What changed

UCLA Computer Scientists, Mathematician Terence Tao Awarded Laude Moonshots Grant to Build AI System as Research Partner Project aims to unlock progress in physics, cryptography and other challenging fields The multidisciplinary UCLA team will lead the Accelerating the Queen of Sciences project to develop an AI system capable of thinking like a mathematician and accelerating scientific breakthroughs. A team of six UCLA faculty members spanning artificial intelligence, computer science and mathematics has received a $250,000 seed grant from the Laude Institute as part of its inaugural Moonshots initiative, which supports university-led efforts to solve some of humanity’s hardest, undiscovered problems. The UCLA team was one of just eight selected from 125 proposals by more than 600 researchers across 47 institutions in the U.S. and Canada, as announced by the Laude Institute today. Led by Amit Sahai, a professor of computer science at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, other UCLA computer scientists include professor Raghu Meka, department chair Wei Wang, and associate professors Kai-Wei Chang and Nanyun (Violet) Peng. Terence Tao, a UCLA mathematics professor and director of special projects at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, is part of the team as well. “I’m most excited by our goal of creating AI capable of wonder-based discovery in mathematics — an AI system that not only solves problems rigorously, but also asks what might be true and explores the boundary between possible and impossible,” Amit Sahai said. Titled “Accelerating the Queen of Sciences,” the project seeks to develop an AI system for rigorous and creative mathematical thinking, ultimately serving as a research partner for scientists across every quantitative field. Rather than training AI to solve known problems, the team is focused on teaching AI to behave like a mathematician and ensure claims are automatically verified, turning ‘sounding right’ into ‘being right.’ “I’m most excited by our goal of creating AI capable of wonder-based discovery in mathematics — an AI system that not only solves problems rigorously, but also asks what might be true and explores the boundary between possible and impossible,” said Sahai, who holds the Symantec Term Chair in Computer Science. Today’s leading AI models can solve competition-level math problems and generate fluent explanations…