GoKawiilTerence 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. They posted a draft of their essay, due to be published in the forthcoming edition of The Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Mathematics, on arXiv1. Nature spoke to Tao about how the technology is transforming his profession.
Why do you think it is important to consider the impacts of rapidly evolving AI?
I feel like AI is not just another technology like the word processor or the web browser. It really is forcing us to rethink fundamental questions — what is a mathematical proof? What is a paper? What is the purpose of our profession? If we don’t ask these questions ourselves, then they will get answered for us by a technology company or decided by financial incentives. We have to get ahead of this.
Why has maths become ‘the next big thing’ for AI?
In almost any other application, the biggest Achilles heel of AI is that it makes unverifiable mistakes. But in mathematics, almost uniquely, you can automatically check the output — at least if the output is supposed to be the proof of a theorem, although that is not the only thing mathematicians do. So, AI companies have recognized that their most unambiguous successes — if they’re going to have any — are going to come from mathematics.
In my opinion, there are many use cases of AI that are risky and controversial. In mathematics, the downsides are much more limited
What will happen to mathematics as a field in the age of AI?
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