Tao was absent from the formal verification circles until GenAI orgs saw formal verification as a way to legitimize their obscene existence, and since has been making the rounds on the podcast bro circuit pumping up these GenAI orgs.

His university is deeply entrenched with the GenAI org that released this result both with having alumni on staff, integrating their tools into the school's processes and curriculum, and paying for lots of grants. (I understand Tao is absent from this specific announcement, perhaps because it found its solution without utilizing formal verification tooling)

Is it unreasonable to assume he's feeling pressure to do so?

Gowers similarly appeared largely uninterested in this current crop of GenAI until some months ago when he announced a 9M$ fund to develop "AI for Maths" and since then his social media has included GenAI promotion.

Now he is being asked about this result and his first sentence is:

> I do not have the background in algebraic number theory to make a detailed assessment of the disproof of Erdős’s unit-distance conjecture, so instead I shall make some tentative comments about what it tells us about the current capabilities of AI.

Why did this GenAI org reach out to mathematicians outside of the discipline that this result addresses?

Why did they respond?!

I think the intention of this paper is to build some type of culture of "math generalists" that don't quite exist in today's academia. The thing is, is that a good half of the people in that paper were actually very pragmatic on the implications of such a success and present questions in terms of the measurability of the difficulty of the problem and the generalizability of the solution provided for other questions. Gowers in particular offers no resistance and in fact resorts to the theatrics of "being the bearer of bad news" on Twitter for some reason.

As with Tao, he's always been a measured optimist even before the tools were consistently usable for his work. And even still nowadays, he adds stipulations to his statements on the successes of AI. Yes, he's part of Math Inc. now and is in close contact with Google Deepmind for some projects but his interest lies in using the tools today. Gowers has been hypothesizing on the future of math in the tone he has taken now ever since o3/GPT5. There's no comparison between the two who should attract more scrutiny.