Terence Tao, a UCLA professor thought of to be the “world’s greatest living mathematician,” final month in contrast ChapGPT’s o1 reasoning mannequin to a “mediocre, but not completely incompetent” graduate pupil that might accurately reply a fancy evaluation drawback with “a lot of hints and prodding.”
AI may by no means beat its human lecturers, he now tells The Atlantic. “One key difference [today] between graduate students and AI is that graduate students learn. You tell an AI its approach doesn’t work, it apologizes, it will maybe temporarily correct its course, but sometimes it just snaps back to the thing it tried before.”
The excellent news for math prodigies, provides Tao, is that AI and mathematicians will extra doubtless all the time be collaborators, the place as a substitute of change math nerds, AI will allow them to discover large-scale, beforehand unreachable issues. Says Tao of the longer term, “You might have a project and ask, ‘What if I try this approach?’ And instead of spending hours and hours actually trying to make it work, you guide a GPT to do it for you.”