[jvanderbot]

It's crazy how he suggests simplifications over and over and gets led through the finding. Absolutely bonkers how you can use AI to understand something and map it to your own mental map so efficiently, and of course he's most interested in generalizing or finding a simpler sub-result that would explain it.

Just awesome to see new knowledge hit an incredible mind like this. Having these "what if" discussions is what I miss most from JPL and academia.

[genidoi]

> you can use AI to understand something and map it to your own mental map

This "symbiosis" (for lack of better word) of human with AI seems to be an emergent value proposition of AI. In the process of doing stuff with AI, producing artefacts like code diffs, we are continuously able to decide how strong the mental map is of the current stage of the production process.

I could probably have worded this better but I'm sure it's something others have noticed... this choice we are able to make of how high fidelity our own understanding needs to be of the current working problem, and how that choice never really existed prior to AI.

[yourself92]

> I could probably have worded this better but I'm sure it's something others have noticed... this choice we are able to make of how high fidelity our own understanding needs to be of the current working problem, and how that choice never really existed prior to AI.

I do get what you are saying and agree with you in principle, as I have noticed the same. But that said, this same way of thinking can really apply to any abstraction. It really just depends on the level you're working at. A software architect might know the nitty gritty details of how each service works, but really those implementation details don't matter if the abstractions are handled well enough, so in theory they don't really need to know those details as long as "the pieces fit". But of course the catch 22 there is you can't build good abstractions that can fit together well if you don't understand well enough the underlying details

[mohamedkoubaa]

Hold on isn't this how math professors used grad students for hundreds of years?

[jvanderbot]

"used" is a bit loaded, but this is just how people talk to eachother when they are thinking really hard about something they want to solve. So, I'm fairly sure it goes back as far as speech. It's just debugging - "What if it was caused by xyz", "What if we tried abc"

[tensegrist]

yeah it's pairing by another name