Tao has been pushing for AI and Lean for a long time and didn't like the way OpenAI handled the Oct. 6th release. He has now been pushing for AI owned by universities.
That is the public way he navigates the situation, who knows what his real game is.
He is one of the people that brought about this situation.
In any case: "reactionary"? Are we using Soviet language to single out perceived dissidents?
I've been reading the posts on his blog (and I should be clear, many posts are guest posts, so it is a collective cognitive behavior therapy session):
Also did you notice he never posted more than 10 posts per month until September? These are definitely posts trying to come to terms with the new reality and searching for value in a field where humans are not pre-eminent:
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/26/a-value-based-appr...
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/19/why-do-we-need-hum...
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/12/after-math/
I also see this post like this one that claims that mathematics will be needed as interpreters of complex AI generated proofs - I see this post as a form of denial in that this is just a current limitation of AI, and will likely be fixed soon:
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/18/if-math-is-more-th...
> In any case: "reactionary"? Are we using Soviet language to single out perceived dissidents?
When new technology is introduced that is disruptive a lot of people fall into "reactionary" stances.
The first definition of reactionary that I found was this:
"A reactionary is a person or policy that opposes political, social, or economic change and seeks to reverse progress to restore an earlier, idealized state of society."
I think that fits with my usage.
All of which was provided and encouraged by a small group like Tao, Gowers, Tsimerman, Avigad, Schmitt etc. It isn't just "an algorithm".
Yeah, sure... What the hell are you talking about? Do you think that if not Tao we would not have the Oct. 6th release? That's totally insane.
The reaction was from the strip mining of pending human discovery, mathematicians were already using LLMs from frontier labs who then published suspiciously similar solutions or found connections that were just waiting to be discovered.