Frank Calegari essay: mathematics has changed with AI — mathematicians should act like it
littmath · x · 2026-11-03
In a guest post on Terence Tao's blog, Frank Calegari argues that OpenAI's October 6 release of 700+ research papers was a watershed: AI is now undeniably capable of groundbreaking math contributions, yet the papers are poorly written, violate attribution norms, and are sometimes wrong. He pushes back on the "hollowing out" narrative — the OpenAI dump barely dented Langlands-program problems, and even solving them wouldn't "solve number theory" any more than the periodic table solved chemistry. Central problems are natural boundaries, not endpoints. His call: mathematicians should focus on what they control — hiring, publishing, training students — and explain the discipline better, rather than lamenting trillion-dollar companies' behavior.
Related event: Tao's blog publishes Calegari: math has changed, embrace AI(4 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- AI research may be the single best LLM-accelerated job, argues alex_peys — alex_peys · 2026-11-03
- Nature: human-derived organoids wired into mouse cortex, BCI implications — bratton · 2026-11-03
- AI safety funders force orgs to be too narrow, argues researcher — JacquesThibs · 2026-11-03
- Frontier agentic AI engineer: 'staying at the frontier is exhausting, not sure how long I can keep up' — smlpth · 2026-11-03
- AlphaFold Predicted 200M Protein Structures in Two Years, Ending 50 Years of Manual Work — r0ck3t23 · 2026-11-03
- Bot traffic surpasses humans: essay argues AI agents are breaking the open web's 30-year business model — Ronangmi · 2026-11-03