They literally have a quote from Tao in the article saying it was a novel approach humans hadn't tried, and that the problem hadn't been solved even after a lot of professional attention.
You're not arguing in good faith here, but just to make this apparent to everyone else: the disclaimers talk about the general case of Erdos problems as a whole.
The article explicitly acknowledges them, but then says that the disclaimers don't apply in this specific case:
> ...experts have warned that these problems are an imperfect benchmark of artificial intelligence’s mathematical prowess. They range dramatically in both significance and difficulty, and many AI solutions have turned out to be less original than they appeared.
The new solution—which Price got in response to a single prompt to GPT-5.4 Pro and posted on www.erdosproblems.com, a website devoted to the Erdős problems, just over a week ago—is different. The problem it solves has eluded some prominent minds, bestowing it some esteem. And more importantly, the AI seems to have used a totally new method for problems of this kind. It’s too soon to say with certainty, but this LLM-conceived connection may be useful for broader applications—something hard to find among recently touted AI triumphs in math.
So I don't see why I have to trust only one of only the other.
Furthermore, their assessment is backed up by direct quotes from Tao himself:
> “This one is a bit different because people did look at it, and the humans that looked at it just collectively made a slight wrong turn at move one,” says Terence Tao, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has become a prominent scorekeeper for AI’s push into his field. “What’s beginning to emerge is that the problem was maybe easier than expected, and it was like there was some kind of mental block.”... “We have discovered a new way to think about large numbers and their anatomy,” Tao says. “It’s a nice achievement. I think the jury is still out on the long-term significance.”
Would you care to explain in what way his claims have been misleading? Because I have read all of his articles and attacked his math and his sources, and so on, and I haven't found them misleading at all. The biggest way I've seen him accuse of being misleading makes the exact mistake he responds to from Joshi in [this piece](https://blog.andymasley.com/p/replies-to-criticisms-of-my-ch...).
Is he wrong about AI water usage, though? Using the fact that he defended AI water usage, as a reason to ignore everything he says, only works if he was wrong to defend AI water usage.
I read that article in depth and checked all the math and the extensive sources and found it very much accurate and it convinced me that the water usage issue is not serious.
He’s kinda wrong. The facts he states are correct. Others are clearly exaggerating or making mistakes. But he jumps from that to the incorrect conclusion that “data centers don’t use water”.
There are water accounting games on how much water is used for the electricity - Masley is right about that. But he ignores the water actually used to cool data centers, which is about 1/10th that. (About 25 billion gallons per year vs the 200B misstated as consumed during electric generation.) 25B gallons is actually still quite small in the big picture, but it’s growing very fast. And in the local regions where these data centers are built that can be a huge strain on the water supply.
So I would say Masley is biased in his reporting, and should be read critically. But on infrasound I think he’s right.
I think my takeaway from the water usage deep dive was about the scale of the numbers and a better intuition about water usage, but also that you really need to consider each data center uniquely. He'll say in broad strokes that data centers are fine, and then mention the few exceptions (in the infrasound article, that's the xAI DC). That's fine for the moment when he wrote the article, but if I'm evaluating a proposed data center in my local area, I don't know what bucket it falls in. Is it the exception or the norm? Still, because I read that deep dive, I feel better equipped to make that evaluation.
I don't think saying "as a general rule, data centers don't use remotely enough water to be any kind of significant threat, when you see through the accounting games, media hype, and look at things in a proper context" is made wrong or misleading by admitting that there are a few exceptions.
> That's fine for the moment when he wrote the article, but if I'm evaluating a proposed data center in my local area, I don't know what bucket it falls in. Is it the exception or the norm?
It does help you set your priors though, and not fall for the "all AI guzzles water, and DCs are dehydrating every town they're in and are always bad, without doing the research" rhetoric that's driving DC bans around the country right now.
I think we agree? I can't tell if you meant this as additional support for what I wrote or as a rebuttal.
Regardless, yeah, I don't think that's wrong or misleading. I only meant to say that because there are exceptions now, there might also be more exceptions in the future. Which, to me, means it's important to evaluate each new local DC individually.
And your point about setting my priors is exactly what I'm saying, too.
> Others are clearly exaggerating or making mistakes.
I'd be interested to hear a specific example, so I can get a sense for what you mean.
> But he jumps from that to the incorrect conclusion that “data centers don’t use water”.
He doesn't ignore the amount they are using, though — he goes to great lengths to contextualize how much water that actually is, compared to other industries (at a national scale) and other industries and recreational things (like golf courses and water parks and so on) at the local scale, specifically to point out that "25B gallons is actually still quite small in the big picture," as you yourself say — and yes, the water usage is growing "fast," but I don't know that anyone's actually quantified that growth rate, and it's still small in comparison to plenty of other industries that also grow year over year, and I neither he nor I think it'll continue to grow forever (AI bubble and all that).
> And in the local regions where these data centers are built that can be a huge strain on the water supply.
He explicitly deals with this, and as far as I can tell he's also right here, that there isn't a meaningful strain on most local water supplies either, as a fraction of total water production or in comparison to other industries those places also choose to host that are water intensive, despite being in arid climates, like the aforementioned golf courses, water parks, and other more industrial things. He goes through all the specific news headlines that claim that the water thing is a serious issue, and show that either they're talking about something different (like data center construction temporarily dirtying well water in nearby houses) or just pointing out that data centers "use water" and are also in arid areas, as if that's self-evidently bad, when other water using industries are already there and it isn't a big issue.
If you could point me to sources that he missed that disprove this, I'd be open to it for sure — I'm open to being wrong, and not committed to absolutely defending the honor of a guy I've never met on the internet against all odds. But I'm not personally aware of any contradictory evidence. I've been linked to a few reports from various foundations before, but they always are referencing numbers from other reports that link to other reports that, if you follow the whole process to the end, bottoms out in random news articles with unsubstantiated numbers that don't line up with what any actual math or other reports say.
> So I would say Masley is biased in his reporting, and should be read critically.
I read everything very critically, especially when it seems "too good to be true," like a lot of the stuff he says, but I might've missed something?
LMArena isn't very useful as a benchmark, however I can vouch for the fact that GLM 5.1 is astonishingly good. Several people I know who have a $100/mo Claude Code subscription are considering cancelling it and going all in on GLM, because it's finally gotten (for them) comparable to Opus 4.5/6. I don't use Opus myself, but I can definitely say that the jump from the (imvho) previous best open weight model Kimi K2.5 to this is otherworldly — and K2.5 was already a huge jump itself!
> If a robot unloading your dishwasher breaks one of your dishes once, this is a massive failure.
Depending on what the rate of breaking dishes is, this would be a massive improvement on me, a human being, since I break a really important dish I needed to use like ~2x per month on average.
I'm extremely sensitive to poor sleep. I also have nothing in my schedule that really prevents me from going to sleep early and sleeping late most of the time, and generally I at least achieve the former. The problem is that I have unbearable horrible nightmares every time I sleep. To the point where going to sleep is akin to going to hell itself, and I generally choose to forcibly wake myself up around like 6 a.m. just to get away from it all. I haven't really figured out a way around this.
I have as a kid. It might help you. As a kid, I instinctively (and later also consciously) have trained myself to become lucid while dreaming. When I become lucid, I gain some power. Then I trained myself to be more powerful in dreams.
For example, I can't fly, but I can (apparently) move the whole universe by a specific offset. I can also change the specific offset at a specific motion. So basically, I don't have flying powers, but I do have the powers of treating my dream like a Unity3D scene. And in that way, I can mimic flight.
I can also turn into a monster myself, usually into a worse monster than whatever I'm facing. I have become my nightmare's nightmare at certain points.
Nowadays though, whenever a nightmare hit I'm just unfazed. What also helps is that I let my nightmare and the creatures within it know that I am immortal. No matter what they do to me. In my dreams I am The Beginning and The End. I am all that will be there. They are there because of me. I'm essentially the only god that there is (I'm not religious but as far as my dreams are concerned, I am a god).
That throws off quite a lot of nightmares. The ones that persist, it's fine. They can test my immortality.
Can I just say that I agree with the other poster. I used to have a lot of nightmares. I didn't do it purposely, but I did figure out that lucid dreaming was the way to solve that issue.
I got interested in lucid dreaming for its own sake, and trained myself for it. I did all the common stuff in the guides, and eventually I had a habit of many times a day rubbing the back of my hand or something else tactile and asking myself if I was dreaming. After quite some time it did start to actually work in my dreams. I would frequently become "aware" in my dream and realise I was dreaming, and in my dream I would dream I would have control, but once I woke up it didn't even really feel like I had full control. It was not the experience I had been expecting, where everything becomes clearer, you can literally consciously control the dream. It was more like dreaming that I knew I was dreaming, and then controlling the dream, but I could never quite control it to the full extent I wanted to. No matter how much I practiced, this is all I achieved.
However, it wasn't nothing. It did let me start to realise I was dreaming in nightmares, and immediately just change them and become "in control" to the point where I could push back on whatever the nightmare was about, dictate on my terms. It still wasn't full lucid/awake control, but it was enough that I become the power in the dream, not the subject of the nightmare.
I really encourage you to keep trying. It took a lot of repetition during the day for the habit to finally enter my dreams. A lot more than I expected. But it did eventually work, to the extent I mentioned.
Arguably the best thing you can do is simply keep a dream journal (aside from deliberately waking up in the middle of the night and falling asleep with a clear intention - but that is more invasive in one's schedule and can also trigger nightmares).
We tried that. It was called Cyc. It never got even close to the level of capabilities a modern LLM has in an agentic harness — even on common sense and reasoning problems!
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