AI Solves Math, China Tops the U.S., and Runway Beats Big Tech

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👋 Morning, Reader!

AI just solved a math problem older than most of the internet, China officially passed the U.S. in the open AI race, and Runway’s tiny team outperformed trillion-dollar giants in video AI. Oh, and OpenAI might start showing ads.

Let’s break it down — no calculator required. 🧮

🧮 ‘Aristotle’ AI Solves a 30-Year-Old Math Mystery

Proofs meet vibes — and humanity just got out-mathed

AI just cracked a long-standing Erdős problem that’s stumped mathematicians for decades. Meet Aristotle, Harmonic’s new reasoning system that solved Erdős Problem #124 in six hours — and then verified its own proof in under a minute.

The details:

• Aristotle’s “beta brain” solved a 30-year-old math challenge once thought too abstract for machines.

• It uses a generator-verifier loop, producing proofs in natural language and verifying them in Lean, a proof-checking system.

• Harmonic’s CEO called this the start of “vibe proving” — where AI explores mathematical ideas creatively before applying formal rigor.

• The company recently raised $120M and has already matched Google and OpenAI on reasoning leaderboards.

Why it matters:
This could change what “doing math” even means. With AIs now capable of reasoning, verifying, and even teaching logic, the next wave of innovation might not come from labs — but from anyone who can prompt.

✏️ Proof of the future: AI writes it, checks it, and maybe teaches it next semester.

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🇨🇳 China Overtakes the U.S. in the Open AI Economy

The global AI race just got a new leader.

China has officially surpassed the U.S. in the open AI ecosystem, according to multiple research trackers. From open-source models to academic output and public infrastructure, China’s AI sector is now the most active and accessible on Earth.

Here’s the scoreboard:

• China leads in open-source AI repositories, overtaking the U.S. on platforms like Hugging Face and GitHub.

• The government’s “Open Intelligence Initiative” has poured $45B+ into cloud compute and LLM development.

• Major players like Baidu, Alibaba, and Zhipu AI are publishing frontier-scale models with open weights — while Western labs trend toward closed systems.

• Domestic platforms are also attracting global users thanks to fewer API restrictions and lower compute costs.

Why it matters:
AI dominance isn’t just about who builds the smartest model — it’s who lets others build with it. By embracing openness, China may be setting the stage for a massive AI adoption wave, especially across Asia and Africa.

🌏 The AI race isn’t ending — it’s just changing tracks.

🎬 Runway’s New Model Tops Google and OpenAI in Video AI

A 100-person team just beat trillion-dollar titans

Runway dropped Gen-4.5, and it’s now sitting comfortably at #1 on the Video Arena leaderboard, surpassing Google’s Veo 3 and OpenAI’s Sora 2 Pro.

The details:

• Gen-4.5 models physics realistically — think falling objects with actual weight, reflections, and shadows that make sense.

• The team fine-tuned the system on NVIDIA’s Blackwell GPUs, optimizing for speed and visual fidelity.

• Its 100-person team focused exclusively on video world modeling, rather than spreading across text, code, and multimodal AI.

• Blind A/B tests crowned it the best performer, scoring higher than every Big Tech competitor.

Why it matters:
Runway just proved specialization beats scale. By obsessing over one domain, it outpaced labs with 100x the funding — and possibly ignited a new wave of boutique AI companies that do one thing brilliantly.

🎥 Hollywood, meet your new camera crew.

🗞️ Other News

💰 Elon Musk’s xAI is reportedly closing a $15B round at a $230B valuation, setting up one of the largest private raises in tech history.

📊 Databricks is in talks to raise $5B at a $134B valuation — a staggering 32x sales multiple, according to The Information.

🛍️ AI and agents drove $14.2B in online sales this Black Friday, with $3B from the U.S. alone, per Salesforce data.

✈️ Virgin Australia is embedding ChatGPT-powered flight planning tools, letting users chat their way through flight searches.

🎬 James Cameron called generative AI “horrifying,” saying it “creates fake actors and fake emotion,” unlike his performance-capture filmmaking style.

🏭 Deutsche Telekom and Schwarz Group are teaming up for a German “AI Gigafactory”, tapping into the EU’s $20B fund to compete with U.S. and China.

💻 Telegram’s Pavel Durov launched Cocoon, a decentralized compute network that rewards GPU owners in TON tokens for secure AI processing.

📢 OpenAI is testing ads inside ChatGPT, starting with search results in its Android app — potentially shaking up the web ad economy overnight.

🚗 Tesla Ride lets users experience Full Self-Driving demos guided by Grok AI, with real-time explanations during 45-minute supervised drives.

🧑‍💻 HP to lay off 4,000–6,000 workers by 2028, citing an AI-driven restructuring that could save $1B annually.

🎓 Coursera’s CEO told his sons to “stack micro-credentials” on their degrees — because in the AI era, learning never stops evolving.

💻 Mastery tools of the day

• Cool Coloring Pages - Creates unique AI coloring pages customized to your personal interests and difficulty levels

• Limitless - Captures everything you’ve seen, said, and heard with AI that helps you remember and recall easily

• PodScribe.IO -  turns audio content into actionable intelligence by pulling knowledge from podcasts, meetings, interviews, and more

💡What else are we reading and seeing?

• Black Friday Broke Records

• Agents Should Be More Opinionated

• Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea

• How good engineers write bad code at big companies

⚡ The Takeaway

This week was peak AI irony:

• Machines are solving unsolved problems.

• Small startups are beating corporate Goliaths.

• And even ChatGPT’s getting ready for ad breaks.

The AI revolution isn’t slowing down — it’s diversifying. Big, small, academic, and open — everyone’s in the game.

🧩 The next big AI breakthrough might come from a startup, a schoolkid, or a self-verifying model.

✨ Thanks for reading Not So Artificial!

If today’s edition proved that AI’s smarter, faster, and maybe funnier than we thought — forward it to someone who still thinks “ChatGPT” is just for writing emails.

See you tomorrow, same inbox, new intelligence. ⚙️

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