Terence Tao, a UCLA professor thought-about to be the “world’s greatest living mathematician,” final month in contrast ChapGPT’s o1 reasoning mannequin to a “mediocre, but not completely incompetent” graduate scholar that might appropriately reply a fancy evaluation downside with “a lot of hints and prodding.”
AI may by no means beat its human academics, 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 excellent news for math prodigies, provides Tao, is that AI and mathematicians will extra probably at all times 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 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.”
