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The ‘Mozart of Math’ is not fearful about AI changing math nerds — ever | TechCrunch


Terence Tao, a UCLA professor thought of to be the “world’s best dwelling mathematician,” final month in contrast ChapGPT’s o1 reasoning mannequin to a “mediocre, however not fully incompetent” graduate pupil that might accurately reply a posh evaluation downside with “numerous hints and prodding.” 

AI would possibly by no means beat its human academics, he now tells The Atlantic. “One key distinction [today] between graduate college students and AI is that graduate college students study. You inform an AI its strategy doesn’t work, it apologizes, it’ll perhaps quickly right its course, however generally it simply snaps again to the factor it tried earlier than.”

The excellent news for math prodigies, provides Tao, is that AI and mathematicians will extra doubtless all the time be collaborators, the place as a substitute of change math nerds, AI will allow them to discover large-scale, beforehand unreachable issues. Says Tao of the longer term, “You might need a challenge and ask, ‘What if I do that strategy?’ And as a substitute of spending hours and hours really attempting to make it work, you information a GPT to do it for you.”