We have to accept the possibility that all mathematics could fall to AI within some months, however unsettling that might seem. ie AI better than all humans at math. That's because math is not fundamentally "hard"... primates are just really bad at it. We did not evolve to be efficient at manipulating math symbols. We think of Terrence Tao as a legend, and he is on a human scale -- multiple standard deviations better at math than me. But to an AI, going from Will-level ability to Terrence-level math ability just means something like a 10x bigger context window, 10x bigger RL run, and 10x more test-time compute. Solving math in the past seemed to require some creative human spark we couldn't understand, but it's increasingly looking more like a mechanical search process over symbols. The aura and mystique mathematicians maintained for millennia can be reframed as them being extremely talented at this mechanical process. They can't compete with an alien creature trained exactly for this purpose, with compute specs far beyond Terrence. By 2027 we'll be cranking out mathematical beauties each morning like Alan Turing cranking out Enigma codes before breakfast. We'll still be bottlenecked by compute for a few years, so the big discoveries will come gradually -- those will take the most computation. Is this sad? Well like software engineering, those people who enjoy it for love of the craft or for their unique abilities compared to other humans will feel diminished. But those who love it for the end results will relish in a golden age of math. Humans will still be the ones mapping the mathematical landscape. The AIs will act like the helicopters taking us wherever we want to go. You gotta pay to ride in compute. You could map different human intellectual activities to whether it's "hard" in a computational sense. Human-level chess is easy, that's why computer solved it early. Moving limbs in physical space however is very hard. We're good at it bc we benefited from hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Software engineering is somewhere in the middle, because it's intertwined with a messy complex physical world filled with computationally hard emotions and group dynamics. So that's why weirdly we'll soon have AIs that dominate all humans on math, and yet we won't fully trust them as software engineers.