Terence Tao

math collaborations with AI.

So not Fields Medal winning, but actual research level math papers.

Like published ideas that are in part generated by AI.

Maybe not the ideas, but at least some of the computations, the verifications.

Has that already happened?

Has it already happened?

Yeah, there are problems that were solved

by a complicated process, conversing with AI to propose things, and the human goes and tries it, and the contract doesn't work, but it might propose a different idea.

It's hard to disentangle exactly.

There are certainly math results which could only have been accomplished because there was a human mathematician and an AI involved.

But it's hard to sort of disentangle credit.

I mean, these tools, they do not replicate all the skills needed to do mathematics, but they can replicate sort of some non-trivial percentage of them, 30, 40%.

So they can fill in gaps.

So coding is a good example.

So I...

It's annoying for me to code in Python.

I'm not a professional programmer.

But with AI, the friction cost of doing it is much reduced.

So it fills in that gap for me.

AI is getting quite good at literature review.