Terence Tao has been exploring the intersection between maths and AI. Credit: David Esquivel/UCLA Is mathematics being taken over by generative artificial intelligence? A spate of media reports has suggested that the field is being fundamentally changed by the technology. Many maths researchers say that AI’s actual capabilities are often hyped up, and that it’s not yet time to announce the death of their profession. Still, by many accounts, in the past year, AI has jumped from solving secondary-school-level problems to actually being useful in research mathematicians’ daily work. Terence Tao, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been at the forefront of experimentation with large language models, including OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini. In particular, he has contributed to a project to test the skills of AI systems on a collection of more than 1,000 problems, ranging from major conjectures to obscure factoids.…