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I do not think it's fair to say that @Poug didn't engage with your post.
If you say:
Then it is entirely fair to point out that the person you're using as an authority isn't using cutting-edge models that correctly capture "current capabilities". A few months is a very long time indeed when it comes to LLMs.
That is all I have to say, and I mean it. I'm not a professional mathematician, I can't attest to their peak capabilities as a primary source. The last time I was able to was when I got my younger cousin (a Masters student then, now postgrad in one of the more prestigious institutions here) to examine their capabilities in my presence.
"Is the one-point compactification of a Hausdorff space itself Hausdorff?" was a problem that I could actually understand, after he showed me the correct answer. The LLMs of the time were almost always wrong, 6 months later we got mixed results , but as early as a year ago, they get it right every time (when restricting ourselves to reasoning models, and you shouldn't use anything else for maths).
Now? He went from being skeptical about my claims of near-term AI parity in mathematics to what I can only describe as grim resignation.
(Now being six months ago, last time I saw him.)
In the interest of fairness, I think @Poug is probably incorrect when he says:
I'm not saying this with confidence, because that's just my recollection of what actual mathematicians say these days, including Tao himself. I just mention it to hopefully demonstrate that I'm trying very hard not to be a partisan about things.
You know what? I don't think he is engaging with the article. The article specifically mentions GPT 5.2 Pro seven times, two of which seem, to my read, to imply that that's what he's using. There is one moment where he just says "GPT 5 Pro". Perhaps he just happened to leave off the ".X" in this one spot. Perhaps I'm reading the other seven mentions of GPT 5.2 Pro wrong, and the dirty secret is that he's using 5.0. I suppose he doesn't say in big bold highlighted words, "I'm definitely using 5.2 and not 5.0," so sure, maybe one could say that it would be nice to have a clear statement.
...but to come in, with one sketchy textual inference, and just boldly declare that the only way anyone could possibly be reporting the experience they're reporting is obviously just because they're using a six month old model, and that obviously it's now totally fixed... it's the same SMH annoyance at someone being annoying and arrogant.
In fairness, perhaps he only read my comment and not the article (thus, not engaging with the article), and in fairness, I did blockquote the one spot where he seemed to have left off the ".X". But yeah, "I didn't RTFA, but I'm going to boldly declare that I've diagnosed exactly what's going on, using the same tired objection," is pretty cold comfort.
I checked, and this seems correct.
On that basis, I can't really disagree with your claim that @Poug didn't engage with the article. Being charitable, it's exceedingly common to see this happen in the wild, so he might have jumped to conclusions, but neither you, nor the author, seems to have made that kind of error and it's unfair to criticize you on those grounds.
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