Terence Tao: identifying promising problems is now the scarce resource in the AI era
anshulkundaje · x · 2026-09-09
Mathematician Terence Tao observes that the current AI era lacks any definitive boundary between "AI-feasible" and "AI-hard" problems.
- AI tools have flattened the difficulty landscape in many areas of math, destroying the traditional ability to locate promising new problems by difficulty
- AI-hard problems certainly still exist—difficulty is unbounded and can even be undecidable—but no clear frontier separates them, partly because AI companies refuse to disclose negative results or their solution processes
His key conclusion: identifying a promising problem is now the scarce and precious resource, to the point that even the rumor of someone working on a problem has become sensitive.
Related event: Terence Tao: Finding Good Questions Is the Scarcest Skill in the AI Era(4 posts)→
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