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given how the navier stokes took $25 million , 10k agents, and a private model to prove the easier version of the problem (which some argue is not the true problem) , for an individual to prove the Riemann hypothesis for only $30k is an optimistic forecast, if anything
The models really hit prime time in mid 2026. The disproof of the Jacobian Conjecture really is what set things in motion, in July 2026. Before then it was assumed mathematicians would always have an edge.
AI images and writing are still kinda bad, but the attention has moved to coding and math, where it really shines. It took 4 years for AI to find its true purpose as a computational tool rather than a creative one.
Spending $30K tokens over 2 years (2029-2030) is the Terence Tao-approved 'mathematician with AI grad student who does the work' kind of thing. He means some mathematician does the principal work, works at human speeds and the AI largely executes directions. It's the status quo but with slightly less tedium for the mathematician.
It's not '2026 agent swarm starts and finishes in a few days.' That's a different kind of scenario, where the AI agents can do all the work and it's principally a matter of the AI's speed, the AI's price, the AI's intelligence. There was some discourse about whether the agent swarm used someone's approach, then some counter-discourse saying that was unlikely, the approach was materially different... Anyway it's not taking years and Terence Tao is upset.
Even in creative works, AI gets better and better. With Opus 5.5 release we had those music videos pop up across AI twitter, they weren't bad. Some human curation of course, some human direction. But a clear capabilities improvement.
I think its writing is fine, with good prompting. I can easily spend a couple of hours building out a story and a setting with it. I have to come up with the premise and that's a bit creatively taxing. But I'm confident that its creative abilities will keep improving every three months like it has been doing. Humans are not going to outwrite entities trained on the whole corpus of writing forever.
Nah it's still terrible at writing essays, imho. It inserts too much hedging language and it often comes off as oddly formal. People complain about AI writing because it has these tells, unless your audience are youtube, Instagram, or tiktok, I suppose . But where it can be useful is if you're trying to write a sentence, but you cannot get the turn of phrase quite right, so you can feed it to Ai and it generates many suggestions and you pick the best sounding one.
Yeah, there is an issue with information density and it not getting right to the heart of the matter.
But also - people don't notice. Not the majority of people: https://x.com/SamaHoole/status/2113126506457186451/photo/1
I see it all the time online:
yeah most people may not notice AI, but all it takes are a few people to make a stink about it and it costs you invaluable credibility, then others see it , too "cannot be unseen effect". Someone taking a screenshot of a pangram score overshadows any good will the author had.
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