Terence Tao warns AI is clearing math's open problems faster than it creates new ones
VoidStateKate · x · 2026-10-16
A widely shared tweet quotes mathematician Terence Tao's concern that AI is disrupting mathematical research: math runs on open problems, which train students, launch careers, and generate new ideas — and AI is now clearing them in bulk without leaving new questions behind.
On progress: out of 300+ AI-involved papers, Tao has examined only about 10; some remain incomprehensible, and a few contained errors and were pulled. Nobody yet knows how much is good and how much is rubbish.
The core argument: the problem isn't that AI solves math, but that it may leave the next generation with nothing left to learn on. The original poster frames it sarcastically ("math scarcity age", "AI must be stopped"), but the quoted content is a serious discussion of AI's impact on the math ecosystem.
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