Terence Tao thinks AI is already very good at using existing, well-understood math techniques to solve problems. An important question is how many open problems in math could be solved this way, without developing any new ideas. An extreme case of a proof like this is the four-color theorem, which was proved by checking a thousand examples one-by-one. If there are lots of problems that are vulnerable to just mechanically applying existing techniques, AI could start to produce new math results…