Terence Tao

Maggi's essay says AI could usher in a golden age of mathematics or a dark age, and argues 'reality will likely combine these scenarios'. His warnings: proofs correct but unreadable, mathematicians guarding their ideas, and a few companies controlling the tools.

Readers argued mostly about Tao himself, with one calling the move from AI booster to worry 'Oh nO MaThS iS KilLeD'.

Gambhir, a theoretical particle physicist, writes as someone who thinks it is inefficient to explain or check a result when the same resources can generate another, and calls the output a repo of potentially true facts nobody will read. Tao hosts it.

On HN, the sharpest hit ran the Library of Babel simulator: random pages are gibberish, while AI proofs are credible and frequently correct. A reply pointed out that the essay says exactly that, and that "look correct" is the joke.

Terence Tao published a raw ChatGPT transcript exploring a counterexample to the century-old Jacobian Conjecture — not a summary of the math, but the actual back-and-forth, phrased like an expert cutting straight to the point.

One line stood out to readers as unmistakably his register: "I've activated Pro. Can you continue to look for a potential geometric explanation of the X_3 ~ A3 miracle that avoids coordinates or other unmotivated constructions?"

Someone tried the trick everyone eventually tries: ask ChatGPT to guess who it's talking to from the same transcript. Unprompted, it guesses "math researcher or paper author."

Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 built a degree-seven map with constant Jacobian -2 that still sends three different points to one output, breaking an 87-year-old conjecture's promise that such maps must be reversible.

Tao's post rebuilds that construction piece by piece rather than calling it a miracle, and admits he leaned on an AI chatbot to check his own math.

One longtime commenter said the write-up lost him at the algebra, and pointed everyone to Tao's own chat transcript instead as the clearer explanation.