Terence Tao Explains The Math Behind AI

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.

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.

Concept to Movie in Minutes

UTOPAI is a new AI studio that works with you to develop and flesh out an idea before rendering complete scenes up to 3 minutes long. It’s the latest advance in GenAI that allows Filmmaker to turn their ideas into reality.

Why an AI ‘Death Spiral’ Threatens the Internet

For decades, publishers depended on search engines to send readers to their websites, where advertising helped fund the creation of online content. But the rise of AI-powered search is changing that model. Researchers like Rand Fishkin say “zero-click” searches are increasingly keeping users inside platforms rather than sending them to publishers, while Rutgers professor Caitlin Petre warns that falling traffic could threaten the long-term economics of journalism and content creation. Yet some large publishers are adapting. People Inc. CEO Neil Vogel says his company has offset declining search traffic through brand diversification, social media distribution, licensing agreements, and paid partnerships with AI companies. The broader question is whether the internet can continue producing the content AI depends on if fewer creators are paid for their work.

I Make Videos for $0 with AI — HyperFrames + Claude (Full Guide)

In this guide I break down HyperFrames: a free, open-source library from the team at HeyGen that turns a single HTML file into a real video. Pair it with Claude Code and you just describe the video you want — the agent plans it, generates the media, and renders it out. No editor, no timeline grind, no subscription.

I show you the two exact ways I use it, the honest catch (spoiler: the framework is free, the AI media costs cents), and where it shines vs. where it doesn’t.

Octo Is Seedance’s Prompt Killer

Dreamina just rolled out Octo, a new canvas/agent workflow that tries to turn Seedance 2.0 into something closer to a scene builder than a prompt box.

So I tested it with character sheets, storyboards, a cyberpunk fight sequence, and a timeline extension to see whether Octo actually makes AI video workflows easier, or just moves the chaos into a new interface.

We’re also looking at NVIDIA Cosmos-3, Black Forest Labs showing Flux to Martin Scorsese, Bernini as an open-source “Google Omni for video” style model, and TripoSplat for turning 2D images into controllable 3D-ish spaces.

Basically: AI video is getting less like “write one prompt, get one clip” and more like planning, editing, world-building, and trying to keep the machine pointed in the right direction.