While I understand and emphatically with Tao's concern I'm afraid it's missing the forest from the trees. Unless you can make a claim that AI will never be able to perform intellectually at the same level as any human at a much lower cost, there's an outstanding utility problem that remains unaddressed. Sure enough, the AI may not have taste or goals, or many human traits, but that's irrelevant to the much thornier (and much broader than mathematics or even academia) question related to who's getting paid how much and for what.

The funding on mathematics is already one of the lowest accross science [0, 1], and theoretical math funding is probably much smaller than the applied math one already, so that's not even close to how much funding theoretical math gets.

So, we are talking about a field that already does not use that much funding anyway, and most high end theoretical mathematicians probably would make much more money in the industry anyway, so this seems like missing the forest for the tree imo.

[0] Table in page 1 in https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/71_fy2025.pdf?Versio...

[1] Figure DISC-13 in https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20257/academic-r-d