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LLMs are the ultimate demoware

blog.charliemeyer.co

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Re: LLMs are the ultimate demoware

#91

Post by tptacek »

getnormality wrote: post #90
tptacek wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what Math Academy is: I'm operating with a grounded set of correct, validated content, and using LLMs to (1) fill in more conceptual explanation and (2) check where I went off the rails when I get things wrong. You can't play the "hallucination" card here. An LLM can reliably do partial fraction decomposition, spot and solve an ODE that admits direct integration, calculate an arc length, invert a matri…

That's very interesting. Maybe you are doing this the right way, and my concern as a math educator is for the people who may struggle to stay on the straight and narrow, or know what the straight and narrow is in this brave new world. Where I see deficiencies is not so much in the calculations. When a problem class has a solution algorithm and 10,000 worked examples online, I'm not too surprised that the LLM generali…

No, we're not going to move the goalposts here. You can tweak any argument so that the thread goes nowhere and nobody can update their mental models by positing a sufficiently misguided user of a piece of technology. I'm saying: LLMs are quite good at math tutoring, in many ways probably significantly better than human tutors (they're tireless, can explain any concept 50 different ways, and can rattle off individualized problem sets in seconds). I made that claim, and you pushed back saying that anything I saw "needed to be validated by an expert". You even said that anything I said was an unreliable narrator because I'm studying math. No, to all of this.

Re: LLMs are the ultimate demoware

#92

Post by simonw »

getnormality wrote: post #90
tptacek wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what Math Academy is: I'm operating with a grounded set of correct, validated content, and using LLMs to (1) fill in more conceptual explanation and (2) check where I went off the rails when I get things wrong. You can't play the "hallucination" card here. An LLM can reliably do partial fraction decomposition, spot and solve an ODE that admits direct integration, calculate an arc length, invert a matri…

That's very interesting. Maybe you are doing this the right way, and my concern as a math educator is for the people who may struggle to stay on the straight and narrow, or know what the straight and narrow is in this brave new world. Where I see deficiencies is not so much in the calculations. When a problem class has a solution algorithm and 10,000 worked examples online, I'm not too surprised that the LLM generali…

The International Mathematical Olympiad challenges should be pretty safely out of distribution. Gemini and OpenAI's best research models both scored gold on that this year.

Re: LLMs are the ultimate demoware

#93

Post by getnormality »

simonw wrote: post #92
getnormality wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very interesting. Maybe you are doing this the right way, and my concern as a math educator is for the people who may struggle to stay on the straight and narrow, or know what the straight and narrow is in this brave new world. Where I see deficiencies is not so much in the calculations. When a problem class has a solution algorithm and 10,000 worked examples online, I'm not too surprised that the LLM generali…

The International Mathematical Olympiad challenges should be pretty safely out of distribution. Gemini and OpenAI's best research models both scored gold on that this year.

When they make a model with those abilities publicly available, I'll happily experiment with it, and I'd anticipate reporting that it is a lot better than what I experienced in the past.

Re: LLMs are the ultimate demoware

#94

Post by eitland »

unshavedyak wrote: post #80
jdiff wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Countless people in comments say this, but other people fail to see evidence of that in the wild. As has been said in response to this point many times in the past: Where's the open source renaissance that should be happening right now? Where are the actual, in-use dependencies and libraries that are being developed by AI? The only times I've personally seen LLMs engaged in repos has been handling issues, and they ma…

> Countless people in comments say this, but other people fail to see evidence of that in the wild. As has been said in response to this point many times in the past: Where's the open source renaissance that should be happening right now? Where are the actual, in-use dependencies and libraries that are being developed by AI? The thing that this comment misses, imo, is that LLMs are not always enabling people who prev…

> The thing that this comment misses, imo, is that LLMs are not always enabling people who previously couldn't create value to create value. In fact i think they are likely to cause some people who created value previously to create even less value!

Agree.

For some time I’ve compared AI to a nail gun:

It can make an experienced builder much quicker at certain jobs.

But for someone new to the trade, I’m not convinced it makes them faster at all. It might remove some of the drudgery, yes — but it also adds a very real chance of shooting oneself in the foot (or hand).

Re: LLMs are the ultimate demoware

#95

Post by tptacek »

adrianton3 wrote: post #61
baklavaEmperor wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s interesting how people insist math requires expert validation when it’s literally the most self validating subject there is. The instinct to gatekeep even something as mechanistically checkable as algebra says more about insecurity in education than it does about rigor.

"5.11 or 5.9 which number is greater?" was a meme query a few months ago to ask an LLM as it would confidenly prove how 5.11 is greater - so yes, we do need expert validation!

A very, very big problem we have with LLM discourse is that LLMs have changed radically since the beginning of last year. If you're making an argument about modern foundation models based on the idea that they can't generate reliably correct answers to whether 5.11 is greater than 5.9, your mental model is completely out of date.

You don't have to believe me on this, just your own lying eyes. Go try this for yourself right now: ask it dy/dx of h(x)/g(x) where h(x) is x^3 + 1 and g(x) is -2e^x. That's a random Math Academy review problem I did last night that I pulled out of Notes.app. Go look.

Re: LLMs are the ultimate demoware

#96

Post by eitland »

jdiff wrote: post #18
eitland wrote: post #4

Again and again people keep saying this while many of us keep using LLMs to create value.

Countless people in comments say this, but other people fail to see evidence of that in the wild. As has been said in response to this point many times in the past: Where's the open source renaissance that should be happening right now? Where are the actual, in-use dependencies and libraries that are being developed by AI? The only times I've personally seen LLMs engaged in repos has been handling issues, and they ma…

Using the same arguments people used (use?) against IDEs and I think also against compilers and stuff back in the punch card days.

I am not a researcher, but I am a techlead and I've seen it work again and again: IDEs work. And LLMs work.

They are force multipliers though, they absolutely work best with people who already know a bit of software engineering.

Re: LLMs are the ultimate demoware

#97

Post by j45 »

tptacek wrote: post #7

It's wild to me that, of all the things to call LLMs out for, this piece has chosen to include math tutoring. I've been doing Math Academy for a bit over 6 months now, going from (essentially) Algebra II through Calc II (integration by parts, arc lengths, Taylor expansions) and LLMs have been a huge part of what has made that effective: * Clear explanation of concepts that respond to questions and reformulate when th…

Absolutely.

This piece feels like a “I tried it out how I could” piece vs “I spent time learning how others are learning math with LLMs too”

LLMs will make meaningful advances in personalized learning.

Some of the frameworks might evolve along the way.

Re: LLMs are the ultimate demoware

#98

Post by tptacek »

unshavedyak wrote: post #66
tptacek wrote: post #7

It's wild to me that, of all the things to call LLMs out for, this piece has chosen to include math tutoring. I've been doing Math Academy for a bit over 6 months now, going from (essentially) Algebra II through Calc II (integration by parts, arc lengths, Taylor expansions) and LLMs have been a huge part of what has made that effective: * Clear explanation of concepts that respond to questions and reformulate when th…

Offtopic, but do you have any comparison to math academy to something like Khan, or other platforms? MA seems a bit expensive for someone just wanting to improve a general skill, but perhaps it's well worth it? I thought Khan was also investing in similar AI offerings, so i'm curious how they intersect

Khan never clicked for me, and while the cost of Math Academy is below my noise floor (when you back it out to $/hr of engagement) as an adult professional in his prime earning years, I should also add that the cost is also a motivator: I've never been tempted to take a break, in part because I'm on the meter.

Re: LLMs are the ultimate demoware

#99

Post by simonw »

getnormality wrote: post #93
simonw wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The International Mathematical Olympiad challenges should be pretty safely out of distribution. Gemini and OpenAI's best research models both scored gold on that this year.

When they make a model with those abilities publicly available, I'll happily experiment with it, and I'd anticipate reporting that it is a lot better than what I experienced in the past.

The Gemini one is out now but expensive:

> Gemini Deep Think, our SOTA model with parallel thinking that won the IMO Gold Medal , is now available in the Gemini App for Ultra subscribers!!

https://twitter.com/OfficialLoganK/status/195126226151265943...

Re: LLMs are the ultimate demoware

#100

Post by chaps »

lomase wrote: post #79
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a term i used to explain that in 'thinking' mode LLMs will read their own output and call out things like incorrect math statements before posting to the user. Now you probably want a debate about the term 'thinking' mode but i cbf with that. It's pretty clear what was meant and semantic arguments suck. Don't do that.

I want people to use correct terms, i don't think that is unreasonable.

I'm all for avoiding anthropomorphism of these things, but what word (or set of words) would you use instead?
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