Terence Tao

A lot of mathematicians.

First of all, I've always been interested in new ways to do mathematics.

I feel like a lot of the ways we do things right now are inefficient.

Me and my colleagues, we spend a lot of time doing very routine computations or doing things that other mathematicians would instantly know how to do, and we don't know how to do them.

Why can't we search and get a quick response?

That's why I've always been interested in exploring new workflows.

About four or five years ago, I was on a committee where we had to ask for ideas for interesting workshops to run at a math institute.

At the time, Peter Schultzer had just formalized one of his new theorems, and there were some other developments in computer-assisted proof that looked quite interesting.

I said, oh, we should run a workshop on this.

This would be a good idea.

And then I was a bit too enthusiastic about this idea, so I got voluntold to actually run it.

So I did with a bunch of other people, Kevin Buzzer and Jordan Ellenberg and a bunch of other people.

And it was a nice success.

We brought together a bunch of mathematicians and computer scientists and other people, and we got up to speed on the state of the art.

And it was really interesting developments that most mathematicians didn't know was going on.

Lots of nice proofs of concept, just hints of what was going to happen.

This was just before ChatGPT, but even then there was one talk about language models and the potential capability of those in the future.

So that got me excited about the subject.

So I started giving talks about this is something we should, more of us should start looking at now that I've arranged to run this conference.

And then ChatGPT came out and like suddenly AI was everywhere.