Much of the excitement around the news has stemmed from the adjudicator of these AI-written proofs: Terence Tao, a professor at UCLA who is widely considered to be the world’s greatest living mathematician. His stamp of approval seemingly legitimizes the greatest promise of generative AI—to push the frontier of human knowledge and civilization. When I called Tao earlier this month to get his take on what AI can offer mathematics, he was more tempered. The AI-generated Erdős solutions are impressive, he told me, but not overwhelmingly so: The bots have functionally landed some “cheap wins,” Tao said.