Terence Tao: AI can take us to the answer without showing us the way

In an interview with Big Think published on 3 September, the mathematician Terence Tao, a Fields medallist, compared AI to a helicopter that drops you at the waterfall you were looking for: you get there sooner, but you learn nothing about the way.

According to Tao, AI tools already solve some open problems by trying many techniques at once, but without knowing what they cost or how many attempts fail, they are hard to assess. Mathematics already suffers from what he calls proof indigestion: proofs arrive faster than they can be understood. He worries about optimising the wrong thing and about losing the problems on which new researchers are trained.