Claims

Tao has experienced increased productivity not uniformly but selectively: auxiliary tasks like literature searches, generating plots and figures, and formatting have been dramatically accelerated (5x faster), while the core mathematical work of solving difficult problems remains largely unaccelerated, and this is changing the nature of papers to include more supplementary material rather than solving harder problems.

AI tools solving Erdős problems have achieved roughly 50 successes out of approximately 1,100 problems, but the pace of discovery has plateaued as the low-hanging fruit has been exhausted, and recent attempts to have frontier AI models directly solve remaining problems one-shot have ceased producing new solutions despite sustained effort.

Current AI-assisted solutions to Erdős problems typically combine multiple tools and human feedback, with some problems solved through ongoing conversations between multiple humans and multiple AI systems working on different aspects rather than being solved autonomously by AI.