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Zeitgeist — a spike by Chris Gathercole
  1. Creators/
  2. Simon Willison — Creator of Datasette; co-creator of Django/

Quoting Terence Tao

Blog · Watch/Read · (gathered 2026-09-10)

  • Terence Tao warns that “good, fruitful open problems” are being “mined in a non-renewable fashion,” leading to their potential scarcity.
  • This scarcity is exacerbated by “AI-powered effort” that can “flatten” problems rapidly, even based on rumors of someone working on them, before original human research can reach its full potential.
  • The new incentives may lead to researchers no longer sharing promising directions, which would reverse “centuries of traditions of open science” and cause “serious long-term damage to the future of the field.”