Terence Tao argues open math problems are being mined non-renewably.

In a four-post Mathstodon thread, he says problems are infinite but fruitful ones are not, the way a country can lack drinking water while surrounded by ocean. His mechanism: every new tool flattens a field's difficulty landscape, and the AI era is unusual in having no visible frontier separating AI-feasible from AI-hard problems, worsened by labs not disclosing negative results or process. His conclusion is a governance one, that the incentive is now to stop sharing research directions publicly, and he proposes designating classes of problems where a raw solution without analysis has negligible or negative value. Mathstodon