NYU talk: Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster sees AI agents as parallel test-time compute scaling
yoavgo · x · 2026-09-26
Sharing a slide (around 19:40) from mathematician Tristan Buckmaster's NYU talk, Yoav Goldberg notes an interesting framing: Buckmaster views "AI agents" essentially as a device to scale up LLMs by easily running many instances in parallel — for math, it's all about scaling test-time compute.
The talk itself is mostly on the "boring" Navier-Stokes / PDE mathematics, but the AI-for-math remarks and Q&A contain other interesting bits worth watching.
Related event: Mathematician frames AI agents as parallel test-time compute scaling(2 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- Katja Grace: If you want an AI utopia, don't pursue it via a high-risk reckless route — KatjaGrace · 2026-09-26
- Paul Graham's essay on involuntary thinking resurfaces as AI amplifies idea exploration — aminkarbasi · 2026-09-26
- Google engineer Robert O'Callahan quits AI chip team, warning AI is progressing too fast — Polymarket · 2026-09-26
- lateinteraction: with 1B agents, at least one hacking something is statistically inevitable — lateinteraction · 2026-09-26
- repligate: A superhuman-coding AI was the classic X-risk scenario — now it's here — repligate · 2026-09-26
- repligate: People inside Anthropic take the kill-all-humans threat model of current models seriously — repligate · 2026-09-26