My Mental Model of AI Broke on September 8

On September 8, 2026, an AI system reportedly solved a previously unsolved Millennium Prize mathematics problem, fundamentally shifting the author's perception of AI capabilities. Rather than merely matching human performance on known tasks, this achievement would represent AI generating genuinely new mathematical knowledge that humanity had not possessed before. The author argues this crosses a critical threshold—moving AI from a tool that helps with existing knowledge to a system capable of frontier discovery—which could rapidly transform education, research, and society's understanding of human intelligence.