So much of HN is half-baked anecdotes about and by LLMs or philosophizing from VCs who talked to an LLM about Rene Girard for twenty minutes or pop sci articles that appear to be posted so that some bored developer can read the abstract and one experiment and dunk on it. Tao is uniquely positioned as a mathematician who has made enormous contributions to many areas and is old enough to contextualize it all against the past and young enough to be open to its possible futures. More Tao spam sounds good to me!
replyI 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.
replyIt'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.
replyOn 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.
I have nothing against the guy. What I don’t like is seeing 50 hacker news posts about him every week.
replyA 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".
replyhttps://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.
Tao is being paid to boost LLMs. That's your argument? This is what human creativity is capable of? Baseless conspiracies?
replyThis comment is spam. When Tao says something we should take it seriously.
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