Post #4164537

2026-07-28 10:49 UTC

As far as I can tell, this dialog between MacArthur prize-winning mathematician Terrence Tao and Chatgpt about "the Jacobian conjecture counterexample" is very impressive: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a5fdc7a-d6f8-83e8-bbea-8deb42cfed56 -- If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh 1/

Replies (2)

@pluralistic@mamot.fr 2026-07-28 10:49

Now, the clause "as far as I can tell" is doing a *lot* of work in that sentence. I am reasonably math literate, up to first-year calculus and a lifetime spent around my father (a mathematician). However, I have never heard of "the Jacobian conjecture," and while I know what all the words in the first paragraph of the relevant Wikipedia entry mean, I can't parse any of the sentences they form: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobian_conjecture 2/

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@otmar@infosec.exchange 2026-07-28 13:17

@pluralistic@mamot.fr I experienced the same effect with news articles: If you don't know much about a subject, then the journalist sounds reasonable and well informed, but if the article is about your core competency, then you notice where the journalist was sloppy. The depressing part is that the other articles are likely not better, but you just don't spot the mistakes.

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