Terence Tao: At the Erdos problem website, AI assistance now becoming routine
19 comments
·November 22, 2025NitpickLawyer
Having the ability to throw math heavy ML papers at the assistants and get simplified explanations / pseudocode back is absolutely amazing, as someone who's forgot most of what I learned in uni, 25+ years back and never really used it since.
kregasaurusrex
'Vibe formalizing' is a logical extension of 'vibe engineering' implemented by 'vibe coding'. Sometimes I have trouble with getting the individual puzzle pieces of a problem to fall into place, where a hypothetical 'Move 37 As A Service' to unify informal methods with mathematical rigor deserves to be explored!
WhyOhWhyQ
I've had mixed results with AI on research mathematics. I've gotten it to auto-complete non-trivial arguments, and I've found some domains where it seems hopelessly lost. I think we're still at a point in history where mathematicians will not be replaced by AI and can only benefit by dabbling with it.
godelski
I've had similar results in both mathematics and programming. For one paper I was writing I wanted to try them and it was a fairly straightforward problem counting the number of permutations. I spent much more time trying to get the AI to figure it out than it took to actually solve it. Couldn't get it to do it even after I solved the problem. Similarly in coding I've had it fail to find trivial bugs like an undefined keyword, which would have easily been caught had I turned on ctags (because the keyword was inherited from a class, which made it so easy to miss). But similarly I've had them succeed on non-trivial tasks and those have been of great help, though nothing has ever been end-to-end just the AI.
So I agree. I think these tools are very helpful, but I also think it is unhelpful that people are trying to sell them as much more than they are. The over hype of them not only legitimizes any pushback but provides ammunition. I believe the truth is that they're helpful tools, but are still far from replacing expertise. I believe that if we try to oversell them then we run the risk of ruining their utility. If you promise the moon you have the deliver the moon. That's different from aiming for the moon and landing in the trees.
RossBencina
Also interesting that the responses include anti-Lean material.
orochimaaru
I'm not a mathematician, but how credible is that anti-Lean material? Are they marketing an alternative programmatic approach, as in they're anti-lean because "I got something else" or are they philosophically anti-Lean and have valid arguments?
CamperBob2
Due to his position and general fame, Tao has to deal with a larger-than-usual number of kooks.
testartr
gemini take on the anti-lean material:
Based on the document provided, this is not "crank material" (in the sense of being incoherent nonsense or anti-intellectual), but rather a radical philosophical critique rooted in Finitism or Ultrafinitism.
The document makes a coherent argument, but it relies on a specific philosophical view that rejects the standard foundations of modern mathematics (ZFC Set Theory).
The arguments heavily echo the views of mathematicians like Doron Zeilberger (explicitly linked in the document) and strict Formalists. Zeilberger is a well-known, prize-winning mathematician who famously argues that infinity does not exist and that computers should just manipulate finite symbols.
DroneBetter
I think Zeilberger is taken heavily out of context and confused with Norman Wildberger a lot; he certainly has some eccentric opinions but that one is not at all reflected in his blog's contents (which are largely things like "[particular paper] presents [conjecture/proof] that can be [resolved/shortened] by routine methods" that are only routine because of his decades of work), it's a shame that him being the go-to example of a crank seems to have become engrained into LLMs
xhkkffbf
They should name one of the AI's "Erdos". Then we can all have an Erdos number of one!
hatmatrix
There is an AI-integrated IDE called Erdos...
bgwalter
[flagged]
lanstin
Because he is smart enough to use the existing (frontier) tools to get good results and create a sort of collaborative environment that is novel for research maths.
bgwalter
Collaborative environment meaning that any PFY employed by the "AI" providers can read your most intimate thought processes and keep track of embarrassing failures or misconceptions.
perching_aix
The embarrassing failures or misconceptions of math experts with regards to research level mathematics? Definitely a serious problem.
Though by your "Perelman and Wiles didn't need "AI" assistance" comment, you'd surely be there on the sidelines to ridicule them for each and every single one. I guess maybe that's where your concerns are coming from?
I can practically see how these concerns of yours would suddenly evaporate if they started using self-hosted models instead... ... yeah, right, who are we kidding?
perching_aix
Thankfully it's mathematics, so people powerscaling their idols, deifying them at the detriment of others, and putting terms into quotes mockingly, is not what determines whether results hold or not. Perhaps the only field not fundamentally shackled by this type of quackery, even if people try their hardest from time to time to make it so.
bgwalter
[flagged]
perching_aix
It's fine, at least you admit that what you wrote was just to insult.
For people who at least pretend to care to not think in strawmans, it's been nearly six years, and their deus has never exited said machina (if it's ever been in there to begin with, or anywhere else).
I hope we continue to see gains for scientific professionals and companies doing research.
Even imperfect assistants increase leverage.