Guest post on Terence Tao’s blog by Francesco Maggi
Will AI bring ‘a golden age or a dark age’ for mathematics? Calls for publicly governed research LLMs
Confirmed
The takeaway
On 18 Oct 2026 Terence Tao published on his blog a guest essay by mathematician Francesco Maggi (author page at UT Austin’s math department), “Will it be a golden age or a dark age for mathematics (and science)?”.
Status
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Confirmed
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- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 18 October 2026
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Key facts
- Format: guest post on Tao’s ‘What’s new’ blog (tags math.HO, opinion, AI); Tao’s note: ‘This is a guest post by Francesco Maggi.’ and ‘This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.’
- Results discussed: LLM-generated proofs of a finite-time blow-up for Navier–Stokes with forcing, the proposed proof of the quasi-Riemann Hypothesis, and OpenAI’s ‘Tuesday October 6, 2026, Drop’ (about 4,000 problems tried, success on ‘some hundreds’ after aggregation and selection; the author calls the wording vague)
- Golden age if: researcher access to frontier tools, ‘reproducibility and disclosure standards for LLM-generated scholarship’ and ‘sustained investments in publicly governed LLM infrastructure’. Dark age if output surges while independent human research withers and knowledge concentrates in a few hands: ‘The real darkness here would be knowledge becoming alien to human understanding.’
- Training: ‘The training of future mathematicians has already become an existential challenge.’ ‘A strong mathematical result, by itself, can no longer be taken as convincing evidence’ of independent ability
- Governance: warns of ‘the growing asymmetry between the scientific capabilities’ of labs and the community, and says voluntary corporate goodwill is not a sufficient safeguard; universities and other institutions ‘should coordinate the development and governance of competitive LLMs’
- Also argues: ‘Mathematics is not a finite system of questions’; AI creativity and consciousness claims should be treated as open scientific questions; authorship, credit, peer review and confidentiality need new norms. 9 comments by the evening of Oct 18
What happened
Twelve days after OpenAI’s mass release of AI-written maths manuscripts and nine days after Tao’s “Math 2.0” lecture, Tao gave his blog, one of the most read in mathematics, to a guest essay by Francesco Maggi. The essay is organised as eight numbered points and a call to action. It accepts that LLMs are powerful research tools but argues that their proofs need independent checking, that the field’s progress is not a list of problems to tick off, and that cheap proofs could make “mathematization” of new sciences, a human task, far more common.
Its sharpest points concern institutions. Because a strong result no longer proves a student’s own ability, training mathematicians has become “an existential challenge”. Because a few companies control the frontier models, Maggi calls for universities, professional societies, funding agencies and foundations to build publicly governed, researcher-oriented LLM infrastructure, with disclosure and reproducibility standards for LLM-generated work. He expects a mix of the two outcomes and says the “golden age scenario is achievable”.
Why it matters
It is the most explicit call yet, on the field’s most visible platform, for academia to build its own frontier models rather than rely on the labs. It echoes Tao’s lecture (open, interpretable maths models) and the Kyoto vision of a “golden age of science”, but stresses the risk side. Maggi’s affiliation is taken from the author link (UT Austin), not from the text.
Sources
1 source from 1 site. Numbers match the chips in the text.
1 source: 1 primary
Primary
- Terence Tao’s blog (guest post by Francesco Maggi): Will it be a golden age or a dark age for mathematics (and science)?terrytao.wordpress.com, official
Changes
- Filed (evening)