Yau builds a 1,000-strong AI math alliance at Tsinghua as Tao weighs OpenAI's 722-manuscript flood

APPSO · wechat · 2026-10-13

AI is compressing mathematics' timescales: OpenAI released 722 math manuscripts at once (some retracted for proof errors), while DeepMind's peer-reviewed AlphaProof Nexus in Science solved 9 of 353 formalized Erdős problems (two open for 56 years) and 44 of 492 open OEIS conjectures. The Human Mathematics Association called for a boycott of OpenAI, which Terence Tao reshared.

China's response: The Shing-Tung Yau Lab Alliance for Math and AI launched at Tsinghua, aiming to gather 1,000 researchers to build math-specific models, shared formalized libraries and compute platforms. Yau calls AI's impact 'a tsunami' but judges domestic models still clearly behind frontier US models for frontier research; Tsinghua has already used AI to refute a degenerate Arnold conjecture, and Calabi conjecture formalization has amassed 273k lines of Lean 4 code.

Tao's Math 2.0: In a Caltech talk he contrasts proof-scarce Math 1.0 with an era of proof abundance, worrying that merely clearing open-problem lists kills the process that breeds new ideas—and proposing AI for explaining proofs, organizing theorem networks and re-examining old theorems.

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Yau builds a 1,000-strong AI math alliance at Tsinghua as Tao weighs OpenAI's 722-manuscript flood

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