Terence Tao

I would just talk about it in words.

So it's hard to measure what 2x means.

So, yeah, on the one hand, you know, I think the type of papers that I would write today, if I had to do them without AI assistance, they would definitely take five times longer.

Interesting.

But I would not write my papers that way.

5x?

So, yeah.

But it's because these are sort of auxiliary types.

I mean, you know, so things like doing a much deeper literature search, supplying a lot more numerics.

Yeah.

I mean, they enrich the paper.

So, yeah, the core of what I do, like actually solving the most difficult part of a math problem, that hasn't changed too much.

I still use pen and paper for that.

But, you know, there's lots of silly things.

I use an AI agent now to reformat.

Like sometimes all my parentheses are not quite the right size.

You know, I just manually change them by hand and I can get an AI agent to sort of do all that quite nicely now in the background.

So yeah, they've really sped up lots of secondary tasks.

They haven't yet sort of sped up the core thing that I do, but it's allowed me to sort of add more things to my papers.

Yeah, but by the same token, like if I were to write a paper I wrote in 2020 again,