Rikab Gambhir (guest post on Terence Tao’s blog): ‘Why are we even doing all this?’

Guest post by Rikab Gambhir, a theoretical particle physicist, on Terence Tao’s blog What’s new (Oct 15, 2026). It is written in an ironic voice that mocks the view that research exists to add unread “factoids” to a repository. It uses Borges’s “Library of Babel” as the image: AI tools can now “probabilistically generate things that look correct”, which shifts the work of checking and understanding onto the community. It cites OpenAI’s early-October release of 722 mathematics documents, a physics output of about 2,500 write-ups, and “misleading Lean certificates” (linking arXiv 2610.08144, Bastounis–Circelli–Hansen). It ends: “Remember why you chose to go into science and math in the first place!”

Short quotes:

• “they’ve found a way to probabilistically generate things that look correct”
• “a complete repo of potentially true facts in a Library of Babel that nobody will bother reading.”

Read via an automated summary of the page; quotes should be re-checked against the original.