Egoless Mathematics in the AI Era
terrytao.wordpress.comHuman pursuits cannot be separated from the humans who pursuit it. In the pursuit of knowledge, what ultimately drives people is what they themselves can understand, and the meaning these understanding provides, both based on their own experience and people whose opinions they value. Humans do not pursuit Platonic knowledge for their own sake, and those who claim to do it, often are satisfying their egos in a different way.
> Human pursuits cannot be separated from the humans who pursuit it.
But it's pretty clear you can chuck "human pursuits" in the garbage, in favor of what really matters: intensification of the market system and wealth accumulation for its own sake.
Your technology leader thinks: Humanity? People? Who the fuck cares about that BS? Fuck 'em (or "I'll fuck 'em and make them like it"). I've got stuff to build and money to make.
> In the pursuit of knowledge, what ultimately drives people is what they themselves can understand, and the meaning these understanding provides, both based on their own experience and people whose opinions they value.
It's pretty clear the message we're getting is "what [people] themselves can understand, and the meaning these understanding provides" doesn't matter, and if you care about that you're an sentimental piece of garbage.
The thing though, is that ego is still driving anyone that is making more money than they need to survive. They just do not care about anything that isn't purely transactional, nothing is sacred, nothing is to be done for its own sake. It is capitalism demonstrating a kind of mechanical self-accelerating quality that is increasingly untethered from the human substrate it subsists on.
As Marx wrote: "Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."
And of course, that relationship is class war between the vast majority of the population and the owners of the productive forces.
Following Terry Tao's blog he seems to be engaging in forced self-directed cognitive behaviorial therapy, he is trying to come to terms with loss while developing a new framework for himself and other as to where the value is. It is cool to see. It is better to engage than to be in denial and just fall into reactionary behavior.
Like many other posts on Tao’s blog, this is a post by guest authors, not by Tao himself.
yeah, people keep confusing his guest posts as things he said . I think he should just make a second blog only for guest posts. it would lessen the confusion.
He wants to give those posts exposure by posting them on his blog, so a second blog would counteract that. What he should do is simply put “Guest post: ” in front of each title.
The very first line reads "This is a guest post by Karthik C. S., Amit Sahai, and Jie Xue." That seems sufficient.
What would also lessen the confusion would be people putting in the effort to read a little further than the headline before coming up with a hot take.
People have disclaimer blindness. it's similar to sidebar or banner blindness. it is also possible it does not show up well on mobile devices. how many people read fine print or terms of service?
That's a charitable view point.
This is a guest post. Tao has been quite consistent in his stance.
People are not good at reading disclaimers. the eyes immediately go to to the title and the body of text.
This is entirely ahistorical and a typical remote psychoanalysis.
Tao has been pushing for AI and Lean for a long time and didn't like the way OpenAI handled the Oct. 6th release. He has now been pushing for AI owned by universities.
That is the public way he navigates the situation, who knows what his real game is.
He is one of the people that brought about this situation.
In any case: "reactionary"? Are we using Soviet language to single out perceived dissidents?
> This is entirely ahistorical and a typical remote psychoanalysis.
I've been reading the posts on his blog (and I should be clear, many posts are guest posts, so it is a collective cognitive behavior therapy session):
Also did you notice he never posted more than 10 posts per month until September? These are definitely posts trying to come to terms with the new reality and searching for value in a field where humans are not pre-eminent:
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/26/a-value-based-appr...
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/19/why-do-we-need-hum...
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/12/after-math/
I also see this post like this one that claims that mathematics will be needed as interpreters of complex AI generated proofs - I see this post as a form of denial in that this is just a current limitation of AI, and will likely be fixed soon:
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/18/if-math-is-more-th...
> In any case: "reactionary"? Are we using Soviet language to single out perceived dissidents?
When new technology is introduced that is disruptive a lot of people fall into "reactionary" stances.
The first definition of reactionary that I found was this:
"A reactionary is a person or policy that opposes political, social, or economic change and seeks to reverse progress to restore an earlier, idealized state of society."
I think that fits with my usage.
> That is the public way he navigates the situation, who knows what his real game is.
What his "game" is? I've been following Tao for years... I can't think of someone I'd be less likely to accuse of having some nefarious "game".
> He is one of the people that brought about this situation.
A baseless accusation. Tao has no power over the progress happening at the frontier labs.
What situation? The development of an algorithm that can prove mathematical theorems?
The systems need Lean, training material, benchmarks, data labeling, experts, publicity and more. OpenAI gave out free researcher accounts to collect more training material.
All of which was provided and encouraged by a small group like Tao, Gowers, Tsimerman, Avigad, Schmitt etc. It isn't just "an algorithm".
> He is one of the people that brought about this situation.
Yeah, sure... What the hell are you talking about? Do you think that if not Tao we would not have the Oct. 6th release? That's totally insane.
Do you think Tao wrote this blog post?
it's a bit funny: all that psychological jargon and shaky speculation about his mental state, but you missed that Tao didn't write the post.
similar to banner blindness or sidebar blindness, people have disclaimer blindness.
Did you even read it? Wild the fanboyism for AI has rotted out the brains of so many people. It's a tool, it's useful, people will adapt.
The reaction was from the strip mining of pending human discovery, mathematicians were already using LLMs from frontier labs who then published suspiciously similar solutions or found connections that were just waiting to be discovered.
If you read the whole post you would see the disclaimer that it was written with the help of AI.
So folks are using AI to help them cope about AI. LLMs "stole" pending results is just another cope. Im sure quasi riemann was about to be proved if it wasnt for those pesky AI models. Jeez.
The lens to use is the Venn diagram of:
1. What you like doing
2. What you are good at doing
3. What people will pay you to do
I think the "egoless" path is taking a 50,000-foot view of mathematics that ignores the above lens. Sure, mathematics will survive and even prosper with AI, but what about the mathematicians?
In time, the profession of mathematics will evolve so a new task is at the center of the diagram--maybe it will be explaining math results to humans or teaching math to future mathematicians. I don't know. But it's easy to see that not everyone is going to be happy with the transition, and many will be left behind.
For software engineering, it depends on what your center is. If you like "writing code", then #3 is under attack. But for those whose goal is, "make something work", all three are still viable and even better than before (or at least faster).
That's why we see so much disagreement on HN about whether AI is good or bad for software engineering.
I'm sure lots of other people have made this observation before.
I got the same advice from my grandfather when I was considering fields of study prior to university. Interestingly, the western version of this advice seems to have dropped the "what the world NEEDS" [0] part of this Venn diagram. This comes from the Japanese concept of Ikigai, which includes the three items above and what would benefit others/fulfills some larger mission.
Fair point.
But I've seldom been in a situation where multiple jobs fit the three circles equally and I need to use a fourth circle ("What the world needs") to decide.
I also think a core tenet of Western culture is that the power to choose your own path (individualism) comes with the responsibility to benefit others (service). E.g., selling cigarettes to kids doesn't fit in the center of the three circles because one shouldn't enjoy that, even if one is good at it and can get paid for it.
Instead of asking, "What does society want me to do," we ask, "How can I make the world better."
Sure, mathematics will survive and even prosper with AI, but what about the mathematicians
It's not a given that mathematics will survive without mathematicians. It's not even likely. The proofs OpenAI threw over the wall are unpublishable garbage, top to bottom. A big reason mathematicians are so upset is that they feel like they've been drafted into the role of unpaid editor for OpenAI.
Make no mistake about it, the mathematical profession is under attack. The biggest incentive for becoming a mathematician (as opposed to a hired gun quant) is the challenge of solving the proofs. Take that away and the most talented problem solvers go with it.
In time, the profession of mathematics will evolve so a new task is at the center of the diagram--maybe it will be explaining math results to humans or teaching math to future mathematicians.
That is the centre of mathematics. It's what schools pay mathematicians to do. All the research stuff, the problem solving, the "thrill of the hunt" for elusive proofs, and the prestige of being the first? That's the carrot the schools dangle in front of mathematicians' noses to get them to work. Without that, you don't get exceptional mathematicians teaching classes and supervising grad students (and attracting the world's top students to your school); you get adjuncts and only adjuncts.
If ego wasn't a factor, how come the companies that dump these results in the math community attach so much value to being the first to solve particular problems?
This essay seems to say, "people don't matter; all that matters is truth." And that all the policy decisions should follow from that assumed value.
Yikes. I fear for what mathematics will become if that becomes the majority viewpoint.
The future of mathematics is outlined in this amusing quasi-satire (satire tends to become reality in Silicon Valley):
https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/31/lean-me-softly-a-sat...
That is literally what some tenured people are pushing for.
Tbh, this was so heavy handed/poorly written that I couldn't get past the first six paragraphs or so. If this is supposed to be good satire, it's coming off more as "Epic Movie" than "Brazil"
That was a great read.
Thanks for sharing. It is well written.
loved reading this
I think that if you had hiring policies that allowed people not to worry about whether they got credit for an achievement, you'd have people significantly more OK with transitioning to an "egoless" approach.
Don't worry, it's far from the majority viewpoint, it's largely an 'AI' industry viewpoint that's being screamed at peak volume to drown out the ongoing economic reality that this period of insane overinvestment is drawing to a close. Who knows what the future holds for this tech, but I suspect in a year or two with the money no longer blinding everyone, we'll have much more realistic conversations.
For now unfortunately we're doomed to an endless retread of "AI boosters vs AI haters" with very little humility and thought on either side.
This is one of the best posts I've seen on this topic in a while.
I finished a math PhD before I decided to get out of academia and into startups. Since then, the older I get the more of a Platonist I become, especially now that I've taught my daughters a bunch of math (I'm their homeschool math+science teacher). And the more of a Platonist I become, the less I care about who made a particular discovery. Who cares?! It seems obvious (and quite beautiful) to me now that the same discoveries must be getting repeated again and again across the universe by alien mathematicians, and eventually by their AIs.
yeah but it's fun to discover things with your own brain
You can still discover it for yourself even if AI discovered it first (or some other human, or an alien on another planet). It is fun to figure out how something works, in and of itself
Absolutely. One of the best pieces of advice my PhD advisor gave me was that to really understand a particular result I would usually have to redo the proof of it myself (even after reading someone else's proof).
that's not nearly as exciting as uncovering something new first yourself, but I agree to some extent. Also that's not something you'll get paid for, it's basically coursework at that point.
sure, and what you said is also not mutually exclusive to what OP said
So why should your children bother to learn math? Just have them prompt their AIs.
When I was a kid we didn't need to learn multiplication tables or how to add/subtract large numbers or long division. By high school a pocket calculator could also do any algebra we were learning no sweat. We were still taught. But those graphing calculators that could do all of the work for us sure did come in handy to teach us a bunch of stuff faster/more clearly than was possible with the previous generation.
Whether or not 99% of people actually use those skills in life for anything other than to pat themselves on the back that they're "good at math" is another story. People are often proud if they can calculate a 20% tip in their head these days.
I wish more people read Plato's work, or did shrooms. Both probably works.
Problem is learning math as a hobby doesn't put food on the table.
What did you mean to say by saying that in response to my comment? I am not sure I followed you
Sounded like you were saying you wish people were more platonic and interested in discovery for the sake of discovery, and not for the sake of personal accomplishment. The problem is, when someone else makes a discovery, there's no way for me to get paid for it. So the more "platonic" I become, the more I surrender myself to homelessness.
Or did I misunderstand?
Ah I see where you’re coming from. I was mostly saying that Plato’s work benefits life in general, not to imply go read Plato to cope with your specific situation.
I guess I replied to the parent OP to break into a tangent about Plato solely.
There is balance between ego and egoless. They are yin and yang. Ego helps drive agentic behavior and mathematicians have to pay their bills too. Meanwhile, ego many a time blinds one from whats out there, and getting into the "flow" requires one to set it aside.
That’s a great paper, I was tripping on these same thoughts last night. The thing that rang true was kind of getting back to these roots, the Philo-Sophia as love of knowledge, and a community that loves knowledge. It doesn’t matter if one guy has a 70 IQ and loves fables, or another is 170 and loves something I can’t comprehend, they are one family. I was as also thinking about old school ideas of wisdom vs plain intelligence. I had this powerful experience during Covid of finding music someone had made from sequencing the DNA of the virus, sitting there sick listening to the virus, singing the song of its people. It struck me that intelligence isn’t something we have, it’s an attribute of nature that can flow through us, something self standing out there. To be able to listen and receive it from nature is the root of learning, while to believe that you have intelligence, not nature, is the root of stupidity. The awareness was something different from anything I had known, I was never smart, I was floating in an ocean of intelligence blocking myself off from receiving by believing I was smart. Whoops! It felt like true wisdom to realize I was stupid and let it flow through me. That was 2020, the seeds of modern AI were planted but I hadn’t seen them, now everybody is grappling with intelligence being “out there” as part of physical nature not even people. The love of Sophia never dies, but we’re being reminded that it’s a receptive relationship we as individuals have with knowledge and humility is the prerequisite, with the humility, the lessons can come from birds or rocks or trees, but we have to realize they matter and we do.
Mathematicians are approaching the recent developments either from some kind of corporatism or selfishness. I think they should take a step back and consider the societal value of their work, ultimately this is the deciding factor.
A lot of top people are going to be having an ego crisis I fear. We're all just human idiots looking to enjoy time with each other while we can. Fortunately, that is enough for a good life.
Why some of us work more and earn less starts to be a little harder to answer though...
I know it's against the rules to be a curmudgeon, but this just reads like a lullaby for people preparing to drink the SF kool-aid. The opportunity cost of becoming an expert will remain, but the reward of pushing the frontier is mostly gone. Now, if you want to save universities as institutions(*), you'll have to offer people some other positive vision. "You won't be able to make a difference" is not one of them. After all, you can get understanding for the joy of understanding (doesn't seem very egoless to me btw) outside of academia as well.
I'm much more sympathetic to the views of this anonymous postdoc here: https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/22/the-rules-cannot-cha... (unfortunately also in LLM-"polished" English). Quote: "A field that fails to attract and support its next generation cannot preserve itself through inspiring statements alone."
(*If you extrapolate a little, for now you can also substitute with 'math departments' there.)
This reminds me of a 55 year old idea from software engineering, "egoless programming".
Maybe mathematics needs to end the "credit" for whoever discovered something first.
If you vomited out a bunch of AI slop that nobody read, history shouldn't care.
The first person to package it up for human consumption and get everyone to agree it is correct should get all the credit now. If you can't get up in front of a seminar and have pretty much everyone walk out understanding what you meant... then too bad, history forgets who you were...
Watching Star Trek TNG as a kid, I vividly recall hearing Geordi or Data often say things like "run a level 3 diagnostic on the Worf Barrels" or whatever to the computer and wonder what the heck that would even be. I wondered where are all ship devops and programmers were hidden. Though I recall the one accurate part was Barclay in the Holodeck spending most of the time setting up his IDE.
Now I think I kind of have an answer. Maybe the level of diagnostic refers to the LLM effort level. Great. So then what are all the people on the Enterprise actually doing? My guess is they're all just being people and doing people stuff like exploring the galaxy and smugfacing the Romulans. It would be easier to just create a race of Datas to do it safer. The Datas could probably be Bluetoothed to the Ship's Computer for even more optimization.
I think some of the struggle is that as we summit each subsequent hill of challenge, the sunset (or is it a sunrise?) is becoming inescapably bright. We're faced with that big ol' "what's the point of all this?" question. What's the point of studying math? What's the point of exploring the galaxy? What's the point of standing under a stack of blue barrels?
I'm not a math guy. I dunno if a Fields medal comes with free Taco Bell for life or something else that would truly move me. But I love that I get to read books and learn cool things and feel that spark of joy when my understanding expands, even if the ending is right there with nothing stopping me from skipping to it.
> Watching Star Trek TNG as a kid, I vividly recall hearing Geordi or Data often say things like "run a level 3 diagnostic on the Worf Barrels" or whatever to the computer and wonder what the heck that would even be....
> Now I think I kind of have an answer. Maybe the level of diagnostic refers to the LLM effort level....
The real answer is that it was gibberish. IIRC, the writers would insert "[tech]" in the scripts, to be later fleshed out into technobabble.
What you say is ret-con at best. A more realistic contemporary interpretation of the "level 3 diagnostic" technobabble, would have been a particular pre-programmed diagnostic procedure (like "run the POST memory checks" on a PC).
From the outside seeing academics wash over concerns and debates about this it's helped me sort of get more comfortable with around my own questions about what I want from math and computers. What I've come to realize it's that I just want tools that do a job and enjoy learning them. I also get gratification of being creative with them. I'm not in it for expanding human knowledge or seeing the beauty in the universe or the pleasure of understanding something difficult.
AI inflicted the 4th narcisstic wound on humanity, the other three being Copernican, Darwinian and Freudian, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_injury for the background.
I think it's the third, because ironically the Freudian one seems to be invented by Freud out of a narcissistic desire to compare the impact of his work to Copernicus and Darwin.
Don't underestimate the impact Freud had.. Even though he is now often seen as a pseudo-scientic Quacksalber, he opened up a world with psychoanalysis. He was an immense popularizer of clinical psychology, the subconscious mind (!) and mental illnesses. He really showed that we humans are driven be desires more than anything else.
The lumping is problematic because it's putting him on a level with the others who (a) discovered; things that were (b) true. The fact that he popularized concepts that had been thoroughly investigated by others (e.g. Nietzsche) with accounts were leaps and bounds ahead of the evidence does not put him at the same tier of the pantheon as those others.
Eat more Freud, it makes you Jung.
Feel like it's hard to accept egoless style, as in academia there is little but the glory to be had in the pursuits. In the publish/perish era, money is already stretched thin in the average research budget.
I want to believe, but research has been tightrope walking with no safety net for awhile.
So, either researchers get SF salaries? or? (first one is not gonna happen)
Human academia needs to clean up its ego fixation, jesus fucking christ
It'd be pathetic if the silicon does better science than us and our crabbucket mentality -- highly likely in my view...
I’ve been thinking the same thing. How many mathematicians are actually just upset _they_ didn’t get to find some result. Or why prior work wasn’t properly cited, etc. It’s pure ego from top to bottom. I’m not saying this is wrong, whatever I do not care it’s not my field, but man the cut is going to be so deep when the whole universe has you at the center of it. I imagine it must be like force feeding a narcissistic prick 10g of shrooms and watching the word “I” become unintelligible.
It's interesting to see Platonism and virtue ethics combined in such a way to try to make sense of what is going on.
This egoless attitude and the call for a broad humility may find itself in conflict with a supremacist humanism. There are people who will only ever want things that originated from a human. I see this attitude mostly in creative fields like art, music, film and games.
I therefore think we need to have different attitudes towards AI adoption depending on the field. In the case of math, some seem to want to excise any human emotion or physical need and create a pure refined space to explore propositional Truth. But extending this to all human activities doesn't seem to follow.
I guess what I'm saying is, there is probably still a place for human ego, even if that place is not math.
I realize this isn't the end of mathematics or whatever, but it's still making me feel better about not having become a theoretical physicist like I wanted to (and seemed to be able to) when I was twenty. I'm now rationalizing a couple of unfortunate accidents and stupid mistakes as divine providence. Strange world we live in.
lol why does he have so many guest posts. part of the problem is people accidently ignoring the guest post disclaimer and misattributing the words to him. mathematicians are now doing more writing about math than math itself. if Ai destroys math jobs, then I guess they can fall back as writers. they are still better than the general population at that, too.
Judging by the writing here I would not be so sure of that.
Cue the confusion when Tao writes a post on his own blog and everybody will be wondering where the attribution is...
Remember the science mines in Egan's Diaspora? It's like that
I call bullshit for the same reason the first reply to the post gives. It's great to reflect on your self-worth and where that worth comes from (regardless of AI). In a way, this post criticizes capitalism for reducing one's worth to productive output. But then you are asked to become pure and egoless, to detach yourself from your work, while others full on ego profit immensely and strip away your rights. How convenient, right? This post is a gross normalizing of the dehumanization of work. Did Terrence even review this shit before publishing?
Crazy to see AI slop being posted on tao's blog.
Isn't it strange how the AI disclaimer is at the end of the writing instead of the start. Almost as if they are trying to hide it.
You must have some variant of banner blindness, because another mention of AI use is also at the start of the text.
The top AI usage is for converting into a different format (really like pdf2html or something), which is unrelated to AI slop and done by Tao himself and not the guest authors.
I see what you mean. Agreed indeed!
It is disappointing, but I think he gets a lot of contributors who are not that proficient at English
Omg such AI written slop. I read it three times and am none the wiser what his point is.
Some are better at reading comprehension than others.
the only appropriate response to AI slop is to feed it into AI to summarize. It's written for AI
'Egoless' can mean a lot of different things. Here it seems to mean 'everything belongs to the corporations.'
Mathematical ideas are not IP.
From the jump the premise seems reasonable. Having a too much of an ego is a source of all sorts of self-imposed problems or create roadblocks in interacting with others. But this literally brings up saintlike detachment as "not far from the truth" in describing the extent they're advocating for.
I'm thinking maths are kinda fucked rn.
It's awful how people with anti-AI psychosis now treat Tao. Just read comments here, people making some completely out of blue pseudo-psychologic diagnoses.
> we gratefully acknowledge the assistance of GPT Astra 6.0 and GPT 6.1 Sol in drafting this post.
Holy. This is the closest thing I've seen one of these AI guys get to accepting it as the machine god. "Dear god, we gratefully accept this divine gift of sustenance that we are about to consume."
That might be a good time to consider what the fuck is going on.
Listen, no one cares about how much you hate AI. You can scream impotently into the void all you want, but AI is not going away. People will be using AI to translate their non-English thoughts into English until you are dead, and long after. You can ridicule, insult, demean, and attack anyone who uses AI, and in the end, it is you who are the bully, it is you who are wrong, it is you who is merely demonstrating how small and insecure you are. I am so tired of people like you spewing hate on the internet because you cannot cope with a new technology that threatens your precious ego. Just log off, because you are not going to win by screeching on the internet every time you see AI mentioned or used by someone. For every single one of you, there are 20 people who aren't driven into wailing and teeth-gnashing. Grow up, or go away. Next time try to comment on something that is actually relevant to the topic being discussed, instead of being a ridiculous crybaby.
No one has any reason to be civil in reaction to people who write things like this. You and your ilk are just judgmental bullies and you do not deserve any respect anymore, because you do not treat anyone with respect yourself.