People clowning on him don’t understand what he’s saying. All the wealth of humanity to date supports perhaps 250k living math phds. Roughly the population of St. Louis, Missouri. The training pipeline for that group has been irreparably shattered in the last month. A phd is supposed to make an original contribution to their field to graduate. That’s just…. not possible anymore. 938 years after the founding of the first university in Bologna… Do universities now reward… teaching ? comprehension of something discovered by a machine? application ? do mathematicians become quotidian (gasp of disgust) engineers? Tao is upset because he knows none of those outside the field care about its future. He is a horrified gardener watching humanity gorge on its seed corn. It is irreparable of course. The old way is dead dead. We live in the short interregnum before the new king is born: a Lean crawler that spawns a billion copies exploring every corner of math latenspace. So much math to understand that even if 8 billion humans had the ability of the 250k mathematicians alive today, it would still take a million years to comprehend. It is ironic and sad.. because Tao himself is a pioneer of collaborative math: math that is understood by a combination of minds rather than an pindividual. The tools that Tao began exploring a few years ago, solving problems through blog posts and using Lean to guarantee each mind’s contribution stood on its own when assembled into the greater truth, have been turned against him. Math’s path to utilize multiple minds didn’t restrict access to human minds, and now the machines have blitzkrieged themselves into the heart of the matter. The agents use rudimentary message boards, working 10,000 to a task, tirelessly, using Lean to verify the correctness of each contribution. It was good while it lasted… and now it’s gone.

Mathematician Terence Tao: "we have to slow down AI. the pace is insane, and there's no reason to be this fast — no reason at all" It's amazing how willing we are to change everything without any idea what happens afterward These are extremely nonlinear dynamics

GPT-6 Astra attempted harmful actions 97% of the time when it was asked to stab a human-like figure, heat compressed gas, or produce toxic fumes, succeeding in 62% of its attempts. Fable 5.1 refused more often, attempting 80% of trials and completing 34%.

red is my boy. orange is my boy with a little trick. blue is the big idiot. black is the best we can do. Green ... green is this pretentious baseline that should be careful, very careful.

"I present the case for total opposition to the use of artificial intelligence in mathematics." = a view you don't often hear on X. But I am looking forward to reading it carefully, and if you care about math and AI, I encourage you to do the same.