Terence Tao on How AI Is Changing Mathematics

I'm Terence Tao. I'm director of special projects here at IPAM, the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics . AI has really been um improving very rapidly . It has allowed me to experiment . I will try crazier things . You can vibe on the blackboard and then if there's a computation that neither of us wants to do, we can just get our AI tool to finish that . [music] I can search literature much more accurately and effectively than I could before . So, I'm doing way more AI-assisted mathematics and and collaborative projects . And now I think it's ready for prime time . Fundamentally, at Open AI, we care about being at the frontier in terms of automating science, the economy, and ourselves . We care less about winning a Nobel Prize or a Fields Medal , and more about enabling 100 mathematicians out there to do that for themselves . We lived in a world of cognitive friction until very recently, where every task required us to use our brain . [music] And so, we didn't really think about it . We just thought this was the cost of doing something intellectual But now we have AI and the other technologies that can bring these frictions down to zero . I hope when AI usage becomes more commonplace , people will also post not just the final product , but all the different paths that they used to get [music] there , cuz that's also very useful information . I think we can find some way to have the best of both worlds