Kevin Buzzard: ‘To grieve, or not to grieve?’

Posted Oct 1, 2026 on the Xena Project blog (Tao’s list attributes it to Kevin Buzzard). Summary from an automated reading of the first 100,000 of about 111,000 characters: the field ‘is currently undergoing a rapid transformation, unlike anything that we have ever seen before’. Buzzard separates theorem-proving, theory-building and conjecture-making and says machines are currently strong only at the first; he writes ‘I’m in it for the theorem tally’ and ‘I am an optimist, so I am expecting future machines to be awesome’, and argues that ‘mathematics is infinite’. He asks AI labs to publish their results and treats Lean formalization as a reliable source of truth. Mentions the Navier–Stokes claim, the Erdős unit-distance disproof, the AGMAI recommendations and two open letters to OpenAI. Quotes were extracted by a summarising tool and should be re-checked against the page.