I get that Tao is a mathematician first and I respect the fact that he stays 'in his wheelhouse' (he didn't write the post but he did post it on his blog). But I think it would be fair to extrapolate and to wonder about this question not just for mathematics but for all of science. Keep in mind that scientific knowledge can be hoarded or used to patent stuff and that there is plenty of evidence that OpenAI, Anthropic and possibly others are going to go after other sources of income[1] than just selling access to their AI inference engines.
I can imagine a future where these companies become the new Zaibatsus[2] holding patents across a wide variety of subject and with mutually re-inforcing silos of proprietary technology created by in-house AI that the rest of the world financed but does not have access to.
I can imagine a future where these companies become the new Zaibatsus[2] holding patents across a wide variety of subject and with mutually re-inforcing silos of proprietary technology created by in-house AI that the rest of the world financed but does not have access to.
[1] For instance: https://www.reuters.com/world/anthropic-quietly-sets-up-biol...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaibatsu