Terence Tao

of this phenomenon in a data service.

We can examine citations and like how often something is mentioned in a conference or something.

And maybe there's a lot of sociology of science research to be done and that could actually detect these things.

Yeah, maybe we should get some astronomers on the case section.

It does seem so.

I mean, there's still activity at the early... Yeah, so 50-odd problems have been solved with AI assistance, which is great, but there's like 600 to go.

And people are still chipping away at one or two of these right now.

we are seeing a lot fewer sort of pure AI solutions now where the AI just one-shots the problem.

So there was a month where that happened and that has stopped.

Not for lack of trying.

I know three separate attempts to get frontier model AI to just attack every single one of the problems simultaneously.

And they picked out some minor observations, or maybe they found that some problem was already solved in the literature, but there hasn't been any further AI purely powered solution yet.

People are using AI a lot currently.

So someone might use AI to generate a possible proof strategy, and then another person will use a separate AI tool to critique it, or rewrite it, or generate some numerical data for it, or do a literature survey.

And some problems have been solved by an ongoing conversation between lots of humans and lots of AI tools.

But it does seem like it was this one-off thing.

So maybe one analogy for these problems is like, imagine like...

there's all these, you're in some sort of mountain range with all kinds of cliffs and walls and maybe there's a little wall which is maybe like three feet high and one that's six feet high and then there's 15 feet high and then there's some mile high cliffs.

And you're trying to climb as many of these cliffs as possible.

But it's in the dark.