This Is a Rare Arena in Which People Think A.I. Is Helping. It’s Making Things Worse.

Indeed, Navier-Stokes was chosen for this million-dollar reward not because it’s the single hardest problem out there, but because it sits at such a crucial junction in the advancement of the field, and its full solution would offer so much for scholars to learn from. “Prematurely solving the problem by purely A.I.-powered methods — particularly without full transparency into the solution process,” Mr. Tao wrote, “can contaminate this process to the point where it actually becomes a net negative for the progress of mathematics as a whole.” It closes down possibilities rather than expanding them. That’s if the proof is even correct, which we still don’t know.