Terrence Tao on what AI can and cannot do:

Tao: Today there are a lot of very tedious types of mathematics that we don’t like doing, so we look for clever ways to get around them. But AIs will just happily blast through those tedious computations. When we integrate AI with human workflows, we can just glide over these obstacles.

I also think mathematicians will start doing math at larger scales. Think about the difference between case studies and population surveys in sciences. If you were to study a disease in the 18th century, if it was a rare disease, you might study one patient who has this disease and record all their symptoms and take meticulous notes. But in the 21st century, you can do a clinical trial and you can administer a drug to 1,000 people and do statistics and get much more precise information about the efficiency of your drug.

Mathematics is still very much at the case-study level. A paper will take one or two problems and study them to death in a very handcrafted, intensive way. That’s our style. But what AI tools enable is population studies.