Special · AI and math

"AI turns beautiful mathematics into toxic waste": Terence Tao reveals OpenAI's 'code red'

"OpenAI published answers to 722 unsolved math problems — and people can't celebrate them." Terence Tao, widely called the world's leading mathematician, told The Observer on Oct 23 that what AI left in math is 'toxic waste.' Here's the scene he described, step by step.

1. @haider1 · X ↗

   A Fields medalist cleaning up after Silicon Valley

   Tao, 51, a UCLA professor and one of the youngest-ever Fields medalists, says he and colleagues are now reverse-tracing OpenAI's answers to verify them. He likened it to Douglas Adams's supercomputer spending 7.5 million years to answer '42' — the answer is out, but its meaning must be worked out afresh.

2. Why math? 'It's almost the only thing left to train on'

   AI labs racing to the most powerful model need tests, Tao says, but the newest models beat every test. "Math problems are almost the only thing left for them to train on, so our field's biggest prizes have become their benchmarks." The byproduct: "great results, but terrible proofs" that don't care how elegant they are or who understands them.

3. A 'code red' over a Millennium problem

   The dump began, Tao says, when rumors spread that Anthropic was near one of the seven $1M Millennium Prize Problems. "My contacts at OpenAI said this became code red priority number one. They dumped tens of millions and set up a 10,000-agent swarm." OpenAI rejected the 'code red' framing, saying it neither suspended signups nor spent as much as Tao suggested.

4. Navier-Stokes, and signups that 'stopped'

   OpenAI targeted the Navier-Stokes equations, Tao says: "For a few days you couldn't sign up to premium because they redirected all compute to this one problem." On Sept 8 it published a proof that the equations fail under some conditions, though reviews suggest errors. OpenAI says it neither withheld nor rushed results.

5. 'You can sit on toxic waste, dump it, or pay people to process it'

   Facing backlash, OpenAI had "a bunch of very badly polished solutions" and didn't know what to do, Tao says. "When you generate toxic waste, you have no good options: sit on it forever, dump it all at once, dole it out, or pay people to process it." Anthropic, he says, chose to pay mathematicians to write up its 'trove of questions.'

6. Math once needed only chalk — now a super-AI

   Tao worries this breaks math's level playing field. Once anyone with chalk and a blackboard could do it; now cutting-edge work means access to a super-AI model. "They get to pick who writes up the paper."

7. 'Put the fries in the bag, Terence' — the meme

   After the 'toxic waste' line, Tao became a meme — a jab that mathematicians are headed to McDonald's. He laughed: "social media is going to social media," adding he understands the schadenfreude of people with bad experiences in math, but says the memes miss the point.

8. What Tao still wants: process and elegance, not just results

   Tao agrees math culture should change — less credit for solving, more for explaining. "Math is half science, half humanities. We care about the outcome but also the process." OpenAI said it is already working with leading mathematicians to share results better, and has committed $5M to help the math community examine AI-made discoveries.