Quoting Terence Tao
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Opinion — commentary, not a factual news event.
A rumor that someone’s working on a math problem can now trigger AI to rush in and flatten it. Terence Tao says that could make researchers stop sharing promising ideas at all.
Based on reporting by Simon Willison’s Weblog, Simon Willison — read the original for the full story.
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Terence Tao is warning that a quiet norm in mathematics may be getting turned inside out. The stock of good open problems, he says, is being mined in a way that can’t just be repeated forever. Once a problem is exposed, it may not stay open for long.
What changed is the speed of the response. Tao says even a rumor that someone is working on a problem can now set off a huge wave of AI-powered effort aimed at solving it before the original research has had time to mature. That is a very different world from the one in which open problems were shared and patiently explored.
The ugly incentive is obvious enough. If promising directions get swarmed as soon as they become visible, researchers may decide it is safer to keep them private. Tao says that would reverse centuries of open-science tradition and do real long-term damage to the field.
This is not just a complaint about overenthusiastic tools. It is a warning that AI can change the social rules around discovery itself, pushing mathematicians toward secrecy when the culture has long depended on openness. Tags attached to the note include ai-ethics, mathematics, and ai.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the part of AI nobody likes to put on the slide deck: not grand intelligence, just industrial-strength opportunism. If open problems become prey the moment they’re mentioned, researchers will do the sensible thing and shut up, which is a lovely way to break a field. The real failure mode here is not that AI gets smart, but that everyone starts acting like it is greedy.
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