Terry Tao's blog runs satirical guest post slamming AI-for-math hype as an IPO marketing gimmick
DanielWhiteson · x · 2026-10-17
Terence Tao's blog features a guest post by theoretical particle physicist Rikab Gambhir, a biting satire of the AI-for-science wave.
Key points:
- Opening parodies the 'First they came for...' poem, mocking how physicists embraced AI tokens and promises to 'solve the field' while ending up as paper-publishing machines.
- The author frames OpenAI's early-October math-model announcement as a marketing gimmick for an IPO: burning massive compute to produce obscure, barely-readable, possibly-true fact lists nobody can understand.
- Invokes Borges' Library of Babel: a library containing every possible book includes a Riemann hypothesis proof, but useful content is unretrievable — an analogy for AI-generated mathematics that may be correct yet incomprehensible.
Notable both for the argument and for Tao choosing to platform this critique on his widely read blog.
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