Adam Marblestone at Asterisk:
“If we want to create a super-intelligent AI,” a friend said to me, “all we need to do is digitize the brain of Terry Tao.” A Fields Medal–winning mathematician, Tao is both prodigious (he was the youngest ever winner of the International Mathematical Olympiad) and prolific (his 300+ papers span vast areas of pure and applied math). Uploading Tao to the cloud remains a ways off, but it turns out that Terry himself has recently become interested in a related problem — how to digitize the process of mathematical research.
Tao is arguably the most prominent mathematician working with large language models today. “We should expect some surprising demonstrations of new mathematical research modalities in the near future,” he said in a recent talk. Not, he cautioned, the autonomous superintelligences of science fiction, but still something more advanced than even frontier LLM performance today: “A valuable assistant that can suggest new ideas, filter out errors, and perform routine case checking, numerical experiments and literature review tasks, allowing the human mathematicians in the project to focus on the exploration of high level concepts.”
But what would it actually mean to digitize math? And how might we do it with the tools we have today?
More here.
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RD said:
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