Terence Tao, a UCLA professor thought of to be the “world’s biggest dwelling mathematician,” final month in contrast ChapGPT’s o1 reasoning mannequin to a “mediocre, however not utterly incompetent” graduate scholar that would appropriately reply a posh evaluation downside with “quite a lot of hints and prodding.”
AI may by no means beat its human academics, he now tells The Atlantic. “One key distinction [today] between graduate college students and AI is that graduate college students study. You inform an AI its strategy doesn’t work, it apologizes, it should perhaps quickly appropriate its course, however generally it simply snaps again to the factor it tried earlier than.”
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 substitute math nerds, AI will allow them to discover large-scale, beforehand unreachable issues. Says Tao of the longer term, “You may need a undertaking and ask, ‘What if I do that strategy?’ And as a substitute of spending hours and hours truly making an attempt to make it work, you information a GPT to do it for you.”