Terence Tao: AI Is Strip-Mining Mathematics
Terence Tao Responds to the OpenAI Math Drop
In a four-part Mastodon thread, Terence Tao warns that AI prompters are solving open problems at scale without digesting the results, starving fields of the seminars, collaborations, and follow-up work that traditionally make breakthroughs fertile. He calls for a "Math 2.0" that de-centers raw problem solving and values exposition, community building, and new directions—and for the community to rethink education, publication, and career advancement.
And so solutions to open problems are now being harvested at large scale in an unsustainable fashion, leaving entire fields of mathematics much less fertile than when such problems were solved in the traditional "Math 1.0" fashion.
- bsenftner
The future of "math" is not just solving, but communicating what was solved, and why that solving is important. "Math" as a discipline is only ever been half created, they abandoned explaining themselves like it was beneath them. Well, now in "Math 1.0 finally whole" they will be explaining what they did to the rest of us. If you can't explain you are not really there.
- shubhamjain
A very balanced perspective, and the concerns he raises are reasonable. He acknowledges that AI is going to transform mathematics, but simply dumping proofs on the math community and expecting others to do the grunt work of verifying, refining, and expanding on them is hardly a productive way to advance the field.
There seems to be more interest in hitting some arbitrary benchmark (we proved X unsolved problems) than in genuinely contributing to mathematics. But what else is to be expected? It's become a maniacal race with too much money. Too much effort is being invested in proving that the exponential curve is still holding.
- Rapzid
Instead of solving problems people will be solving solutions.
- j-pb
The authors of the proof are invited to give many talks, and meet with other experts in the area. Workshops are set up to discuss the proof, as well as other recent developments.
problems are being solved autonomously by AI prompters who have no interest in the broader field itself once their initial target is "solved", and do not understand the AI output well enough to answer questions on the result
The value here seems to be the insights that the author of the proof gained, and the paths they took and maybe more importantly didn't take.
Inviting only the human prompter to a talk on the paper is like inviting only the department chair, manager of the actual author.
The valuable part that Tao is feeling the absence of is the insight, and you can only get that from talking to the swarm of agents that developed the original proof with all of their context.
So to me it feels like we don't need Math 2.0, but Authorship 2.0. I want to "meet" the context that generated these proofs. I mean luckily these were not generated by faceless systems like a SAT solver, you can actually talk to it, but I'm not sure if we can step beyond our pride and grant the true authors of these proofs that recognition.
- lifeisloving
The same could be said of Software. Instead of giving up on creating novel projects and instead just taking other peoples ideas and porting them to Rust, we could be embracing AI to push software and computers farther.
Im not sure how that will work, but im convinced the current paradigm of just pushing agents into codebases for not much reason other than you can is going to make building software incredibly boring and push creative people away from the field and stagnate progress.
My prediction is software gets boring and building hardware projects will be the new frontier for creative engineers looking to push computing further. Which is probably a good thing.
- enum
The real question is how do you come up with a credible 3-5 year research program that is unlikely to be scooped or become pointless overnight.
3-5 years is the period of a grant, and grants have to make research progress, or you don’t get the next grant.
- devolving-dev
Why were we doing math in the first place? We should be happy that math problems were being solved, since presumably they were blockers for other problems in science and the like. But it feels like math was really more about seeking enlightenment, like a form of mental yoga or something. If so, we can just ignore AI proofs and continue on maybe?
- AlexAplin
>the mere knowledge that a solution exists "contaminates" efforts by both humans and AI to find alternate routes to the problem that reveal additional insights
This really expresses the heartburn you see across all fields, not exclusive to careerism. I certainly have friends in decomp and fan translation spaces that have been demotivated by the current rash of efforts happening there.
The rush to be "first" has always been over-celebrated, but it would be nice to believe there's a way to get beyond that thinking.
- sunkeeh
He is right, I think this would be a good direction for sectors and careers that are at risk of becoming redundant.
I love smart people like this; even when there's a threat, instead of just being in denial or boycotting out of anger, they figure out a new path for their community
- armcat
I think this focus on a "holistic" approach applies to everything AI is touching now, not just math. On Twitter I see people one-shotting games, or reproducing games. If the goal is to just one-shot a game using AI, it's done. But if the goal is to produce immersive medium that people can truly enjoy, admire the story and the craftsmanship, and can find entire new ways of bringing a story to life, that's something else entirely.