Simon Willison September 9, 2026 1 min signal 2026-09-09

Quoting Terence Tao on AI and open problems

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9th September 2026

I wrote recently about how the collection of good, fruitful open problems is now being mined in a non-renewable fashion, leading to the potential scenario of these problems becoming scarce. [...]

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. The incentives may now be pointing in the direction of no longer sharing any promising research directions with the broader community, which would reverse centuries of traditions of open science and do serious long-term damage to the future of the field.

— Terence Tao

Posted 9th September 2026 at 12:20 am

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