Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedTerence Tao: belief
20 Mar 2026 Dwarkesh Podcast Terence Tao – Kepler, Newton, and the true nature of mathematical discovery
“On the one hand, I think the type of papers that I would write today, if I had to do them without AI assistance, would definitely take five times longer.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Terence Tao
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 20 Mar 2026
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
Transcript context
…So let’s see if you can continue this streak. You personally are 2x more productive as a result of AI. What year would you say that? Productivity, I think, is not quite a one-dimensional quantity. I’m definitely noticing that the style in which I do mathematics is changing quite a bit, and the type of things I do. For example, my papers now have a lot more code, a lot more pictures, because it’s so easy to generate these things now. Some plot which would have taken me hours to do, now I can do in minutes. But in the past, I just wouldn’t have put the plot in my paper in the first place. I would just talk about it in words. So it’s hard to measure what 2x means. On the one hand, I think the type of papers that I would write today, if I had to do them without AI assistance, would definitely take five times longer. But I would not write my papers that way. 5x?…
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