Terence Tao

But, you know, sometimes once you make the code, you know, you still have to maintain it and there's issues with upgrading it and making it compatible with other things.

And

And that, I think, I've heard that programmers are reporting that even if an AI can create the first prototype of a tool, making it mesh with everything else and making it interact with the real world in the way they want, I mean, that's an ongoing process.

And if you didn't have the skills that you pick up from writing the code, that may impact your ability to maintain it down the road.

So certainly mathematicians, we've used problems to build intuition and to train people to have a good idea as what's true, what to expect, what is provable, what is difficult.

And so just getting the answers right away may actually inhibit that process.

I made this distinction between theory and experiment before.

In most sciences, there's an equal division between the theoretical side and the experimental side.

But in math, it's been almost unique.

It's almost entirely theoretical.

We pay a premium on trying to have coherent, clean theories of why things are true and false.

And we haven't done much experiments as to like, you know, maybe we have two different ways to solve a problem.

Which one is more effective?

We have some intuition, but we haven't done large scale studies where we take a thousand problems and we just test them.

But we can do that now.

So I think AI-type tools will actually revolutionize the experimental side of math, where you don't care so much about individual problems and the process of solving them, but you want to gather just large-scale data about what things work, what things don't.

Same way that if you're a software company and you wanted to roll out

a thousand pieces of software, you know, you don't really want to handcraft each one and learn lessons from each.

You just want to find what are the workflows that let you scale.

So we don't yet, the idea of doing mathematics at scale is at its infancy, but that's where AI is really going to revolutionize the subject.