621–630 of 668 posts
He's (unsurprisingly) making an analogy to the dotcom bubble, which seems to me correct. There was a bubble, many non-viable companies got funded and died, and nevertheless the internet did eventually change everything.
It’s different enough that it probably isn’t relevant.
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That's a very relevant question. And as your question implies, we all know which society the billionaires talk about. But AI is just a technology like any other. It does have the potential to bring great benefits to humanity if developed with that intent. It's the corruptive influence of the billionaire and autocrat greed that turns all technologies against us. When I say benefits to humanity, I don't mean the AI slo…
I have a phd in mathematics and I assure you I am not happy that AI is going to make doing mathematics a waste of time. Go read Gower's essay on it from the 90s. He is spot on.
I'm not someone who likes or promotes LLMs due to the utterly unethical acts that the big corporations committed to make profits with them. However, people often forget that LLMs are a technology that was developed by people who practice Mathematics and Computer Science. That was also PhD level work. The fact that LLMs got such a bad reputation has nothing to do with those wonderful ideas, but was a result of the greed of those who are obsessed with endless profits. LLMs aren't just about vacuuming up the IP on the internet, dumping kilotonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere or endless streams of AI slop and low effort fakes.
Human minds process logic and the universe in extraordinary ways. But it's still very limited in the set of tools it uses to achieve that. That's where LLMs and AI in general raise the tantalizing possibility of perceiving and interpreting domains under Mathematics and Physics in ways that no living being has ever done or even imagined. Perhaps its training data won't be stolen text or art. It could be the petabytes of scientific data locked up in storage because nobody knows what to do with it yet. And instead of displacing us, it's likely to complement and augment us. That's where the brilliance of mathematicians and scientists are going to be needed. Nobody knows for sure. But how will one know if you close the doors to that possibility?
I admire Dr. Tao for keeping his mind open to anything new at his age. I wish I had as much curiosity as him.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-will-become-ma...
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Go ahead and post what youve done fella so we can critique. Why is it all these kinds of posts never come with any attachments? We are all interested to see it m8.
Because they are private and I can’t make them public. I have no self interest here, I’m an MLE by trade and this technology threatens my job. I had been mostly opposed to vibe coding for a long time, autocomplete was fine but full agentic coding just made a mess. That’s changed now, this stuff is genuinely working on really hard problems.
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That's a very relevant question. And as your question implies, we all know which society the billionaires talk about. But AI is just a technology like any other. It does have the potential to bring great benefits to humanity if developed with that intent. It's the corruptive influence of the billionaire and autocrat greed that turns all technologies against us. When I say benefits to humanity, I don't mean the AI slo…
What are the actual benefits? Where are all these medicines that humans couldn’t develop on their own? Have we not been able to develop medicine? What theorems are meaningful and impactful that humans can’t prove without AI? I don’t know what a solution to the climate crisis is but what would it even say that humans wouldn’t have realistically thought of?
1. How AI revolutionized protein science, but didn’t end it: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-ai-revolutionized-protein...
This is about DeepMind's AlphaFold 2. It's arguably a big deal in medical science. How do you propose humans do it?
2. Code vulnerability detection across different programming languages with AI Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11710
> What theorems are meaningful and impactful that humans can’t prove without AI?
I'm not a mathematician. I cannot give a definitive answer. But I read somewhere that some proofs these days fill an entire book. There is no way anybody is creating that without machine validation and assistance. AI is the next step in that, just like how programming support is advancing from complex tools to copilots. I know that overuse of copilots is a reason for making some developers lose quality. But there are also experienced developers who have found ways to use them optimally to significantly increase their speed without filling the code base with AI slop. The same will arguably happen with Mathematics.
The point ultimately is, I don't have definitive answers to any of the questions you ask. I'm not a domain expert in any of those fields and I can't see the future. But none of that is relevant here. What's relevant is to understand how LLMs and AI in general can be leveraged to augment your performance in any profession. The exact method may vary by domain. But the general tool use will be similar. Think of it like "How can a computer help me do accounting, cook a meal, predict weather, get me an xray or pay my bills?" It's as generic as that.
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What are the actual benefits? Where are all these medicines that humans couldn’t develop on their own? Have we not been able to develop medicine? What theorems are meaningful and impactful that humans can’t prove without AI? I don’t know what a solution to the climate crisis is but what would it even say that humans wouldn’t have realistically thought of?
It's a matter of prompt engineering, you have to be a really good engineer to pick the correct words in order to get the cure for cancer from ChatGPT, or the actual crabby patty recipe ;)
Yesterday, I asked an LLM to create a browser plugin and it got 98% correct in its first try.
Yesterday someone's uncle tried the same thing and now his bank account's drained because the 2% that wasn't working was the 2% that prevented his password store from being posted online. See how that works? A few nerds think it's great while everyone else gets screwed by it.
I would use AI to create extensions for my use than trust someone else's.
He's (unsurprisingly) making an analogy to the dotcom bubble, which seems to me correct. There was a bubble, many non-viable companies got funded and died, and nevertheless the internet did eventually change everything.
The biggest problem is the infrastructure left behind from the Dotcom boom that laid the path for the current world (the high speed fiber) doesn't translate to computer chips. Are you still using intel chips from 1998? And the chips are such a huge cost, and being backed by debt but they depreciate in value exponentially. It's not the same because so much of the current debt fueled spending is on an asset that has ve…
I'm paying for 3 different AI services and our company and most of my team is also paying money for various AI stuff. Sounds like a real industry to me. There's just going to be VC losers as always, where usually "losing" is getting bought by a bigger company or aquihires instead of 100xing or going public.
> 3 different AI services Why three? Will you ever be in a position where one will do it for you? > and most of my team is also paying money for various AI stuff. And what are they using it for? > Sounds like a real industry to me. Sounds like early adopter syndrome to me. We'd have to know more about your business to take this out of the realm of hazy anecdotes.
I believe LLMs will be niche tools like databases, you pay for the product not 'gpt' vs 'claude'. You choose the right tool for the job.
I have a feeling coding tool with be separate a niche like Cursor, which LLM it uses doesn't matter. It's the integration, guard rails, prompt seeding, and general software stuff like autocomplete and managing long todos.
Then I pay for ChatGPT because that's my "personal" chat LLM that knows me and knows how I like curt short responses for my dumb questions.
Finally I pay for https://www.warp.dev/terminal as a terminal which replaced Kitty terminal on macos (don't use it for coding) which is another niche. Cursor could enter that arena but VSCode terminal is kinda limited for day-to-day stuff given it's hidden in an larger IDE. Maybe a pure CLI tool will do both better.
I'm paying for 3 different AI services and our company and most of my team is also paying money for various AI stuff. Sounds like a real industry to me. There's just going to be VC losers as always, where usually "losing" is getting bought by a bigger company or aquihires instead of 100xing or going public.
are you paying them enough to have profitable unit economics? How hard would it be for you to switch from one provider to another?
The lie is that LLMs are the product itself rather than the endless integration opportunities via APIs and online services.
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Yes, this is true. There used to be a lot of local book stores, for example. Amazon optimized that away, while ruining social fabric.
Independent book stores are booming in quantity since the initial Internet crash. Be careful about making narratives that don’t line up with industry data. There’s a lot of brick and mortar retail going on. It just doesn’t look like the overbuilt mall infrastructure of the 1970s-1980s.