Terence Tao, a UCLA professor thought of to be the “world’s best dwelling mathematician,” final month in contrast ChapGPT’s o1 reasoning mannequin to a “mediocre, however not fully incompetent” graduate scholar that might accurately reply a fancy evaluation downside with “a number of hints and prodding.”
AI would possibly by no means beat its human lecturers, he now tells The Atlantic. “One key distinction [today] between graduate college students and AI is that graduate college students be taught. You inform an AI its strategy doesn’t work, it apologizes, it is going to perhaps briefly appropriate its course, however generally it simply snaps again to the factor it tried earlier than.”
The excellent news for math prodigies, provides Tao, is that AI and mathematicians will extra doubtless all the time be collaborators, the place as an alternative of exchange math nerds, AI will allow them to discover large-scale, beforehand unreachable issues. Says Tao of the longer term, “You may need a venture and ask, ‘What if I do this strategy?’ And as an alternative of spending hours and hours truly making an attempt to make it work, you information a GPT to do it for you.”
