61–70 of 156 posts
Terry Tao using coding agents feels like watching a Michelin-starred chef discover microwave dinners and get genuinely excited about them.
Are there any documented essays or reactions from the great chefs of back in the day reacting to the first microwave dinners?
Building visualizations with LLMs has been a major boost for my CS classes: https://htmx.org/essays/universities-and-ai/#demos-visualiza... Many visualizations that I have always wanted but just didn't have the time to build, I now have. To give an example, I wanted a simplified 8-bit computer to complement the 16-bit teaching computer I use and designed this in a few days with the help of claude: https://bdp.cs.mont…
When I did my microcontroller class with lecturer hand drawing an 8-bit computer, the registers, memory, instructions on the white board, it was v cool to understand how things worked under the hood.
Wondered if someone could make more simulations for what was being taught. Teaching is about deciphering a thing into it's components and seeing how they interact. Vibe coded simulations are a great tool for that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and generally not to be trusted There are many AI bulls who adamantly disagree and cite Tao’s statements about LLMs for mathematical proofs as an example of how advanced and autonomous these systems already are
Statistical gradient descent token vomiter. We can all say it together. Nothing about this is advanced or autonomous.
Building visualizations with LLMs has been a major boost for my CS classes: https://htmx.org/essays/universities-and-ai/#demos-visualiza... Many visualizations that I have always wanted but just didn't have the time to build, I now have. To give an example, I wanted a simplified 8-bit computer to complement the 16-bit teaching computer I use and designed this in a few days with the help of claude: https://bdp.cs.mont…
Nice balanced perspective there at the end: "as such [LLM-coded interactive] supplements are not mission-critical to the core of the paper, I again feel that the downside risk of using guided interaction with LLM agents to generate such visualizations is acceptable." It's a tool. Good for some things but not others and generally not to be trusted.
Terry Tao using coding agents feels like watching a Michelin-starred chef discover microwave dinners and get genuinely excited about them.
I always enjoy these "domain expert has fun using AI to do something in their domain" articles. But it's always a hobby project, never something serious.
Teaching, research and publication are the core activities of his job as a math professor. How does it get more serious than this?
Terry Tao using coding agents feels like watching a Michelin-starred chef discover microwave dinners and get genuinely excited about them.
Terry Tao using coding agents feels like watching a Michelin-starred chef discover microwave dinners and get genuinely excited about them.
People are so confident that this just-a-tool will hit its limits any day now...