We’re Entering Uncharted Territory for Math
Terence Tao, a mathematics professor at UCLA widely considered to be the world's greatest living mathematician, recently posted his impressions of OpenAI's o1 model, comparing it to a mediocre but not completely incompetent graduate student. This article contains an edited transcript of an interview with Tao where he describes a kind of AI-enabled 'industrial-scale mathematics' in which AI acts as a lubricant for mathematicians' hypotheses and approaches to unlock new information. This approach keeps humans at its core, embracing both the strengths of people and machines.