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 pupil that would accurately reply a fancy evaluation downside with “a number 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 method 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 doubtless at all times be collaborators, the place as an alternative of change math nerds, AI will allow them to discover large-scale, beforehand unreachable issues. Says Tao of the longer term, “You might need a venture and ask, ‘What if I do this method?’ And as an alternative of spending hours and hours really attempting to make it work, you information a GPT to do it for you.”
