Terry Tao on crisis in mathematics
The gist
Fields Medalist Terence Tao said he is "on a war footing" after OpenAI released 722 AI-written math manuscripts.
His warning captures how AI proof dumps are unsettling mathematicians' work and prestige.
How it unfolded
- 2016AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol in Go, after which human Go matches were reduced to a "recreational activity" — later cited as the precedent for mathematics.
- May 2026OpenAI used AI to solve the Erdős unit distance problem, likely the first major mathematical problem ever solved by an AI model.
- Sep 8, 2026OpenAI deployed an undisclosed internal giant model coordinating roughly 10,000 AI agents, which spent 88 hours delivering a finite-time singularity proof for the Navier-Stokes equations and completed formal verification in the Lean language.