Everyone who built an identity on being the most intelligent in the room is going to have to come to grips with that no longer being a differentiator.
He described it at 'strip mining', 'rude', and said that many grad students, who are given problems like these as a part of their training, had the rug pulled out from under them (because its customary to let people know you are working on something to prevent this kind of thing).
And your whole analysis is that Tao is worried about his 'identity', status, and 'being a differentiator'.
This is projection on your part. People have values that bear no resemblance to yours and it would behoove you to learn to recognize that.
AI is coming for all of us knowledge workers, nobody is immune.
Disclosure: PhD, early 1990s. In my case, replicating my project would have required a sizable investment in equipment, much of it was purpose-built, among other things.
Interestingly we're a few months away from a data point on what happens to grad school applications.
In math, proofs are "the coin of the realm," and could be devalued to zero. This leaves no answer as to how someone will earn a graduate degree. For instance, what kind of work will be accepted by a thesis committee in five years? The professoriat can only say "we will need to change some things." That's not good enough when the deadline for grad school applications is a few months away.
Strip mining what, platonic reality? Mathematicians don't have a monopoly on mathematical truth. It doesn't exist for their benefit.
It's not about improving understanding, as you just pointed out.
So why? What the purpose? Is it just pure misanthropy?
A small subset of humans who lost a bunch of comparative advantage hate it. Most people who care about math in the abstract probably think it's really cool!
The thing I liked about humanity was its ability to think. Making that valueless is not my idea of progress.
I’ve seen multiple conference submissions that read like English, but take hours of effort to disentangle and figure out what they mean.
There is a limited number of known interesting problems that are worthwhile to engage in. New ones are found and understood, but it is a slow process and it is dependent on understanding and verification, not generation of content.
Saying AI will create new ones, strengthens the strip mining analogy. The idea that AI will find other problems parallels the idea that firms can cut down a forest and plant them elsewhere.
The conversation on HN is driven by non mathematicians, to whom math is a subject, like “nature”. It’s not their core business. The original post by Tao is a better source of information on what he means.
No one has the right to prevent others from working on a math problem. If you're working on a problem the best way to not get scooped is transparency: publish whatever you have as soon as possible.
Tao's behavior is most consistent with any other worker resisting automation for selfish reasons.
> It's time for the social fabric [of math] to be ripped up
This is the attitude of a social arsonist. You can, and should, integrate changes without maximizing destruction for its (or Altman's) own sake.
> an industry being disrupted.
This is the SV euphemism for law-breaking and monopolist practices in a country that has forgotten how to prosecute those with the most power and privilege.
Quite the opposite. The mathematicians are the monopolists who are upset that new-comers are able to do their job better than them, and even worse, they are giving it away to the world for free!
The horror! People giving knowledge to the world for anyone to use freely! Won't someone think of the oligopoly that was coordinating to make sure each of the gatekeepers get their slice of the pie?
Mathematics is collaboratively and publicly produced, it is vetted for free by peers, and results are publicly available. There is no 'market' and no 'price'.
These results, like the invention of LLMs, are often used by private companies for the generation of private profit.
"Open" AI used a private, unreleased, for-profit model to generate those papers.
What, precisely, did the mathematics 'oligopoly' gatekeep you, or anyone, from?
> their slice of the pie
There's very little money in academia, and even then, its a struggle to get any funding at all. What are you even talking about?
Final point, 'knowledge' is socially produced as well. Until the papers are accepted, they are machine artifacts that might be knowledge, but that same system you disdain will be what incorporates and validates those insights.
How wonderful then! You should be happy to know that the AI companies are releasing information for free for all to collaborate on then!
> What, precisely, did the mathematics 'oligopoly' gatekeep
Well what they are trying to do is convince the AI companies to stop releasing all of their findings. Because they are upset that other people are able to do their job better than they are. Its the classic gatekeeper move.
> There's very little money
Oh there is much more than money to silly games like these. Instead, clout and the admiration of their peers, in this tiny insular group for sure, is what most of these people are so desperate to acquire.
Fame (well... relative.... in their subgroup) and admiration of their peers is a much stronger motivation factor for humans than mere money.
> but that same system you disdain
I don't distain anyone who is willing to get with the times. My distain is held out only for those who want to prevent the rest of the world from using the latest tools to achieve real results. If a mathmatician simply doesn't care and isn't wineing about all this AI stuff, I have no issue with them.
There are already several of these "proofs" that have been retracted because they did not make sense.
I would have no problem accepting this whole ordeal if the humans behind each proof took the time to re-read, understand and synthesize the result in a readable paper.
There is ample evidence of how damaging fake information can be, and paper retraction never fully undoes the damage (see the Andrew Wakefield and his antivax "paper" for instance).
Interestingly, the dynamics strongly resembles the industrial revolution when from highly skilled manufactures society moved to factories with power machines. And it all came down who owns means of production. Now AI is a new means of production for all white collars jobs and if the industrial revolution taught is the way to go, nothing good will come out of it.
I don't particularly like AI, but if AI replaces developers and other knowledge workers, not everyone is worse off, and I don't mean just capital owners.
would someone who runs faster 100m also somehow drive better?
I use LLMs to great advantage, solving problems in my domain. I no longer make for loops.
my point was that the new future where running faster doesn't matter any more might come, because everyone is driving (and potentially can't run much at all).
See the beauty of analogies is you can make one to support any point.
We know it's a filter, and we know it's an idiot parroting Claude.
So there's that.
This is what Terence Tao's ChatGPT chats look like: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a5fdc7a-d6f8-83e8-bbea-8deb42cfed.... Can a layperson prompt the LLM like that?
"Garbage in, garbage out" is a polite way of saying the LLM's output is a reflection of the prompter's own intelligence.
The only thing that will matter is capital, which will translate directly into all the talking and doing needed to make more money.
At the same time it should be considered that with physical labor workforces lost their income source numerous times. Ironically they are currently being considered a safe haven.
The last(-ish) chapter does have a section on how AI has robbed the "cognitive elite" of our identity.