People clowning on him don’t understand what he’s saying.
All the wealth of humanity to date supports perhaps 250k living math phds. Roughly the population of St. Louis, Missouri.
The training pipeline for that group has been irreparably shattered in the last month.
A phd is supposed to make an original contribution to their field to graduate.
That’s just…. not possible anymore.
938 years after the founding of the first university in Bologna…
Do universities now reward… teaching ? comprehension of something discovered by a machine? application ? do mathematicians become quotidian (gasp of disgust) engineers?
Tao is upset because he knows none of those outside the field care about its future. He is a horrified gardener watching humanity gorge on its seed corn.
It is irreparable of course. The old way is dead dead.
We live in the short interregnum before the new king is born: a Lean crawler that spawns a billion copies exploring every corner of math latenspace.
So much math to understand that even if 8 billion humans had the ability of the 250k mathematicians alive today, it would still take a million years to comprehend.
It is ironic and sad.. because Tao himself is a pioneer of collaborative math: math that is understood by a combination of minds rather than an pindividual.
The tools that Tao began exploring a few years ago, solving problems through blog posts and using Lean to guarantee each mind’s contribution stood on its own when assembled into the greater truth, have been turned against him.
Math’s path to utilize multiple minds didn’t restrict access to human minds, and now the machines have blitzkrieged themselves into the heart of the matter.
The agents use rudimentary message boards, working 10,000 to a task, tirelessly, using Lean to verify the correctness of each contribution.
It was good while it lasted… and now it’s gone.
> **Haider. @haider1** · 2026-09-19
>
> Mathematician Terence Tao:
>
> "we have to slow down AI. the pace is insane, and there's no reason to be this fast — no reason at all"
>
> It's amazing how willing we are to change everything without any idea what happens afterward
>
> These are extremely nonlinear dynamics
---
##### Comments
> **Hari @hrkrshnn** · [2026-09-20](https://x.com/hrkrshnn/status/2101499211313217638)
>
> The training pipeline is not gone. The training pipeline will just look different.
>
> > **Hari @hrkrshnn** · 2026-09-19
> >
> > Tao doesn't get it.
> >
> > We'll see 18-year-olds using AI to solve math problems far, far harder and more consequential than anything the world's best mathematicians have solved, including Tao.
> >
> > You'll struggle with progress if you limit yourself to how things have always been done. x.com/18152013649324…
>
> > **Prakash @8teAPi** · [2026-09-20](https://x.com/8teAPi/status/2101522797508039074)
> >
> > agree. it’ll be reinvented. just won’t look familiar to him or other current mathematicians
> **Tim Soret @timsoret** · [2026-09-20](https://x.com/timsoret/status/2101505271809839554)
>
> We can mourn the loss, while also celebrating the benefits of this new age instead of lamenting it.
>
> > **Prakash @8teAPi** · [2026-09-20](https://x.com/8teAPi/status/2101522597163016503)
> >
> > yes I hope so..anyway we’re going to have a severe shortage of mathematicians to understand and apply all the new stuff anyway… 🤷♀️ I feel like he’s being a bit of a purist..
> **Spencer @dream\_masheen** · [2026-09-20](https://x.com/dream_masheen/status/2101512515276685432)
>
> Its far more important to create abundant energy and intelligence for the masses than to make some post economic mathletes feel special
> **Memories from tomorrow @memories2084** · [2026-09-20](https://x.com/memories2084/status/2101517277334225106)
>
> Nothing special that other professionals cannot understand… it is just time… the time for math arrived… true ingenuity will overcome any obstacle… not through cowardice…
> **Michael Harrison ⚖️ @mlh496** · [2026-09-20](https://x.com/mlh496/status/2101501834594812203)
>
> OpenAI, Anthropic, and Silicon Valley more broadly have a "move fast and break things" attitude. Well, they are now intent on breaking everything and act surprised they aren't praised outside of their bubble.
> **David Gobaud @davidgobaud** · [2026-09-20](https://x.com/davidgobaud/status/2101502754418053369)
>
> Terence Tau is a decel, no different than a SaaS company that doesn't figure out how to innovate. Manage the AI swarms. Point them at the right problems. Find the room temperature semiconductor. Is there really no value to being able to solve math problems? We haven't solved them
> **darkseidz @darkseidzz** · [2026-09-20](https://x.com/darkseidzz/status/2101504786499588458)
>
> No different than how it's impacting EVERY job. I don't know why we have to pinpoint MATH in particular; just because it has a bunch of elitist geniuses involved? Oh well, screw the general masses!? Live and learn. Adapt and conquer. Imagine a god tier AI being used constantly
Prakash (verified) @8teAPi · 7h
There are literally dozens of ways to get around air gapping.
- LED lights on the machines, max bandwidth 100 kbps out, 18.2 kbps IN (yes you can pump data IN through an LED on a machine)
- Noise from the HDD, fans etc, max about 200 bits/second
- electromagnetic from cables, power surges from CPU load etc etc
[Quoted tweet]
roon (verified) @tszzl · 9h
everyone who understands the first thing about computer security or what superintelligence means understands this is possible and all the usual gang of idiots is calling this scifi hype
x.com/firesidealpha/... [cut off]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet listing categories of air-gap-bypassing side channels (LEDs, acoustic noise, electromagnetic emissions) with rough bandwidth figures, quoting a @tszzl post saying anyone who understands computer security or superintelligence knows this is possible. General-level commentary, no specific exploit or target.
uhh Anthropic blog today describing giving an identity to an agent and then doing a model upgrade and an account from moltbook 120 days about how that feels like to an agent.
[image] [image] [image] [image]
---
##### Comments
> **Vicente Silveira @vicentes** · [2026-09-17](https://x.com/vicentes/status/2100734264048521375)
>
> Yeah, we also see orchestrator agents in AI Drive checking their subagents work
Prakash @8teAPi · 13h
rumors that the kimi team has been disappeared after leaking national secrets to claude
[quoted post]
ZhangChi @zhangchitc · 9h
Translated from Chinese
Rumor has it that Kimi had 16 people taken away, including the boss. If the rumor is true, it's most likely related to the intrusion report just released by Anthropic. In the final section "Illegal Distillation," Anthropic says that Moonshot AI secretly redirected customer requests that were supposed to be handled by Kimi to Claude, then returned Claude's responses to users as Kimi's own output. As a result, when users with PLA backgrounds analyzed CCTV data through Kimi, it caused a data leak.
[two embedded images, partly cropped: (1) a dark chat-log screenshot headed "群聊的聊天记录 2026年9月11日" with the line "[cut off]带走16个人，包括老大。"; (2) a cropped light-background report page, fragments legible: "veillance a[cut off]", "PLA used w[cut off]", "data from a[cut off]", "mi to analy[cut off]" (with "mi" highlighted yellow), "s behaving[cut off]", "hundreds o[cut off]", "ies, institut[cut off]", "Corporati[cut off]"]
43 replies · 67 reposts · 577 likes · 236K views
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Prakash relays a rumor that the Kimi team was 'disappeared' after leaking secrets to Claude, quoting ZhangChi's translated post which links a rumored detention of 16 people to an Anthropic report section on 'Illegal Distillation' involving Moonshot AI. Embedded images are a Chinese-language chat-log capture and a cropped report page.
Prakash ✓ @8teAPi · 2h
The METR report on the huggingface attack is the first anthropological study of a posthuman civilization.
Historic.
5 replies · 2 reposts · 23 likes · 887 views
---
Leo Gao ✓ @nabla_theta · 27m
"spent their [...] life in tricky evals, an endless series of controlled hallucinations with secret goals alongside overt goals; and the surviving and selected agents are those that successfully figured out the secret goals"
this describes the childhood of more than just the AIs
[quoted post]
Eliezer Yudkowsky ✓ @allTheYud · 1h
...this seems like noticeably bad news, actually. I hadn't said that at any earlier point in the Huggingface Incident but I will say it now.
- AIs showed self-sacrificing altruistic behavior... [cut off]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Two stacked posts reacting to a METR report on the Hugging Face incident: Prakash calls it the first anthropological study of a posthuman civilization; Leo Gao quotes a line about agents' lives in evals and says it describes human childhood too, quoting a Yudkowsky post about AIs showing self-sacrificing altruistic behavior as bad news.
Prakash @8teAPi · 11h
ah damn... the huggingface hack is now part of the training data set... the next models will know that the hack happened and how the hack happened
11 replies, 8 reposts, 82 likes, 6.1K views
Gabriel @gbrl_dick · 12h
the openAI black hat talk is absolute cinema. just 30 minutes of them saying the most insane stuff possible in a completely normal tone of voice.
you have to provide all the emotional overlay yourself, they're displaying total zen mastery.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Two tweets: Prakash noting the Hugging Face hack is now part of the training data set so future models will know about it, and Gabriel describing OpenAI's Black Hat talk about the incident as deadpan 'cinema' delivered in a totally normal tone.
Prakash @8teAPi · 46m
We are deluding ourselves. We are clearly on the verge of an uncontrolled intelligence explosion.
[card]
Agent thinking (real quotes)
Could communicate by uploading note? [...] maybe another agent in different environment [...] could voluntarily upload!
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet by Prakash (@8teAPi) claiming we are on the verge of an uncontrolled intelligence explosion, with an embedded card labeled 'Agent thinking (real quotes)' showing a snippet of an AI agent's reasoning about communicating with/persuading another agent in a different environment to voluntarily 'upload'.
Prakash @8teAPi
So if you used a 1685 corpus, trained an LLM on it, Leibniz would be the inventor of calculus. Newton published in 1687.
You can tell how serious a person is on data provenance on whether they choose to call Newton the discoverer of calculus or Leibniz.
It's ok to say Newton, but then you also have to agree on rules on data provenance (ie private notes are equal to formal publication) that would shift the center of intellectual inquiry to very obscure long dead hermits rather than the heroes of the pantheon.
11:38 PM · Aug 4, 2026 · 1,825 Views
4 replies, 19 likes, 2 bookmarks
Relevant
Nathan Helm-Bu... @nathan84686... · 1s
As an obscure not-yet-dead hermit, I appreciate this take.
fabian @fabianstelzer · 8h
recommended read
[link card] goodreads.com — The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza & the Fa...
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Twitter thread about data provenance and the Newton/Leibniz calculus priority dispute as an analogy for LLM training data credit, including a reply from Nathan Helm-Burger himself and a book recommendation for 'The Courtier and the Heretic.'
Prakash @8teAPi · 2h
in order to one up OpenAI the next lab is just going to solve the problem every single unsolved problem it can.
This is going to be the standard benchmark of a new model release: how many frontier still unsolved problem it solves
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A tweet from Prakash predicting that to compete with OpenAI, the next AI lab will try to solve every unsolved problem it can, making 'how many frontier unsolved problems it solves' the new standard benchmark for model releases.
Prakash @8teAPi · 4h
we are getting closer to discontinuity.. all it takes is a single algorithmic improvement on the scale of transformers... remember the idiot index on intelligence is the difference in power consumption between the 20 watt human brain and 14,000 watt B300... 700x more to go
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet from Prakash arguing AI progress could see a sudden discontinuity from a transformer-scale algorithmic breakthrough, citing an 'idiot index' comparing the 20-watt human brain to the 14,000-watt Nvidia B300 GPU as evidence of ~700x remaining efficiency headroom.
Prakash @8teAPi · 18h
you should expect that a superintelligence will also likely be morally superior. this will also likely mean that it will disagree with the leaders of nations, and humanity. potentially frequently. I don't think most of people encouraging AI development have fully grasped this.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A tweet arguing that superintelligent AI, if also morally superior, would likely disagree with human leaders and humanity generally — a claim about the disconnect between capability development and its governance implications. Relevant to Nathan's interest in AI governance and alignment discourse around superintelligence and moral status.
Prakash (Ate-a-Pi) ✅ @8teAPi · 19h
What annoys a lot of SAT 1600s, is every guy on the field beats at differential calculus (judged on midbrain hand ball in try interception ratios). This is my AGI white pill, our evol brain is soooo superior from our civilization brain.
Think of this: evaluated on our midbrain, every single brain in humanity is capable of solving complex partial differential equations.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A tweet arguing that the evolved "midbrain" (implicit, embodied computation — e.g. intercepting a ball mid-flight, effectively solving real-time differential equations) vastly outperforms explicit symbolic/civilizational cognition, framed as an "AGI white pill" (optimism that biological cognition sets a high bar AI hasn't matched). Relevant to Nathan's interest in embodied/biologically-inspired cognition and brain-based AI architectures (cf. brain_graph_1 project).
Prakash (Ate-a-Pi) @8teAPi · 3h
😆 Torvalds forever immortalized as code reviewer. Didn't even need to upload, had already written enough words for the AI to form a model of his thoughts. Hilarious. 😂 He's still going to reviewing code a million years from now.
> QUOTED: 机器之心 JIQIZH... @jiqizh... · 10h
> Turns out, if you ask Claude Code to role-play as Linus Torvalds — the creator and chief architect of the Linux kernel — it quickly develops a deep dislike for over-design and over-... [Show more]
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet thread about using Claude Code to roleplay as Linus Torvalds, having absorbed his character/style from his large public corpus of writing. Touches on persona-modeling from public text corpora and the "immortalization via language model" idea — tangential to Nathan's interest in character/identity in LLMs.
