AI has driven the cost of idea generation down to nearly zero, similar to how the internet drove the cost of communication down to nearly zero, but this abundance of low-cost ideas does not automatically create scientific progress without corresponding verification, validation, and evaluation structures.

causalpending

Speaker

Terence Tao

Evidence Quote

“I think AI has driven the cost of idea generation down to almost zero... Now the bottleneck is different. We're now in a situation where suddenly people can generate thousands of theories for a given scientific problem. Now we have to verify them, evaluate them.”

Source

Terence Tao – How the world’s top mathematician uses AI— Dwarkesh Patel
Created: 8/12/2026, 6:05:48 PM

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