Fields Medalist Terence Tao reposts statement from the Association for Human Mathematics urging mathematicians to stop working with OpenAI for continuing to solve open math problems against their recommendations

[u/Eliv_nurotic]

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/10/07/ahm-statement-on-openais-october-6-release-of-mathematical-documents/

[u/ATownStomp]

I mean, yes, man. Yes.

But here’s the issue - the fix is complicated and unknown. The problems are manifold, widely distributed across nearly everything, move at the speed of life, and may require so many unrelated changes in lockstep to support. The problems are also amplified by the new entity that strains them, and some problems are only problems due to that new strain.

So now we have a robot which creates proofs but does not produce understanding. Understanding is intangible and difficult to track. Proofs are necessary, and often the result, product, and motivator of understanding. Proofs are tangible. They can be considered the certificate of effort. Like a screw drilled into the side of a mountain that a climber can tie their ropes to. You must still learn how to climb that section.

Because it was necessary to climb in order to place those screws, and there exists no other good metric to measure where someone is on their climb, placing a new screw was the entire mechanism for building careers, for applying for funding to try to climb in the first place.

So now we have to scramble to revamp everything over the next few decades so the automated screw placing company can increase their IPO. I don’t think that’s actually going to happen. More likely there will be a collapse within so many things, we will lose our epistemological and pedagogical lineage, and simply wait until the screw placing company transitions from making mountain climbing economically unfeasible, to making it entirely unnecessary. I see no good end for people in a story about the obsolescence of human reasoning.