Terence Tao's post, curated on eChai

The entry that reframes the week, and the reason this page starts where it does. On 3 September Tao published a six-part case study using Navier-Stokes as his worked example of how an AI-generated solution could damage a field. Five days later people were arguing about exactly that. The fifth part describes the scenario in advance: an autonomous harness, backed by enormous compute, running the whole search internally while the company keeps the process out of public view, so the problem is technically solved and almost nothing is added to mathematics.

Terence Tao, in mathstodon.xyz

A concrete example of how AI advances in solving key open problems could inihibit the future development of a mathematical field can be found in the global regularity problem for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations [...] there is now an increasingly realistic scenario in which a primarily AI-generated solution to the problem appears, but in a fashion that contaminates the problem as a source of further advances.

Read it in full on mathstodon.xyz →