alt Hacker NewsI'm a mathematician relying heavily on AI as an association engine of massive scope, to organize and expand my thoughts. One doesn't get best results by "testing" AI.
A surfboard is also an amazing tool, but there's more to operating one than telling it which way to go.
Many people want self-driving cars so they can drink in the back seat watching movies. They'll find their jobs replaced by AI, with a poor quality of life because we're a selfish species. In contrast Niki Lauda trusted fellow Formula 1 race car driver James Hunt to race centimeters apart. Some people want AI to help them drive that well. They'll have great jobs as AI evolves.
Gary Kasparov pioneered "freestyle" chess tournaments after his defeat by Big Blue, where the best human players were paired with computers, coining the "centaur" model of human-machine cooperation. This is frequently cited in the finance literature, where it is recognized that AI-guided human judgement can out-perform either humans or machines.
Any math professor knows how to help graduate students confidently complete a PhD thesis, or how to humiliate students in an oral exam. It’s a choice. To accomplish more work than one can complete alone, choose the former. This is the arc of human evolution: we develop tools to enhance our abilities. We meld with an abacus or a slide rule, and it makes us smarter. We learn to anticipate computations, like we’re playing a musical instrument in our heads. Or we pull out a calculator that makes us dumber. The role we see for our tools matters.
Programmers who actually write better code using AI know this. These HN threads are filled with despair over the poor quality of vibe coding. At the same time, Anthropic is successfully coding Claude using Claude.
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> I'm a mathematician relying heavily on AI as an association engine of massive scope, to organize and expand my thoughts.
Can you share more about your architecture & process? Also a researcher involved in math research (though not strictly speaking a mathematician, but I digress). I've often thought about using AI on my notes, but they are messy and even then I can't quite figure out what to ask: prioritization, connecting ideas, lit search, etc.
I'd love to hear what you do.
That centaurs can outperform humans or AI systems alone is a weaker claim than "these particular AI systems have the required properties to be useful for that". Chess engines consistently produce strong lines, and can play entire games without human assistance: using one does not feel like gambling, even if occasionally you can spot a line it can't. LLMs catastrophically fail at iterated tasks unless they're closely supervised, and using LLMs does feel like gambling. I think you're overgeneralising.
There is definitely a gap in academic tooling, where an "association engine" would be very useful for a variety of fields (and for encouraging cross-pollination of ideas between fields), but I don't think LLMs are anywhere near the frontier of what can be accomplished with a given amount of computing power. I would expect simpler algorithms operating over more explicit ontologies to be much more useful. (The main issue is that people haven't made those yet, whereas people have made LLMs.) That said, there's still a lot of credit due to the unreasonable effectiveness of literature searches: it only usually takes me 10 minutes a day for a couple of days to find the appropriate jargon, at which point I gain access to more papers than I know what to do with. LLM sessions that substitute for literature review tend to take more than 20 minutes: the main advantage is that people actually engage with (addictive, gambling-like) LLMs in a way that they don't with (boring, database-like) literature searches.
I think developing the habit of "I'm at a loose end, so I'll idly type queries into my literature search engine" would produce much better outcomes than developing the habit of "I'm at a loose end, so I'll idly type queries into ChatGPT", and that's despite the state-of-the-art of literature search engines being extremely naïve, compared to what we can accomplish with modern technology.
Centaurs are a transient phenomenon. In chess, the era of centaur supremacy lasted only about a decade before computers alone eclipsed human+computer. The same will be true in every other discipline.
You can surf the wave, but sooner or later, the wave will come crashing down.