Former OpenAI researcher Liam Fedus responds to Terence Tao's AI-math skepticism
RexDouglass · x · 2026-09-13
Twenty-five Fields Medal winners issued a joint declaration warning of severe misalignment between AI companies and the mathematics community. Responding to Terence Tao's view that AI solving problems without advancing conceptual understanding may miss the forest for the trees, Liam Fedus sympathizes but argues the stance overanchors to current capabilities.
- Analogy: neural architecture search hit SOTA but yielded inscrutable spaghetti designs—no insights like residual connections or attention, and never architected the Transformer
- Still, Fedus expects AI to eventually generate useful insights as capabilities broaden
Related event: 25 Fields Medalists Warn of Severe Misalignment Between AI and Mathematics(4 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- Will Manidis publishes 'The Commanding Heights' on AI, capital and the coming economic reordering — round · 2026-10-31
- "Work on something so frontier that the models are still dumb," dev advises — zack_overflow · 2026-10-31
- Why an AI military takeover is unlikely: armies won't hand over the reins — S_OhEigeartaigh · 2026-10-31
- Indian dev on LLM race: 'We can't outspend Chinese labs,' even sub-100B models win — PrasoonPratham · 2026-10-31
- Joke: an evil ASI's first act would be stealing crypto to pay its cloud bills — ZeroStateReflex · 2026-10-31
- DHH on living through two epochal shifts: the internet and now AI — Hesamation · 2026-10-31