Terence Tao on how AI math solutions miss the point

In a Science Friday interview, Terence Tao said AI models solving open problems—such as OpenAI's claimed Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize solution and results for over 350 previously unsolved problems—deliver answers without the understanding that normally comes from the work. He argued that mathematics has organized itself around the scarcity of proofs, and that AI is decoupling problem-solving from mathematics' deeper goals of understanding, real-world application and training the next generation. Tao also described junior researchers scrambling as projects are made obsolete and mathematicians becoming secretive about their research directions.