Terence Tao on OpenAI's math result: proofs cost hours, understanding still costs years
xiaosun86 · x · 2026-10-08
Terence Tao offered a sharp take on OpenAI's recent math release, using Andrew Wiles' Fermat's Last Theorem proof as an analogy:
- In 1993 Wiles announced the proof; months later experts found an error while reading it line by line, and it took him and Richard Taylor another year to fix.
- "A proof became a proof because people had to read it line by line" — the talks and workshops were part of how it got to be true.
- "A proof now costs hours. Understanding it still costs years, and the experts who pay that cost never asked for the result."
The remark highlights the widening gap between AI's ability to generate mathematical proofs and humanity's capacity to verify them.
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