• What a modern LLM does during training is, essentially, very very quickly skim the textbook, the words just flying by , not spending much brain power on it.


• Rather, when you or I read that math textbook, we read a couple pages slowly; then have an internal monologue about the material in our heads and talk about it with a few study-buddies; read

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AI as interlocutor. As the thing that helps you understand what you’ve already noticed, or points you toward resources you didn’t know existed.

The 1970s math teachers who adapted to calculators didn’t ban the technology or embrace it uncritically. They asked: What does this tool make possible, and what does it make too easy? Then they restructured... See more

An AI Thought Experiment

But the pleasant surprise: It has been enormously helpful in my attempts to resurrect and improve my rusty engineering knowledge, and level up my middle-aged forays into maker-ing things. The killer app for me is the ability to go deep in a domain for remedial learning. The most immediately helpful use-cases for me have been:

1. Getting back into

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