Live data from Hacker News

Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

mathstodon.xyz

161–170 of 341 posts

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#161

Can't mathematicians still gain novel insights by reverse-engineering AI-generated proofs? Just like chess players learn new concepts by studying what engines play.

Pure math is practiced mostly for the intellectual thrills and recognition among a very small group of peers. There's little else to it. You don't become rich, you don't become a celebrity. You teach students, write papers, and probably know most other people who work in the same subfield as you. Tao is a sort of a celebrity of the quarter on HN, but I promise you that outside this forum, almost no one has ever heard…

> Now, Tao is a sort of a celebrity of the quarter on HN, but I promise you that outside this forum, almost no one has ever heard of him.

This is an absurd thing to say. Hacker news is not the only place that knows about the most famous mathematician in the world. Glancing at Google Trends he seems to be roughly as famous as Linus Torvalds. Not exactly a household name but by no means obscure.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#162
post #75

I didn't realize that open math problems were a finite resource. I recall a story about some famous mathematician (Gauss?) dismissing interest in Fermat's Last Theorem claiming that he could crank out problems of equivalent interest. Clearly Tao knows a hell of a lot more than I do about this, but I'm surprised that math that close to completion.

Deforestation might be a better metaphor than mining. Logging is renewable if for each tree you chop down you plant several more. AI companies are operating "in a non-renewable fashion" by chopping down trees without planing seeds. Open problems are a renewable resource, but only if harvested sustainably.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#163

I think this is where people will have to let go of the ego of being the "sole author" of a solution for us to move into the next era of human flourishing.

The future sole owners of half of San Francisco’s mansions thank you for your enlightened stance.

The future I'm after involves Open models controlled by the people, not a few SC venture capitalists

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#164
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So solving and discovering math is or is not the core value a mathematician provides? If AI can perfectly replicate their work but faster and better then what? SWE have nobody crying for them as they've been massively disrupted.

Mathematicians provide two complementary services bundled together. 1. Proving theorems - what AI can apparently replicate faster and better. 2. Creating definitions and new theorems from those definitions to prove, selecting which of the possible statements to work on. I.e. developing the "language" of mathematics. So far there is no evidence that LLM can do this at all well. And there's some reason to think that ma…

Fair take.

So I totally agree if AI also cannot do the second part better than a person.

Honestly though, I wouldn't want to take that bet. I never thought that the first thing AI would become super human AGI like is math.

You ask me 10years ago and I'd think the opposite. I think we all would have said we'd have super human HR employees before a super human mathematician.

But here we are.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#165
From "Jokester" by Isaac Asimov 1956:

"Early in the history of Multivac, it had become apparent that there was one big bottleneck: the questioning procedure. Multivac could answer the problems of humanity, all the problems, if -- if it were asked meaningful questions. But as knowledge accumulated at an ever-faster rate, it became ever more difficult to locate those meaningful questions."

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150118004835/http://www.sffaud...

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#166
post #43

We're having to rediscover in real time the extremely hard way, why enabling mass theft is so incredibly damaging to society. This is literally why we need a functional copyright system If theft becomes more profitable than genuine creation, then nobody will create anything. Then there's nothing to steal, at which point all progress collapses

What theft? LLM output has never been copyrightable.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#167
This is worsened by OAI/Ant's strategy of grabbing the glory and running rather than spending effort trying to to advance understanding of math. Tao, who is quite sophisticated in use of AI, has said a lot about this, including in meme form: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117068266026618494

The AI labs' approach to math is immature in a way they can't get away with in coding. In coding, they realize that a pile of code that technically works is not enough: they need the code output to be a foundation to build on, and they need their agents to work well with humans which means explaining things in a way that makes sense.

In math, their goal seems just to be to exploit mathematics' reputation as full of hard problems with a general population that can't tell a pile of Lean from a good proof. OpenAI pretty much said this work is just to show off at the end of the post. Anthropic said their FLT formalization is a research artifact they do not intend to clean up or improve in any way.

Besides uniting mathematicians in irritation at the labs, the other flaw with this strategy is that it ignores that organizing knowledge is part of intelligence, much like not just producing a mess that runs is part of programming. You can write a proof that uses algebraic geometry because someone organized what could have been a bunch of disparate ideas (or fragments of a Lean repo no one will read) into a toolbox where an expert can find the tool they need.

I hope they change tack. Perhaps instead of making an explicit strategy of taking the credit from mathematicians but doing little for actual understanding, they could let some math departments at their swarms or best models, ask for a bit of acknowledgement, and hopefully they approach it by trying to write good papers, simplify, etc. rather than just rushing for headlines. (Tao's post about digesting an LLM-generated proof https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/08/12/a-digestion-of-the... is an interesting read for a sense of what he means by 'digestion'.)

On that last note, it's also important (Tao's also noted) for the mathematical community to properly value digestion and organization of results, so that given the incentives of mathematics and availability of new tools you end up with good papers and textbooks and so on, not just mathematicians taking the labs' current role of pushing incomprehensible-even-to-specialists proof code to repos.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#168
post #104
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his point is that AI is not creating new problems. It may solve "the Riemann hypothesis" but may completely fail to posit a "Mythos hypothesis" which is vital to advance the field. In fact, achieving the former may make the latter even harder because it will disincentivize production of human mathematics which has till now been the only source of "interesting" problems. FWIW this is my understanding of his ar…

Have we asked AI to create new interesting math problems? XD

Yes, many mathematicians have.

As Tao points out, merely suggesting new open questions isn't really sufficient. Part of what gives these problems their fame is their notoriety, their difficulty, the fact that many prodigious mathematicians have spent an evening or week or month or several years studying it.

It wouldn't be as interesting if it had just been solved by the fifth random mathematician who considered it

Notably, gardening a new field of study in math is somewhat nontrivial. You have to introduce the field, illustrate some relevance or connections, and then - and this is key - not solve all of the low-hanging fruit yourself! Because you need somebody else to become an expert in that particular field.

The analog in programming is: if a large company merely open sources a product that's decent but not great and in a language nobody wants to maintain, but they don't commit to maintaining it themselves.

Suddenly there's a bit of a vacuum because in order to provide something of value, you either need to:

1. Implement something more complete than was initially open sourced

2. Or maintain something in a horrendous language while incrementally improving it and keeping it relevant

3. Or rewrite it into a tolerable and maintainable modern language.

What the large company has done is create a vacuum in the tool space where you now require extreme motivation to get someone else to step in.

Note that in this scenario, in 2026, it's actually not such a big deal. I think several recent models could happily translate it into a more maintainable language themselves or happily maintain it in the original crufty one. And so the question is: which parts of this analogy are true in math, too?

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#169
post #166
post #43

We're having to rediscover in real time the extremely hard way, why enabling mass theft is so incredibly damaging to society. This is literally why we need a functional copyright system If theft becomes more profitable than genuine creation, then nobody will create anything. Then there's nothing to steal, at which point all progress collapses

What theft? LLM output has never been copyrightable.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. GP was referring to the use of copyrighted material to train LLMs.

Re: Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI

#170
post #43

We're having to rediscover in real time the extremely hard way, why enabling mass theft is so incredibly damaging to society. This is literally why we need a functional copyright system If theft becomes more profitable than genuine creation, then nobody will create anything. Then there's nothing to steal, at which point all progress collapses

Nobody owns math and it is ridiculous to suggest someone should.
Post reply on HN