Future Technology[Weekly Roundup] AI solved maths nobody could crack
Morning. Five stories worth your Friday coffee, plus one to watch before the Sun goes dark over Europe next week.
This Week's Top Stories
An AI just solved ten maths problems that stumped everyone for decades
OpenAI has an unreleased model called Astra, and it produced verified proofs for ten open problems in maths and computer science this week. Some had sat unanswered for a decade. One question, about a type of mathematical group, had been open since 1999. Every proof came with a formal Lean 4 certificate, so it isn't just a confident-sounding answer, a verifier checked it and it compiled. Total compute cost for all ten: about 2,000 dollars.
Why it matters: this is the strongest evidence yet that frontier models can produce genuinely novel, checkable research, not just remix what they've already read. That argument just got a lot harder to make.
NVIDIA just paid $500 billion to make sure it has enough memory
SK Group and NVIDIA signed a pact worth more than 500 billion dollars to build Vera Rubin AI infrastructure powered by SK hynix's HBM4 memory. It's one of the largest single commitments the AI boom has produced, and it tells you where the real bottleneck sits now. Compute was the story for two years. Memory supply is the story now.
Why it matters: this is the enterprise-scale version of the same squeeze that's already made your DDR5 upgrade cost more. Whoever controls HBM4 supply gets to set the pace for everyone building on top of it.
Two critical flaws are under active attack, and one skips the login screen entirely
A pair of serious holes landed at once this week. One in VMware Directory Service lets a network-adjacent attacker walk straight past vCenter login and take the management plane. The other is an actively exploited zero-day in Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center, caused by hard-coded credentials sitting in the web interface. Both are the boring, always-on plumbing nobody thinks about until it's the reason everything else falls over.
Why it matters: this is the kind of bug that hands over the keys to what's behind it. Patch now, rotate credentials, check exposure.
The warehouse robots stopped being a demo
Figure, Tesla's Optimus programme and Boston Dynamics are now running thousands of general-purpose humanoid robots on real warehouse floors, doing real shifts. The motors were never the hard part. The software was, and simulation-trained models have finally caught up enough that a robot can spot an object it's never seen labelled that way and work out how to pick it up.
Why it matters: thousands of units on real shifts is a very different claim to one robot folding a shirt on a stage. Warehouse operators now have to take this seriously as a near-term option, not a someday one.
The best meteor shower of the year peaks next Wednesday night
The Perseids peak overnight on 13 August, and this year the timing is close to perfect: the peak lands on a new moon, so nothing washes out the sky. Under clear, dark conditions you could see 50 to 100 meteors an hour. No telescope needed, just a dark horizon, patience and your eyes given 20 minutes to adjust.
Why it matters: it's the most beginner-friendly astronomy event of the year, and a genuinely dark peak like this doesn't come round often. If you're heading out, a red head torch saves your night vision and a pair of wide-field binoculars turns the lull between meteors into a tour of the Milky Way.
One to Watch Next Week
On 12 August the Moon throws a narrow shadow across Siberia, eastern Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain, the first total solar eclipse to touch mainland Europe in decades. Maximum totality runs about two minutes and eighteen seconds. If you're anywhere near the path, sort certified ISO 12312-2 eclipse glasses now rather than the night before. We'll cover it properly once it's happened.
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