AI Forecast Ledger

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Terence Tao: rumor of a solution now triggers AI effort to 'flatten' open math problems

simonwillison.net · 2026-09-09

Tao argues that AI-powered mining of open problems may lead researchers to stop sharing promising directions publicly, reversing open-science traditions. The comment follows the contested OpenAI Navier–Stokes result.

“We have now seen that even the rumor of someone working on a problem can trigger a massive amount of AI-powered effort to flatten it before the original research project has time to reach its full potential.”

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