alt Hacker NewsI think you are missing the sarcasm of the parent comment.
I am also fairly certain you have yet to actually watch Tao "demonstrate" his interaction with these technologies because if you had you would know in those demonstrations he formally verifies theorems that already have proofs, and even more importantly, that he had already formally verified twice before 'off camera'. Despite these two realities he still spends a lot of time correcting the LLMs or completely ignoring their suggestions while expressing a mostly polite appraisal of the tech's use and capability.
Of course the hype machine takes his politeness, which has more to do with his specific personality than anything to do with the tech, as universal endorsement for the tech and all of its externalities.
I called it when he started getting in bed with these malevolent tech companies that they were laundering their misdeeds through his reputation, and here we are.
Unless you claim Tao is outright lying, his statements say he's getting objective value out of AI tools. They are helping him accelerate actual math research.
Math seems like an ideal target for AI, as it provides a firm basis for identifying correctness (has something actually been proved.) I think the consequences of this are going to be enormous for mathematics, including the conversion of the entire historical math literature to formalized, checked proofs. Once that is done, once all that training data is available, the capabilities of math AIs are IMO likely to be extraordinary. Add to that the sort of Alpha Go-style self training as AI provers work on new problems.