Sawhney: OpenAI models prune search trees instead of brute-forcing proofs
Mehtaab Sawhney · Inside OpenAI’s Breakthroughs in Mathematical Reasoning · Sep 8, 2026 · at 8:10
OpenAI researcher Mehtaab Sawhney discusses how OpenAI's reasoning models tackle complex mathematical open problems, referencing publicly released summarized chain-of-thought traces.
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“You can sort of look at it, and it's reasoning like a mathematician, and because it knows a few very correct bits, it makes the right decisions and is eventually able to prune the search tree. It's not really trying everything. It tries a lot of different things. It's extremely dogged, but it kind of I mean, it can't try every idea. It has to try a limited set of ideas, and it's able to kind of use its knowledge plus good, good mathematical judgment and find the right path to go along.”
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