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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   21869 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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The primary smell test is if a person promoting something is only using one brand. Does he only use chatgpt and never mention something else? Then that is fishy. Does he hop between models and providers than it is probably genuine excitement.

Speaking of covert LLM marketing I was recently invited to a meetup that specifically mentioned claude code vibe coding. There was no official sponsor yet they had rented a somewhat fancy venue and there were heaps of food. They were going to another city to do the same thing the day after. According to themselves they were just passionate about claude code.

Considering the boatload of money invested into these spaces it makes sense to market their products and traditional advertising probably gives less bang for the buck.

The primary smell test is if a person promoting something is only using one brand.

Typically, yes, but we're unironically talking 160+ IQ here. He certainly has negotiating power and some sense of dignity and taste. Anyway, yes, I freely concede my searches specifically for "OpenAI gives TT a bunch of money" were in vain. But they did turn up his new foundation, which comes remarkably close to confirming my original conspiracy theory right on the tin. He’s clearly salty about losing that government money (and rightly so), and is pivoting to asking for private sources.

I know little of the math / AI space but google is genuinely a player here in LLM math along with OpenAI

Has anyone ever seen Terrance speak of Gemini or use a Google LLM math product

Has anyone ever seen Terrance speak of Gemini or use a Google LLM math product

Yes we did, even recently:

Bogdan Georgiev, Javier Gómez-Serrano, Adam Zsolt Wagner, and I have uploaded to the arXiv our paper “Mathematical exploration and discovery at scale“. This is a longer report on the experiments we did in collaboration with Google Deepmind with their AlphaEvolve tool, which is in the process of being made available for broader use. Some of our experiments were already reported on in a previous white paper, but the current paper provides more details, as well as a link to a repository with various relevant data such as the prompts used and the evolution of the tool outputs.

or here you can see his comments on erdosproblems.com:

I asked ChatGPT and Gemini for literature review. ChatGPT DeepResearch basically just cited this web page and declared the problem open. Interestingly, Gemini DeepResearch reproduced essentially the same proof as yours (in the section under "Harmonic capacity"), but without directly citing the above argument. Also it seemed unaware that it had actually established the result, and instead devoted the rest of the report to explaining why the problem was difficult.

The entire OpenAI conspiracy theory is asinine. Tao isn't a shill, he's pretty restrained in his praise of AI, and his experiments have been going on for years now, gradually escalating from "neat paperwork automation" to "can assist in mundane bits of research" to recognition of autonomous discovery, in tune with AI gaining these capabilities. Eg here he talks about GPT-4:

Today was the first day that I could definitively say that #GPT4 has saved me a significant amount of tedious work. As part of my responsibilities as chair of the ICM Structure Committee, I needed to gather various statistics on the speakers at the previous ICM (for instance, how many speakers there were for each section, taking into account that some speakers were jointly assigned to multiple sections). The raw data (involving about 200 speakers) was not available to me in spreadsheet form, but instead in a number of tables in web pages and PDFs. In the past I would have resigned myself to the tedious task of first manually entering the data into a spreadsheet and then looking up various spreadsheet functions to work out how to calculate exactly what I needed; but both tasks were easily accomplished in a few minutes by GPT4, and the process was even somewhat enjoyable (with the only tedious aspect being the cut-and-paste between the raw data, GPT4, and the spreadsheet).

Am now looking forward to native integration of AI into the various software tools that I use, so that even the cut-and-paste step can be omitted. (Just being able to resolve >90% of LaTeX compilation issues automatically would be wonderful...)

This precedes Trump and discredits speculations about his recent financial motive.

He is also not locked into OpenAI ecosystem, as I've just demonstrated, and he's been on the board for AIMO, which is a Kaggle competition of tuning small open models for solving math problems. Progress Prize 1 and 2 were won using DeepSeek and Qwen models. I don't see how that advances OpenAI's agenda. Prize 3 seems to be won using gpt-oss, but it was unusually strong in its weight class in the relevant time window, so this is fair.

He has no reason to refuse participating in OpenAI-funded activities, he's got no ideological dog in this fight, so that proves nothing. Him, Gowers and other extremely successful mathematicians are obviously just excited about AI getting good, which is a very natural thing to be excited about. I struggle to understand the theory of mind that makes one see anything suspicious here. Probably if you're convinced that AI is a sham and all smart people ought to recognize it as well as you do… but that's such a fanatical viewpoint. More sane to just dismiss him as a washed-up crank.

I wouldn't read too much into this. Has anyone ever seen him use a theorem prover other than Lean? If anything, he's a lot more explicit about using the Lean "brand" than the OpenAI brand. Yet obviously he's not a sponsored shill for Big Lean (because there is no Big Lean).

What's clear is his organisation is pursuing private funding since the government axed his grants. I think it's likely OpenAI is among them given his appearance on their Twitter promo. Whether there's any exclusivity contract, who knows, I don't have a confident assessment.

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