Comment by robotpepi
8 hours ago
> 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.
> It is not about what a "failed mathematician" would do, or if "LLM can only record what already existed"
This is what I was alluding to:
I wrote recently about how the collection of good, fruitful open problems is now being mined in a non-renewable fashion, leading to the potential scenario of these problems becoming scarce [0]
[0] https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117237320796901560
Of course there's a meaningful analogy. The poster wants to make Tao sound unreasonable and against "progress" while ignoring the very real concerns Tao has.
It's what fanatics do when they want to enforce their view on the world, they have to attack anyone with a reasonable viewpoint because they can't imagine a world where someone tells them they don't like what they're doing.
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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...
You have expressed a few different ideas, so I will address them separately.
> It's not about whether the conjectures themselves are interesting or not, or whether people simply have enough time.
Tao seems to think otherwise, if I am reading him correctly:
I wrote recently about how the collection of good, fruitful open problems is now being mined in a non-renewable fashion, leading to the potential scenario of these problems becoming scarce [0]
Often these solutions are announced in a rush, leaving no time for a proper writeup, the isolation of new methods and ideas, and citing relevant previous work of others. As in all creative professions, this raises severe attribution and plagiarism questions. [1]
> It's that a bare proof made by a machine doesn't actually do much for us.
I get it, and I think the same can be said about all sorts of human endeavors.
> 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.
Sure. Although there are certainly practical applications to be found along the way. E.g. proving P=NP would be potentially very significant in the real world. I think we agree.
> "Mathematics" is the people doing it (the "mathematical community" Tao references below)
Sure. And the same can be said again about all sort of human endeavors. But I don't see how that is a reason to stop using AI in those fields, either. It doesn't subtract anything, in the same way that chess engines didn't destroy the love of the game for chess.
And just like in chess, these AIs can be used to gain a deeper understanding. Including, but not limited to, explaining to humans the proof they just came up with.
[0] https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117237320796901560
[1] https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/11/a-severe-misalignm...
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