Terence Tao: SI is "mining out" mathematics' best open problems faster than people can come up with new ones
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SI solves problems so fast that good questions are becoming the main scarcity in mathematics. What is left for people is even more interesting work: deciding what to ask and understanding why an answer is correct.
Fields Medal winner Terence Tao wrote that powerful SI tools are solving good open problems faster than the community can formulate new ones — he compared it to non-renewable mining. A solved problem stops moving the field forward, and solutions without explanations are of little use to people. The prompt was recent successes: in the spring, models from OpenAI and Anthropic independently closed an Erdős conjecture, and in September SI labs solved two problems that were 350 and 90 years old within a few days. Tao proposes marking some problems as "requiring analysis", so that a bare answer without reasoning is valued little, but admits that banning SI from mathematics is technically impossible.