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After Math

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/12/after-math/
14•throwaway81523•3h ago

Comments

sp-ti-en-ma-in•27m ago
I feel like things have changed dramatically overnight. The field of mathematics seems to be moving at an extraordinary pace, especially following the recent developments around the Navier-Stokes problem.

25 Field Medalist and 5000+ mathematicians from leading institutions around the world endorsed an open letter expressing concerns about the impact of AI on mathematics:

https://www.mathandai.org/

More than 1,900+ mathematicians have also shown concern over the Caltech Mathathon:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IL0b2oG2KvvSnxn_DuXsNxuH...

James Maynard, a Fields Medalist, has also publicly expressed concerns about the implications of AI for mathematics:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/R9VQnNv5SoI

octoberfranklin•20m ago
The first assumption is wrong because to really solve a mathematical problem, providing a mere answer (even if formally certified) is not sufficient. What is missing is an intelligible proof that human mathematicians can understand and use to advance the aims of mathematics.

This subjective attitude turns mathematics into nothing more than number-poetry.

That would reduce mathematics to something very pathetic.

Focus instead on attribution. Yes, OpenAI took the last tiny step in the process of solving this problem (= proving it). But it cannot attribute credit to all the mathematicians whose chat logs from the past few months were fed into its training data. Unlike a human, it can't even remember where it learned things from! For many theorems, I can still recall which exposition was the one that "sank in" for me (often not the first one!) a decade after grad school.

In my mind, this makes current LLMs unfit to deserve any credit at all -- they cannot give credit to others, so they and their owners deserve no credit themselves. OpenAI's LLM took the last tiny step, but not any of the important ones.

traject_•15m ago
I don't think that's particularly true. The whole point of the Millennium Prize problems as the article states was not on absolute difficulty of the problems but on the high chance of a proof producing fruitful results leading to new concepts and theories. Any pursuit of capital T truth will of course aim for better and more clarifying abstractions and is not a subjective turn by any means.
octoberfranklin•13m ago
What you describe is Tao's point #2, which I fully agree with.

It's point #1 that makes me sad.

traject_•2m ago
If you mean > What is missing is an intelligible proof that human mathematicians can understand and use to advance the aims of mathematics.

Then that is not necessarily subjective either if an AI can produce an actually intelligible proof. The problem is that as mathematicians with PDE expertise have mentioned on Twitter the actual solution seems to devolve into an unreadable mess focusing on irrelevant details after a more readable first few pages in the proof. If it wasn't a Lean compiled proof and presented as a human artifact, it would be hard to assess if the deviser of the solution had any actual understanding of the solution.

Pulcinella•11m ago
Focus instead on attribution. Yes, OpenAI took the last tiny step in the process of solving this problem (= proving it). But it cannot attribute credit to all the mathematicians whose chat logs from the past few months were fed into its training data. Unlike a human, it can't even remember where it learned things from! In my mind, this makes it unfit to deserve any credit at all -- it cannot give credit to others, so it deserves no credit itself. It took the last tiny step, but certainly not any of the important ones.

Yes I fear a lot of doom and gloom around AI is unearned and only really serves to prop up the valuation of AI companies. It's still very much unclear how much work OpenAI actually did versus just copying the nearly complete homework of someone 5 minutes earlier.

stabbles•12m ago
Wouldn't AI make the field of mathematics more ambitious? In software development it feels that way: there are often tasks I can take on that would have been too risky in 2025, because it was unclear if they were worth it. Now you generate a prototype and can make much better judgement calls what is possible and what is worth pursuing.

The Interim Computer Museum

https://icm.museum/
72•mulmen•3h ago•7 comments

Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap

https://high5apps.github.io/josm-plugin-website-wizard/
409•juliantigler•13h ago•93 comments

Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

https://yoshuabengio.org/en/publication/why-are-ai-agents-lying-cheating-and-coordinating
72•jonifico•5h ago•64 comments

Real-SWE: Benchmarking AI models on private, real-world, enterprise codebases

https://withspecific.com/benchmarks/real-swe
199•theanonymousone•9h ago•105 comments

I Made a Non-Wi-Fi Mitsubishi AC Smart with an ESP32

https://medium.com/@ivangomezarnedo/how-i-added-a-non-wi-fi-mitsubishi-ac-to-home-assistant-22770...
36•ichacas•2d ago•7 comments

Nvidia is the central bank of AI

https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2026/09/03/nvidia-is-the-central-bank-of-ai
445•tolugenius•15h ago•313 comments

Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer

https://purplesyringa.moe/blog/dont-call-yourself-an-artisanal-programmer/
34•emschwartz•3h ago•38 comments

Apple iPod Engraver (2019)

https://dunstanorchard.com/apple-ipod-engraver/
182•NaOH•4d ago•43 comments

Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

https://xeiaso.net/notes/2026/everyone-slowdown-but-me/
343•xena•5h ago•192 comments

A succession crisis that tore England apart

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/succession-crisis-tore-england-apart
16•pepys•3h ago•9 comments

Stabilizing Rust's Never Type

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1091015/d9e48318ed242b41/
166•cjd8•3d ago•45 comments

Durable execution without history replay

https://trigora.dev/blog/durable-execution-without-history-replay/
11•hypervs•3d ago•1 comments

From Git to Fossil

https://lucio.albenga.es/web-en/posts/2025/from-git-to-fossil.html
42•smartmic•2d ago•18 comments

AgentsDock: An IDE designed for agentic AI research

https://agentsdock.net/
34•ZihuiGeorgia•6h ago•10 comments

LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/lg-strongly-denies-tv-security-claims-says-tr...
489•datakan•2d ago•386 comments

Aligned to Whom?

https://hyperbo.la/w/aligned-to-whom/
10•lopopolo•3h ago•0 comments

Vintage Scientific Papers with LaTeX

https://github.com/Foadsf/vintage-latex
50•petalmind•3d ago•3 comments

Getting 50 GB/S Back from the Apple Neural Engine

https://eiln.github.io/posts/ane-dma.html
121•eiln•3d ago•26 comments

P(doom)

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/12/pdoom/
50•lumpa•8h ago•23 comments

We must pace the frontier

https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier
612•apsec112•16h ago•858 comments

After Math

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/12/after-math/
14•throwaway81523•3h ago•7 comments

Günther Anders, the Philosopher at the End of the World

https://www.compactmag.com/article/gunther-anders-the-philosopher-at-the-end-of-the-world/
6•Caiero•2d ago•0 comments

Metamorphosis: Transformations in the Early Modern Flap Book (19th Century)

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/metamorphosis-early-modern-flap-book/
4•benbreen•2d ago•0 comments

I made a build visualizer to understand Bun's compile times

https://lalitm.com/post/buildprof/
114•lalitmaganti•15h ago•22 comments

Microcode in Intel's 8087 floating-point chip: the scale instruction

https://www.righto.com/2026/09/8087-microcode-reverse-engineering-fscale.html
101•pwg•14h ago•32 comments

Will There Be a 7G?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01877
90•Betelbuddy•13h ago•153 comments

Linux Zoom client proactively reading everything written to X11 clipboard

https://hachyderm.io/@simontatham/117201594980991062
254•encyclopedism•11h ago•83 comments

Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2098443262214230095
88•dsubburam•8h ago•64 comments

I fixed a tractor using John Deere's self-repair service. Farmers aren't sold

https://www.wired.com/story/i-fixed-a-tractor-john-deere-self-repair-service/
121•sbulaev•1d ago•124 comments

A Mathematical Framework for Transformer Circuits (2021)

https://transformer-circuits.pub/2021/framework/index.html
95•Bluestein•16h ago•17 comments