Terry Tao went from calling o1 a 'mediocre grad student' to fearing AI will devour math academia
aran_nayebi · x · 2026-09-27
- Nathan Calvin and Boaz Barak contrast Terry Tao's shifting view of AI: in 2024 he likened working with o1 to "advising a mediocre, but not completely incompetent, graduate student"; by 2026, after post-Navier-Stokes progress, Tao warned AI risks devouring math academia.
- Barak notes general models now achieve zero-shot breakthroughs in domains they were never trained for (e.g., driving), and models routinely solve math problems humans failed to crack for decades — echoing the chess trajectory from terrible to superhuman.
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