41–50 of 96 posts
Also interesting that the responses include anti-Lean material.
I'm not a mathematician, but how credible is that anti-Lean material? Are they marketing an alternative programmatic approach, as in they're anti-lean because "I got something else" or are they philosophically anti-Lean and have valid arguments?
Having the ability to throw math heavy ML papers at the assistants and get simplified explanations / pseudocode back is absolutely amazing, as someone who's forgot most of what I learned in uni, 25+ years back and never really used it since.
I was driving around tonight doing errands and while I was doing so, had a great conversation with chatgpt as to the intimate details of the llvm and GCC pipeline schedulers. It's a huge productivity boost. It has now taken notes for me for some compiler stuff I'm experimenting with. This would previously have been impossible.
Erdős I was told by a hungarian, that hungarian written spelling and spoken pronunciation is pretty precisely aligned compared to, say, english. Except when it comes to names when it gets a bit random! Why not do the bloke the decency to spell his name correctly? Those diacritics are important. Anyway, I was told that Paul's name is very roughly pronounced by an anglophone as: "airdish".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is where LLMs shine for learning imo: throwing a paper in Claude and getting an overview then being able to ask questions. Especially for fields that I didn’t study at the Bachelors or Masters level, like biology. Getting to engage with deeper research with a knowledgeable tutor assistant has enabled me to go deeper than I otherwise could.
Isn't there a risk that you're engaging with an inaccurate summarization? At some point inaccurate information is worse than no information. Perhaps in low stakes situations it could at least guarantee some entertainment value. Though I worry that folks will get into high stakes situations without the tools to distinguish facts from smoothly worded slop.
The texts have to be short and high-level for the assistants to have any chance of accurately explaining them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't there a risk that you're engaging with an inaccurate summarization? At some point inaccurate information is worse than no information. Perhaps in low stakes situations it could at least guarantee some entertainment value. Though I worry that folks will get into high stakes situations without the tools to distinguish facts from smoothly worded slop.
Yes. I usually test AI assistants by giving them my own work to summarize, and have nearly always found errors in their interpretation of the work. The texts have to be short and high-level for the assistants to have any chance of accurately explaining them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is where LLMs shine for learning imo: throwing a paper in Claude and getting an overview then being able to ask questions. Especially for fields that I didn’t study at the Bachelors or Masters level, like biology. Getting to engage with deeper research with a knowledgeable tutor assistant has enabled me to go deeper than I otherwise could.
Isn't there a risk that you're engaging with an inaccurate summarization? At some point inaccurate information is worse than no information. Perhaps in low stakes situations it could at least guarantee some entertainment value. Though I worry that folks will get into high stakes situations without the tools to distinguish facts from smoothly worded slop.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The embarrassing failures or misconceptions of math experts with regards to research level mathematics? Definitely a serious problem. Though by your "Perelman and Wiles didn't need "AI" assistance" comment, you'd surely be there on the sidelines to ridicule them for each and every single one. I guess maybe that's where your concerns are coming from? I can practically see how these concerns of yours would suddenly eva…
If mathematicians aren't occasionally saying something that's obviously wrong to a 300-level student, are they really pushing the envelope? I'm just a programmer, but I find that my, and my coworkers, biggest insights always come right after we've said something seriously dumb.
Erdős I was told by a hungarian, that hungarian written spelling and spoken pronunciation is pretty precisely aligned compared to, say, english. Except when it comes to names when it gets a bit random! Why not do the bloke the decency to spell his name correctly? Those diacritics are important. Anyway, I was told that Paul's name is very roughly pronounced by an anglophone as: "airdish".
Erdős I was told by a hungarian, that hungarian written spelling and spoken pronunciation is pretty precisely aligned compared to, say, english. Except when it comes to names when it gets a bit random! Why not do the bloke the decency to spell his name correctly? Those diacritics are important. Anyway, I was told that Paul's name is very roughly pronounced by an anglophone as: "airdish".
I could be wrong, but FWIW I doubt Hungarians include diacritics that don’t exist in Hungarian (like ñ) when writing foreign names.
In general, if the source language has a latin alphabet, we try to stick to the original spelling in most cases, but it is not uncommon to replace non-Hungarian letters with the closest one. It's a bit more complicated in case of non-latin alphabets, especially Cyrillic due to a lot of shared history.