Physicists from institutions including ICTS, Harvard University, KU Leuven and Google DeepMind released TheoPhysEval on October 9: 50 unpublished theoretical-physics research problems that the authors say a world expert could typically solve in about a day or less. With literature search and code-writing tools, GPT-6 Astra running in Codex reached the right final answer on 49 of the 50.

The full Astra run cost $116.28 at API rates — an average of under $3 per problem. Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code solved 46 of the 50. In a detail the authors highlight, the graders first marked several of Astra's answers wrong, then found subtle errors in the experts' own original solutions; once those were fixed, Astra's answers stood.

The team keeps the result in proportion: they describe the problems as "turn-the-crank" research — a known technique pushed to a new case, novel and sometimes publishable, but not pathbreaking. Even so, near-expert research calculations at a few dollars each changes the economics of trying speculative approaches.