The ‘Mozart of Math’ isn’t worried about AI replacing math nerds — ever

Terence Tao, a UCLA professor considered to be the “world’s greatest living mathematician,” last month compared ChapGPT’s o1 reasoning model to a “mediocre, but not completely incompetent” graduate student that could correctly answer a complex analysis problem with “a lot of hints and prodding.” 

AI might never beat its human teachers, he now tells The Atlantic. “One key difference [today] between graduate students and AI is that graduate students learn. You tell an AI its approach doesn’t work, it apologizes, it will maybe temporarily correct its course, but sometimes it just snaps back to the thing it tried before.”

The good news for math prodigies, adds Tao, is that AI and mathematicians will more likely always be collaborators, where instead of replace math nerds, AI will enable them to explore large-scale, previously unreachable problems. Says Tao of the future, “You might have a project and ask, ‘What if I try this approach?’ And instead of spending hours and hours actually trying to make it work, you guide a GPT to do it for you.”