. The CD Player survives by linking against crtdll.dll, which Windows 11 still ships.

enlyth

Austin Wintory releases his unasked-for Mass Effect 5 score

The Journey composer recorded about 20 minutes in LA in 2025 — large orchestra, vocals, analog synths — as a speculative surprise for BioWare, extending Jack Wall and Sam Hulick’s trilogy sound without knowing the story. EA has since cancelled the game and is closing the studio, so he’s shared it publicly.

NME

“A mountain of gold”: why game composers miss out on royalties

A GameSoundCon panel argued that game scores are entertainment’s largest unmonetised publishing catalogue: streaming a game and a show are mechanically identical, yet only TV/film composers get meaningful performance royalties. Most game work is buyout, so the contract decides everything. Early signs of change: BMI licensing deals with PlayStation and Game Pass.

Digital Music News (written with panellist Materia Music)

Zubin Kanga improvises with two AIs in George Lewis’s new piece

In Blombos Playground, Kanga’s piano, celesta and harpsichord trade ideas with Lewis’s rule-based Voyager and IRCAM’s machine-learning Somax, diffused in quad — “like playing with a virtual chamber group.” The same programme had Kanga duetting with a digital avatar of himself and a collage of choirs, birds and kitchen utensils, using a ROLI Seaboard and body sensors.

Interlude

Sheffield remakes the Lycurgus Cup’s colour-changing glass

The 4th-century cup is jade green in reflected light and ruby red with light behind it, from gold–silver nanoparticles nobody knew how to make on purpose. Technician Lisa Hollands designed a Roman-like base glass and iterated through furnace types, oxygen levels and additives (including sugar) until it worked in quantity; glass artist Elliot Walker then blew a sculpture from it.

University of Sheffield · Archaeology

Lumina: the first 2 billion years in a 1.5-billion-light-year box

A Harvard & Smithsonian-led team ran the largest cosmological radiation-hydrodynamics simulation yet on Oak Ridge’s Frontier (15,000+ GPUs), 100× the volume of earlier runs. It is the first of its kind to follow helium reionisation as it happens, giving a theory baseline to check against Webb and Roman.

ScienceDaily

Nedi: you are a rain cloud drifting over a dead island

A small Steam game due this month: hold rain to regrow grass and forests, drift off an island’s edge to refill on mist, start springs that become rivers and waterfalls. Later chapters add wind gusts, geysers, lightning that burns healed land and drifting islets; daily weather brings hail clouds and “dandelion winds”. No-fail mode or medal times racing rival clouds. A neat reference for an unpowered flyer where the wind is the level designer.

Steam

Mexico: Antonelli needs a top nine; Piastri calls it “the story of the year”

Lights out Monday 2 November, 7 am Sydney time. Ninth or better makes Antonelli champion; tenth does too unless Russell wins (and even then he’d hold the countback, 9 wins to 3). McLaren and Red Bull are level on 355 for third in the constructors’.

Piastri, 15 races without a podium since Miami, says he can find a lap but not repeat it in the MCL40, which needs a more aggressive style than his.

Coffee Corner Motorsport · RacingNews365

Freestyle Friday #18 this week

The weekly 11-round Chess960 Swiss (3+2) runs Saturday 31 October from 3 am Sydney time, feeding qualification for the 2027 FIDE Freestyle World Championship (phase ends 4 December, knockouts 11 and 18 December). Niemann won last week; Carlsen’s entry is unconfirmed. Meanwhile Clutch Chess is under way in St Louis. No new Carlsen news.

DAZN · Clutch Chess live (Lichess)

Ghost Festival in The Rocks; final week for My Fair Lady and The Lion King

Ghost Festival runs Thu 29 Oct–Sun 1 Nov in The Rocks (free: Halloween market, outdoor cinema). Sydney Open is Sunday 1 Nov. My Fair Lady closes at the Opera House Saturday and The Lion King at the Capitol Sunday — last chances with Ada. Still on from yesterday: Hans Zimmer at Olympic Park Wed/Thu, a packed Darling Harbour Friday night, BIGBANG at Accor Stadium Saturday. No new city trackwork listed for this week.

Sydney Travel Guide · Transport NSW: BIGBANG · Transport NSW news