I have a phd in mathematics and I assure you I am not happy that AI is going to make doing mathematics a waste of time. Go read Gower's essay on it from the 90s. He is spot on.
I'm not someone who likes or promotes LLMs due to the utterly unethical acts that the big corporations committed to make profits with them. However, people often forget that LLMs are a technology that was developed by people who practice Mathematics and Computer Science. That was also PhD level work. The fact that LLMs got such a bad reputation has nothing to do with those wonderful ideas, but was a result of the greed of those who are obsessed with endless profits. LLMs aren't just about vacuuming up the IP on the internet, dumping kilotonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere or endless streams of AI slop and low effort fakes.
Human minds process logic and the universe in extraordinary ways. But it's still very limited in the set of tools it uses to achieve that. That's where LLMs and AI in general raise the tantalizing possibility of perceiving and interpreting domains under Mathematics and Physics in ways that no living being has ever done or even imagined. Perhaps its training data won't be stolen text or art. It could be the petabytes of scientific data locked up in storage because nobody knows what to do with it yet. And instead of displacing us, it's likely to complement and augment us. That's where the brilliance of mathematicians and scientists are going to be needed. Nobody knows for sure. But how will one know if you close the doors to that possibility?
I admire Dr. Tao for keeping his mind open to anything new at his age. I wish I had as much curiosity as him.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-will-become-ma...
The truth is that with a few more innovations, even Terence Tao will have little to add to an AI's problem solving ability. I will personally enjoy having mathematics explained to me by the AI, but it will be in relative poverty and material insecurity caused by the AI.
A recent AI data point occurred this last weekend with many coming together to answer MathOverflow post, because Terence Tao answered it with some tedious parts done by AI. https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115325229364313459
I think his tone is optimistic, but falsely so.