#472 – Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Terence Tao, widely considered to be one of the greatest mathematicians in history, often referred to as the Mozart of math. He won the Fields Medal and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics and has contributed groundbreaking work to a truly astonishing range of fields in mathematics and physics. This was a huge honor for me, for many reasons, including the humility and kindness that Terry showed to me throughout all our interactions. It means the world. And now a quick few second mention to each sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfridman.com. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Notion for teamwork, Shopify for selling stuff online, NetSuite for your business, Element for electrolytes, and AG1 for your health. She was wise in my friends. And now on to the full ad reads. They're all here in one place. I do try to make them interesting by talking about some random things I'm reading or thinking about. But if you skip, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. To get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact. All right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by Notion, a note taking and team collaboration tool. I use Notion for everything, for personal notes, for planning this podcast, for collaborating with other folks, and for super boosting all of those things with AI, because Notion does a great job of integrating AI into the whole thing. You know, what's fascinating is the mechanisms of human memory before we had widely adopted technologies and tools for writing and recording stuff, certainly before the computer. So you can look at medieval monks, for example, that would use the now well-studied memory techniques like the memory palace, the spatial memory techniques to memorize entire books. That is certainly the effect of technology started by Google search and moving to all the other things like Notion, that we're offloading more and more and more of the task of memorization to the computers, which I think is probably a positive thing because it frees more of our brain to do deep reasoning, whether that's deep dive focused specialization or the journalist type of thinking versus memorizing facts. Although I do think that there's a kind of background model that's formed when you memorize a lot of things. And from there, from inspiration arises discovery. So I don't know, it could be a great cost to offloading most of our memorization to the machines. But it is the way of the world. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com/lex. That's all lowercase notion.com/lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. Our future friends has a lot of robots in it. Looking into that distant future, you have Amazon warehouses with millions of robots that move packages around. You have Tesla bots everywhere in the factories and in the home and on the streets and the baristas. All of that, that's our future. Right now, you have something like Shopify that connects a lot of humans in the digital space. But more and more, there will be a automated, digitized, AI-fueled connection between humans in the physical space. Like a lot of futures, there's going to be negative things and there's going to be positive things. And like a lot of possible futures, there's little we could do about stopping it. All we can do is steer it in the direction that enables human flourishing. Instead of hiding in fear or fear-mongering, be part of the group of people that are building the best possible trajectory of human civilization. Anyway, sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. There's a lot of messy components to running a business. And I must ask, and I must wonder at which point there's going to be an AI AGI-like CFO of a company, an AI agent that handles most if not all of the financial responsibilities or all of the things that NetSuite is doing, at which point will NetSuite increasingly leverage AI for those tasks? I think probably you will integrate AI into its tooling, but I think there's a lot of edge cases that we need the human wisdom, the human intuition grounded in years of experience in order to make the tricky decision around the edge cases. I suspect that running a company is a lot more difficult than people realize, but there's a lot of sort of paperwork type stuff that could be automated, could be digitized, could be summarized, integrated and used as a foundation for the said humans to make decisions. Anyway, that's our future. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com/lex. That's netsuite.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. Now, I run along the river often and get to meet some really interesting people. One of the people I met was preparing for his first ultra marathon. I believe he said it was 100 miles. And that, of course, sparked in me the thought that I need for sure to do one myself. Some time ago now, I was planning to do something with David Goggins, and I think that's still on the sort of to-do list between the two of us, to do some crazy physical feat. Of course, the thing that is crazy for me is a daily activity for Goggins. But, nevertheless, I think it's important in the physical domain, the mental domain, and all domains of life to challenge yourself. And athletic endeavors is one of the most sort of crisp, clear, well-structured way of challenging yourself. But there's all kinds of things, writing a book, to be honest, having kids and marriage and relationships and friendships, all of those, if you take it seriously, if you go all in and do it right, I think that's a serious challenge. Because most of us are not prepared for it. You can learn along the way. And if you have the rigorous feedback loop of improving constantly and growing as a person and really doing a great job of the thing, I think that might as well be an ultramarathon. Anyway, get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Just try it at www.drinklmnt.com/lex.