On the YouTube page:
Terence Tao has read more mathematics than almost anyone alive, and he uses AI tools every day. So when one of the most cited mathematicians on Earth says these systems still can't ask a genuinely new question, it's worth understanding exactly where he draws the line — because it isn't where the headlines put it.
Watch the full conversation: Terence Tao: Nobody Understands Why AI Actually Works
If AI has absorbed every textbook ever written, why can't it discover anything new? Tao, a Fields Medal winner and professor at UCLA, separates what these systems do brilliantly from what they can't do at all, and the boundary turns out to be sharper and stranger than most people assume.
We cover why reproducing a famous proof is less impressive than it sounds, what a neural network found hidden inside a million knots that humans had missed, why we still can't predict which tasks AI will actually be good at, the "Keating Test" — the benchmark that would actually demonstrate machine thought — and where exhaustive recall ends and real conceptual origination begins.
AI can pass every exam. It just can't ask a question nobody has asked before — yet.
Chapters:
00:00 The question AI can't ask
00:48 Read every textbook, discover nothing
01:42 Why a reproduced proof proves less
02:39 A million knots, one hidden pattern
03:54 The competence we still can't predict
05:11 The Keating Test for machine thought
06:18 Where recall ends and discovery begins📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt
"Keating Test" How good will A.I. be at high energy self promotion and self referencing? Difficult to get past the sell and into the substance with the Prof. as just how hard is huffing and puffing is difficult to escape.
ReplyDeleteSean Carroll Creates the Keating Test
ReplyDeletehttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pp6n4kO02a8
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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As with fat tails Llms are frequency machines that fail to extrapolate outside the sample set. What they know is the VISIBLE. Almost as bad as economists, almost worse than psychologists.
Oded Rechavi
@OdedRechavi
Most experiments fail, and negative results rarely get published. This means LLMs are unaware of the outcomes of most experiments.
Last edited2:18 AM · Jun 5, 2026