‘The job description is changing’: mathematician Terence Tao on the rise of AI

Terence Tao has been exploring the intersection between maths and AI. Credit: David Esquivel/UCLA Is mathematics being taken over by generative artificial intelligence? This year, a spate of media reports have suggested that the field is being fundamentally changed by the technology. Many maths researchers say that AI’s actual capabilities are often hyped up, and that it’s not yet time to announce the death of their profession. Still, by many accounts, in the past year, AI has jumped from solving secondary-school-level problems to actually being useful in research mathematicians’ daily work. Terence Tao, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been at the forefront of experimentation with large language models, including OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini. In particular, he has contributed to a project to test the skills of AI systems on a collection of more than 1,000 problems, ranging from major conjectures to obscure factoids. The questions were accumulated by the late Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős (1913–1996) over his lifetime. Last month, Tao teamed up with Tanya Klowden, an art historian at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, to explore the implications of AI for researchers and the world at large. They took mathematics as a test case, and urge society to adopt the technology but in a human-centric way. …