Terence Tao, the legendary mathematician, explains the promise of generative AI.
Wong: What improvements are you hoping or expecting to see from generative-AI models in the next year or two?
Tao: There’s a middle ground where we want to encourage responsible AI use and discourage irresponsible AI use. It is a delicate line to tread. But we’ve done it before. Mathematicians routinely use computers to do numerical work, and there was a lot of backlash initially when computer-assisted proofs first came out, because how can you trust computer code? But we’ve figured that out over 20 or 30 years. Unfortunately, the timelines are much more compressed now. So we have to figure out our standards within a few years. And our community does not move that fast, normally.
One very basic thing that would help the math community: When an AI gives you an answer to a question, usually it does not give you any good indication of how confident it is in this answer, or it will always say, I’m completely certain that this is true. Humans do this. Whether they are confident in something or whether they are not is very important information, and it’s okay to tentatively propose something which you’re not sure about, but it’s important to flag that you’re uncertain about it. But AI tools do not rate their own confidence accurately. And this lowers their usefulness. We would appreciate more honest AIs.