Joshua Levy

@BrianFeroldi @GRDecter The danger is not in letting students use tools like ChatGPT. It is in letting them learn that they don’t have to think, or believing that the tools are smarter than they are.

The strong signal here is that most of all Goodreads reviews are by women. But I can’t decide whether the reason is that men just don’t read as much or that women really like to post book reviews.

Why training is more expensive than inference

This is ridiculous. Obviously the cat on the right has way better aura.

I think research like this is very cool for three reasons.

Firstly, it illustrates that we are moving toward a direction of observational science when it comes to complex mathematical patterns.

I believe a new frontier in mathematical sciences and computational biology will arise soon and it will start by having deeper explorations of simple systems with complex behavior. A few people, notably @drmichaellevin, have been pursuing this vision for years but it will become more obvious soon.

Secondly, in the 19th century and earlier it was much more common to have “citizen scientists” finding results at the frontier of human knowledge. I think in purely theoretical subfields, where agents work best, we're moving back to a world a little like that.

Another example of this is work of dozens of people exploring square packing (including me and in fact this is why I gave myself math psychosis this summer!). Anyone with a coding agent can explore new mathematical ideas.

Thirdly, this illustrates how the initial narrative that the surge in notable AI proofs eliminates mathematics as a human pursuit is completely backwards.

We are bottlenecked in some areas of science not by the ability to do experiments, but by the ability to ask new questions. As more people have the freedom to ask questions and do experiments, it leads to a renaissance in understanding.