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Joanna Ko
@0JoannaKo0                                     [Follow]

I have made a correct guess: AI companies would try to recognise which user is a Mathematician.

Still not knowing that you're indeed the fish seeing the bait, thinking there're benefits for you, only to finally be caught by the fishermen?

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Thomas Kahle
7d ago · @tomkalei@mathe.social

Talking to different mathematicians working with #ChatGPT in the last months, we noticed two things that were true for all of us:

1. it's basically impossible to run out of tokens. Every time we approached the limits we got free/automatic usage resets and could keep going.

2. We all got access to GPT-6 astra on the first day, when influencers and podcasters still reported of some staggered release and that they did not have it.

Given everything that happened last week, the picture looks very much like #OpenAI knowing exactly who is a mathematician and making sure they use their system as much as possible.

7:18 PM · Sep 22, 2026 · 143.6K Views

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Terence Tao
@tao@mathstodon.xyz

I doubt that anything resembling genuine "artificial general intelligence" is within reach of current #AI tools. However, I think a weaker, but still quite valuable, type of "artificial general cleverness" is becoming a reality in various ways.

By "general cleverness", I mean the ability to solve broad classes of complex problems via somewhat ad hoc means. These means may be stochastic or the result of brute force computation; they may be ungrounded or fallible; and they may be either uninterpretable, or traceable back to similar tricks found in an AI's training data. So they would not qualify as the result of any true "intelligence". And yet, they can have a non-trivial success rate at achieving an increasingly wide spectrum of tasks, particularly when coupled with stringent verification procedures to filter out incorrect or unpromising approaches, at scales beyond what individual humans could achieve.

This results in the somewhat unintuitive combination of a technology that can be very useful and impressive, while simultaneously being fundamentally unsatisfying and disappointing - somewhat akin to how one's awe at an amazingly clever magic trick can dissipate (or transform to technical respect) once one learns how the trick was performed.

But perhaps this can be resolved by the realization that while cleverness and intelligence are somewhat correlated traits for humans, they are much more decoupled for AI tools (which are often optimized for cleverness), and viewing the current generation of such tools primarily as a stochastic generator of sometimes clever - and often useful - thoughts and outputs may be a more productive perspective when trying to use them to solve difficult problems.

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