Comment by david-gpu
10 hours ago
Tao doesn't go as far as Baudelaire, but there are some similarities. In particular, Tao has criticized that AI is not being used to create new interesting conjectures, and that the rush to prove old conjectures is not giving human mathematicians enough time to carefully analyze and understand the proofs and the methods used in those proofs.
My answer to both is the same: nothing stops mathematicians from doing both of those things, with or without the help of AI. And we all understand that it will take time to do that. But complaining about the dawn of a new era of advancements seems counterproductive.
But the point is your original analogy with Baudelaire now just boils down to "both of them were critical" which is quite shallow indeed.
It's especially annoying given that many people are making repeat Baudelaire's critique of photography (or Socrates critique of writing) in the context of AI and the declaration is interest because it's not that.
> But complaining about the dawn of a new era of advancements seems counterproductive.
you completely misunderstood the critics. your analogy is awful. this is much closer to the industrial revolution in the uk: it brought a lot of progress, but also extreme inequality and concentration of power.
I am very specifically addressing what I have read Terrence Tao say on AI and mathematics, as that is the subject of this submission.
Are we on the same page?
I don't see any meaningful analogy with your cites of Baudelaire. First of all, Baudelaire discusses art, which is very different to science. Several new forms of art have emerged, and then slowly integrated, despite the strong opinions of some. Here, Tao's letter discusses mainly practical aspect of scientific research. It is not about what a "failed mathematician" would do, or if "LLM can only record what already existed"; in fact, it ackowledges that LLM could become a central tool. If you want me to be even more precise, what they're saying (without saying it out loud) is that tech companies have too much power and are being irrespondible with it because they don't even think about the externalities.
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It's not about whether the conjectures themselves are interesting or not, or whether people simply have enough time. It's that a bare proof made by a machine doesn't actually do much for us. There is not some set of problems that, once finished, will amount to some kind of final, correct system and we can call it a day and, like, utilize it. "Mathematics" is the people doing it (the "mathematical community" Tao references below). This other stuff is kinda just.. expensive exercises to render a result. They are only actually beneficial to us insofar as they exist in a context of research among peers.
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/11/a-severe-misalignm...
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