AI Is Solving Math's Best Problems Faster Than They Can Be Replaced, Terence Tao Warns

In brief

• Terence Tao argued that AI is depleting the supply of fruitful open math problems faster than mathematicians can identify new ones.
• His warning follows a real precedent of AI labs solving historically hard problems.
• Tao wants mathematicians to label certain problems "analysis-required," so a bare AI-generated answer without explained reasoning counts for little.

Terence Tao, the UCLA professor widely considered the best living pure mathematician, has sounded the alarm over the accelerating AI race in math happening right now.

Tao, who was awarded the Fields Medal in 2006, posted a warning on the math-centric Mastodon instance Mathstodon yesterday in which he argued AI is draining the field's supply of good open problems, the unsolved questions that actually push math forward. Not proofs. Not papers. Good questions.

Anyone can invent infinite new math questions; the googol-th digit of pi is technically an open problem nobody has calculated. Almost none of them matter, because most teach nothing about the wider field. What actually matters, Tao wrote, is to know what is actually worth the effort.

“In short, the indiscriminate use of powerful solution-extraction tools can achieve the immediate short-term goal of solving problems at hand, but at the cost of sustaining the ecosystem for the next wave of progress, or in understanding the progress already obtained,” Tao wrote.