This quote is taken wildly out-of-context.
This is a wildly out-of-context quote used to sensationalize Tao's otherwise constructive criticism of frontier labs' approach to AI Math.
The quote came from the Q&A session of a talk where Tao discusses the challenges of working with AI in "Pure Mathematics". Tao noted that:
- "Pure Mathematics" is curiosity-driven research.
- Solving open problems in pure math typically does not lead to immediate applications, and therefore is not in and of itself interesting. **
- Recent results, like the solution to Navier-Stokes, are missing the important "proof digestion" step (see graphic).
So what Tao is actually saying is: for "Pure Mathematics", there is no need to further speed up "proof generation" and "proof verification", without first scaling "proof digestion".
** This is different than most sciences, where solutions to problems can be very impactful, like curing cancer for example!
My views:
- I'm an accelerationist, but I agree with Tao here, since pure math has no direct applications.
- There are many open problems in applied math (e.g. theoretical computer science & cryptography) that do have more direct applications (proximity gap for Reed-Solomon, for example). We should accelerate AI problem-solving on problems with downstream impact.
