Two dire warnings, one from Terence Tao, the other from someone who just quit Anthropic

Back in fall of 2024, Terence Tao, perhaps the most respected living mathematician, was eager to learn about what AI could and could not do. Although he was skeptical of the then recently-released o1, he was optimistic about a future in which humans and machines co-existed. Matteo Wong had great interview with Tao about this in The Atlantic:

Wong spoke to Tao by phone and summed up Tao’s openness to new futures this way:

Lately, as I noted in a Substack here in August, Tao has been raising questions. At the end of July he gave a great lecture, with this among his slides.

He’s clearly been thinking about this ever since. By now, it is clear that his views have radically shifted.

Three posts of his from the last two days illustrate:

The first (yesterday) notes that solving puzzles is not the same as coming up with new insights:

The second (also yesterday) is in some ways an argument about good intellectual taste, and expresses deep concerns about the consequences of AI for math.

It is also a plea for transparency:

The final one (all appeared on mathstodon) came out today and appears to allude to the OpenAI-NYU-Anthropic Navier-Stokes controversy, in which OpenAI rushed to scoop Alpöge and Buckmaster, spending $22.5 million in the process, possibly using their data. (In vague, evasive words OpenAI wrote that “we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.”)