Terence Tao: evaluation

Transcript context

…So this is a hard question, but not competing but collaborating. Okay, hypothetical. If I gave you an Oracle that was able to do some aspect of what you do and you could just collaborate with it, what would you like that Oracle to be able to do? Would you like it to maybe be a verifier, like check, do the codes? Like “Yes, Professor Tao, correct, this is a promising fruitful direction”? Or would you like it to generate possible proofs and then you see which one is the right one? Or would you like it to maybe generate different representation, different totally different ways of seeing this problem? Yeah, I think all of the above. A lot of it is we don’t know how to use these tools, because it’s a paradigm that… We have not had in the past. Systems that are competent enough to understand complex instructions that can work at massive scale, but are also unreliable. It’s an interesting… A bit unreliable in subtle ways, whereas was providing sufficiently good output. It’s an interesting combination. I mean, you have graduate students that you work with who kind of like this, but not at scale. And we had previous software tools that can work at scale, but very narrow, so we have to figure out how to use, so Tim Gowers is actually, you mentioned he actually foresaw in 2000. He was envisioning what mathematics would look like in actually two and a half decades. That’s funny.…

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