Terence Tao Goes 'On a War Footing' Over OpenAI Math Dump

Terence Tao, the UCLA Fields medalist, told The New York Times he is 'on a war footing' after OpenAI released 350 machine-generated math findings on October 6, including a 165-page proof of the Navier-Stokes problem produced by roughly 10,000 AI agents running for about 88 hours. Tao and 24 other Fields Medal winners signed a statement calling OpenAI's math 'detrimental' to the field; the day he posted it, his blog drew 100,000 views. Two of the researchers in our Who's Who tracker shared the piece the same day it ran.

The scene around him is a small UCLA auditorium: a two-day workshop on partial differential equations 'in the age of A.I.' that opened at 9 a.m. Tao, once an early AI adopter, told the Times he had initially described the forthcoming OpenAI release as 'toxic waste,' then revised that after reading it to 'maybe treated waste.' 'There are no rules any more,' he said. His assessment of the proof itself was clipped: 'It is technically readable.'

The disruption has reshaped his working life. Tao, who sees each of his three PhD students once a week, said every meeting is 'increasingly a therapy session more than technical guidance.' He now spends most of his time on what he calls 'community organizing': pulling together groups of mathematicians, strategizing, responding to the media, delivering lectures on A.I., counseling. 'I am horrified by the many person-years,' he said of young mathematicians' work the release had upended.

OpenAI, through spokesman Laurance Fauconnet, told the Times the company values 'our engagement with Terence and the wider mathematics community.' At the workshop, Stanford's Ravi Vakil pressed the room with a question aimed at what might still be defended: 'You've had epiphanies, right? Suddenly everything in the room becomes clear.'