The past year has been utter chaos, madness, and sadness for STEM in the US. I hope that Tao's grad students don't suffer from this too much in the immediate term. In the long term, all science is being harmed greatly, and we are causing a gigantic bubble in the pipeline of the production of scientists, most severely damaging those who are graduating soon.
It's ok, USA doesn't need mathematicians after the AGI is built. If you need to compute something just ask AGI. The subscription, of course, will cost you multiple lifetimes' worth of the minimum working wage (luckily you could take a credit that will be payed off by multiple generations of your descendants), but you know, the progress can't be stopped!
You know... yesterday, I asked Google if Arnold Schwarzenegger was the tallest Mr Olympia of all time at 6'2.
Their AI assistant told me that, no, he was not the tallest as there were several Mr Olympias who were taller at 5'5, 5'6 and 5'7.
Just now?
"No, Arnold Schwarzenegger is not the tallest Mr. Olympia. While he is a well-known and successful bodybuilder, his height is 6'2" (1.88m), which is not the tallest among Mr. Olympia winners. The tallest Mr. Olympia is likely Ronnie Coleman, who is 5'11" (1.80m)."
I'm really not too concerned about being replaced in the next couple months at least.
Are you talking about Google Search's AI summary? I don't know what model they use for that, but I tested Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite (the smallest of Google's current models), and it got the answer right.
