alt Hacker NewsI haven't seen any negative sentiment toward Terence Tao before. Coming from outside the academic math sphere, genuinely curious if there's a real issue or if this comment is just spam itself.
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It's actually a strange situation. Tao is the only high-profile mathematician who tries to resolve the reproducibility crisis in math by popularizing proof checkers, and who used LLMs in probably the most legitimate way: to produce formal undeniable proofs with them, that cannot really suffer from LLMs being wrong all the time.
On the other hand, I still find content and arguments he produces to be quite weak, and honestly it's getting annoying to hear them that often. It's the case when he could really get some help of a ghost writer who is more experienced in popularization, otherwise this repetition might cause some serious harm instead.
This comment is spam. When Tao says something we should take it seriously.
A big trend in AI spam is to take achievements in one field that could be called "AI" and use them as evidence of advancement in other fields that happen to be called "AI".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package-deal_fallacy
Tao has been doing a lot of demonstrations of using LLMs for search and translation by experts who already know enough about a field to judge whether generated text is valid or meaningful. Those are valid demonstrations, but they don't justify the LLM-as-intelligent-agent narrative being pushed by most of the reporting on the topic, so the whole situation reeks of payola.