Life is a gift. A reminder from the world’s oldest “Life-Cult”. I could not explain myself to you given weeks of undivided attention. Let’s not bother or pretend. No? You know what you’re doing. So be it. May your family be safe and your home filled with love, all the same. ☮️

I cannot more profoundly disagree. The mathematicians complaining about AI in math are, by and large, not the Einsteins, Atiyahs, and Diracs. They are closer to the modern Fermis, Bethes, Paulis. Some of us are excited by this!! We don’t want Pauli’s mean girl nastiness. We don’t care all that much that Bethe can think and compute faster than us. I mean it’s cool. It’s amazing that Fermi doesn’t drop a minus sign over many pages….but it’s not THAT cool. And Pauli inhibits more innovation than he sharpens the thinking of others. Every single person above I revere as a researcher. But not as a leader or referee or an elder. AI is doing a great job of scaring all the right people in math and Physics. All the people who thought “Ya know, things work pretty darn well, more or less.” I really want to emphasize: math ain’t over. AI is at last pointing what I have been talking about for 40 years: there is a LEADERSHIP *crisis* in Physics… and to a lesser extent mathematics. It is a giant mistake to listen too much to those howling most loudly. What was bad for Fauci and Collins was good for virology and good for science. What is bad for many of our leaders in Physics is Essential for Physics. Less true…but still true…for many of our top mathematicians. AI is great for the leadership crisis. For the first time: everyone outside can see what I have not found any way to communicate. Top people in science also hold back science. That may be confusing. But you are seeing it now.

It would be fascinating to know where this rumor among non-mathematicians got started about the greatest living mathematician. Jean Pierre Serre is still alive. As is Edward Witten. And Simon Donaldson. As well as Peter Scholze. And Jacob Lurie. Not to mention Graeme Segal. Or Nigel Hitchin. Or Pierre Deligne. To say nothing of Dan Freed. Or Michael Hopkins. Or Maxim Konsevitch. Or ST Yau and Mikhail Gromov. Or Drinfeld and Beilinson. Or…. I think Terry Tao is amazing. I cannot shake the feeling that the New York Times and some people at Princeton came up with a meme that Tao won the prize as the greatest living mathematician. Which simply never happened. I’m sorry, but this is wrong. Nothing against Tao. But It’s just a meme.

Remember when we did that in the U.S.? Made our scientists rockstars? Ignore me at your peril billionaires: We *MUST* cut our own scientists into “the upside” that they created. “Capitalists” are giving the golden goose to Communists in China. This is madness. Mark my words.

To be clear, the OpenAI result is far from the "most important day in the history of mathematics" or similarly hyperbolic statements. However, it is concrete evidence that the rate of progress is steep, and we may not be so far away from such a day.

I don’t think being critical of the amazing work AI is doing in pure math is fair to @OpenAI until I can start to say why I feel it’s not yet at the level of our top humans. It’s like AI has a style that is weirdly being taken to be universal (which it isnt). Hence the claim that Mathematians and Physicists are nearly obsolete. Ahem: there is no *public* indication that this is REMOTELY true. Yet. I would like to pose a collection of math physics benchmarks that are not about searching large spaces for counter examples and the like. These are 10 problems and issues that humans haven’t solved but which we likely will solve. Each feels to me like a deeply human math/physics problem. This isn’t an unfriendly challenge to @sama and team. It’s just pointing out that AI has yet to deeply touch any of the kind of things that many of us care MOST about in Mathematics and Physics. I’m just not a puzzle solver or a discrete conjecture guy. I’m into theory building and even the mathematical version of mysticism. Here goes an attempt: ————- A) What new Extraordinary Cohomology Theories/Co-cycles can AI find that we need, but do not know/understand? B) What areas of pure mathematics and theoretical physics are most polluted by human blind spots? Where is the training corpus most wrong? Show us you can go well beyond us by contradicting your training. C) What discarded ideas were discarded improperly and prematurely? D) What is a natural version of Grand Unification that doesn’t contradict experiment? E) Find a natural version of Super-Symmetry that doesn’t predict Superpartners and that predicts unification scale different from the Minimally SuperSymmetric Extension or the Standard Model. F) Pose a new, deep and surprising conjecture relating 3 or more of the following: representation theory, number theory, arithmetic/algebraic geometry, and analysis on manifolds, homotopy theory and Pseudo-Riemannian Spin Geometry. G) Integrate the Octonions, Magic Square and the 4 large exceptional lie groups, tightly into the mainstream of mathematics once and for all. H) Settle the issue of the 6 sphere and complex structures in Math or the Koide fine tuning mystery in particle theory. I) Explain the reason for there being 3 families of observed Fermions. J) Give a deep, natural and as yet unknown reason for the remarkable Fermi-Bose correspondence (e.g. Metaplectic vs Spin reps, Honest vs Berezin Integrals, etc.). Why should we have expected this correspondence to be this weird and this tight? ——— I don’t think humans are going to be ahead forever. AI will blow past us. So while I am not all that impressed yet at the math or physics, any non-tricky solutions to one of the above (with the possible exception of some answers to H) would feel different to me than the feeling I get from AI finding yet another funky counter examples to some Erdos problem, discrete puzzle or Combinatorial issue in Graph theory. We have always been humbled by Gauss, Galois, Dirac and Newton. That’s nothing new. If this is going to put us out of work soon, LFG. May the best mathematicians and physicists, carbon or silicon, win.

The one where Jon Stewart mysteriously suddenly and spontaneously grew a pair out of nowhere and normalized the obvious so that people clapped that he had single-handedly ushered in a new era? I also think about this all the time. Possibly for different reasons…

Easy: Who will read what it finds? Watch this. Hey @grok, explain this so that non-mathematicians truly understand this mindblowing and profound fact about the very nature of logical reality itself:

Those of us bitterly opposed to communism fall into two different groups. A) Those who argue that it must be abandoned because it has show us that it doesn’t work. B) Those of us that are so bitterly opposed to collectivism applied to dissenting individuals that we are relieved that it *cannot* work. A happy accident. Those who don’t care if it *could* be made to work: we’d continue to fight it. Working or not working is irrelevant. It’s just bad. Period. The end. If Communism could actually be shown to deliver stable high levels of growth and innovation, broadly distributed, with low inequality, I believe I would still fight it to my dying breath. My opposition to communism has little to nothing to do with the fact that it doesn’t work as an economic system. So, it’s merely a relief that it doesn’t work. A convenience for its opposition. Communism and collectivism are intrinsically soul killing for people who are hyper-individualistic . So let’s stop hiding behind the fact that they don’t work as economic or governance systems. Some of us who aren’t the biggest fans of naked capitalism red of tooth and claw, hate communism not because we think capitalism is intrinsically fair. It isn’t. We oppose it because communism hunts the individual. For us, It’s not communism vs capitalism. That is a businessman’s argument. Instead, it’s communism vs individualism for me. Show me a system that fights harder to let a dissenting individual thrive more than brutal market capitalism (which also barely works), and I am all ears. Not everything is a market after all.

Yeah…nah. Here’s what I think is happening instead. I haven’t wanted to say this, but there is a problem with organized Skepticism even more than conspiracy theories. My claim is that from hard evidence NOT ONE of the following is an extraordinary claim: The CIA not only gathers intelligence but kills people, violates rights, gaslights and evades scrutiny and oversight. The U.S. hides bioweapons programs. The U.S. engages in regime change through charity and aid programs. We in the U.S. medically experiment on our own citizens without consent. We run drugs. The DOJ and FBI are actively and flagrantly obstructing justice. Putin easily kills people outside Russia. We conspire and use academics for sheepskin washing our dirty work. U.S. newspapers actively avoid reporting stories about which the U.S. population is desperate for information. They also carry extremely non neutral biases. We actively conspired to hide open and obvious presidential dementia. And by extension, there are massive conspiracies at every level below that one. At a mind boggling level. There are Special Access programs that are about real and/or fake NHI/UFOs Etc. ———— The last thing we need is skeptics telling us the bar for such conspiracies and/or governmental accountability requires extraordinary evidence. Somehow the skeptics have it totally wrong. After Watergate, Iran-Contra, COVID, Church/Pike committees, etc. these are no longer extraordinary claims to raise. They are ordinary claims. I have no idea whether Lindsay Graham died of natural causes. But I can tell you the difference between a skeptic and a scientist looking at the claim. A skeptic’s first move is to lurch for the budding conspiracy and try to pull the idea of foul play off the table first and then to require a mountain of evidence to consider such a thing. A scientist firmly grabs the skeptic’s hand and forces him to put the hypothesis back on the table and says “Uh, you’re not in charge here. There’s a history…and I’m going to need to see something other than reference to null hypotheses, William of Occam and Carl Sagan…because that’s not how science and investigation works.” Time for extra scientific skepticism to die I think. Covert operations and conspiracies are difficult enough to document as it is. We don’t need skeptics as self appointed referees.