In a recent interview, Terence Tao stated the following:
One thing that this whole era of AI is teaching us is what our idea of what intelligence is not really accurate. The history of AI has been: here’s a task that only humans can do, like maybe it is read natural language, or win at chess, or solve a math problem. And then one by one, someone finds some AI algorithm that also does that. We can now recognize faces, we can understand speech, but you look at how it’s done and it doesn’t feel like intelligence. Like, it’s some trick, you just cobbled (?) together these neural networks and you ran some algorithm, and we were looking for some elusive intelligent way of thinking, and we don’t see it in the tools that actually solve our goals. But maybe it’s actually because intelligence is not what we think it is. So Large language models in particular became very successful, and a lot of what they’re doing is just predicting the next token, picking the next word in a sentence. And that doesn’t sound like something which is intelligent. You know, if you ask someone to improvise a speech and they have no preparation, and at every moment they’re just saying the next word that comes to their mind stream of consciousness dump you don’t think that this could actually work but it does for LLMs, and maybe that’s actually a lot of what humans do as well. This response I’m giving you right now is not rehearsed; I didn’t think about it that deeply, but you can get very far just by being in the moment and reacting. It’s certainly there are some things that actually do require careful, deep thought, but you can do a lot of what seemingly seem like intelligent tasks almost by instinct or by autopilot. And that’s, I think, one thing that the age of AI is teaching us: that maybe we’re not quite as smart as we think we are sometimes.
I listened to many interviews by relevant individuals, like famous computer scientists and mathematicians (like this one by Hugo Duminil-Copin) sharing their thoughts about the impact AI is having, not only on science, but on our society as a whole, and this excerpt from Tao’s interview really hit me harder and deeper.
In the 16th century, the Copernican Revolution marked a profound shift on how humanity perceived itself and its place in the Universe: Earth was not anymore at the center of it, but just one of several planets revolving around the Sun. Humans were no longer the epicenter of the Universe.
Speaking of intelligence, I believe we are experiencing something very similar right now, in 2026. The release of models such as Astra by OpenAI or Claude Opus 5.5 by Anthropic, proved that our intelligence, our creativity is not as unique and unreachable as we once thought. Our brain is and it will remain one of the wonders of our Universe, however, just as Earth, as beautiful and marvelous as it is, turned out to be just one planet among others, human intelligence could be just one form of intelligence among others. We are living in a period where carbon-based intelligence now coexists alongside a ever-growing silicon-based one.
Through science and literature, our species has long speculated and fantasized about the existence of other (intelligence) beings in our Universe. Like in many movies, we imagined aliens arriving from distant stars on board of giant odd-looking space vessels. Instead, the first non-human intelligence we have encountered may be one of our own making. And considering the pace of AI progress, this human-made intelligence seems poised to become better at any task a human can perform. This argument, as sci-fi as it sounds, it is definitely not out of sci-fi fiction, but it really is our current reality that we are collectively facing on a daily basis.