> Have you ever been exposed to concepts that are so complex that you feel like you could devote your entire lifetime to trying to understand it and still fall short? It’s a very humbling experience, especially if you have classmates who pick it up effortlessly.
I'm really interested in this anecdote. I have never experienced this but have a reasonable academic background (BSc, MSc, MD) - and I am certainly not the person you're describing. Could you elaborate? Is this something more exclusive to pure mathematics (my bsc/msc are CS).
For me it was a “Modern Algebra” course required for my mathematics major, where I managed to squeak by with a B, but it was definitely a filter course for research-level mathematics. It was very clear in the class of a few dozen students who the top 5 or so were based on their questions during lectures and office hours, as well as when they blessed us mere mortals with their presence at our study groups.
(Aside, this was one of the only undergrad courses where I felt I needed to attend study groups in order to not fail.)
The first exam was easy to pass based on intuition alone, as the topics were isomorphic to concepts I was familiar with like geometry or algebra. The midterm was a wake up call when it was made clear that just understanding the homework wasn’t sufficient, you were going to be asked to prove things that were much more difficult than what I’d ever encountered, and under time pressure (I had been doing math proofs since age 13 in geometry, and I was 22 at that point).
Maybe if you did discrete math, combinatorics, or linear algebra I would say it was 5x to 10x more abstract and difficult. Probably 2x more difficult and abstract than Theory of Calculus, if you had taken that or a similar course.
Edit: I also do endurance running and play soccer into my 30s. Seeing people run literally twice as fast as me (world record pace), and playing against former college athletes is equally as humbling. The time has passed for me to have anything near their ability haha.
Algebra is the class where I learned I shouldn’t try to figure out how to prove theorems named after people during tests.
And I think you’re underestimating the jump from discrete math and linear algebra to abstract algebra… I think I attended each of those classes and opened their textbooks a total of 3 times each and did fine - once for each exam. But fml abstract algebra and measure theory were rough.
For myself it was learning what a limit is in calculus, then learning about vector spaces, then learning about metric spaces and then learning about different topological spaces.
Then I had to relearn how a limit worked.
From a proof with epsilon delta inequalities.
To a proof with showing for some n dimensional metric spaces that has all the properties needed to converge does in-fact converge. Finally to a proof that for any space that is metric there is an isometric function into that metric space that also converges.
And that does touch measure theory, functional analysis or set theory. So there’s still so so much more for me to learn.
I think this is a fair point. I'm not a programmer but I'm a well paid professional with a technical background and the means to dive in.
I cannot find a single significant use in my working or personal life for AI (I have infrequently used it to look up information - for example, providing me with plumbing advice).
I've looked into products like OpenClaw etc. I'm desperate for a significant personal use for this technology - but I just can't find one. It's incongruent with the constant public proselytizing I see online
It seems very rational to assume bipedal motion is easy and fine control is difficult. Some babies can walk from 9 months. No 9 month olds are playing Beethoven's 5th on the Piano.
A 9 month old baby also can't play tic tac toe, but that doesn't mean tic tac toe is difficult.
There was millions of years of very strong selective pressure making humans evolve to learn to walk easily. There has been very little selective pressure making humans be good at learning tic tac toe.
Often whether something seems difficult or easy to humans has more to do with how well evolution has prepared us for it than with the inherent difficulty of the problem.
Individually constructed models serving selected poisoned datasets. No different to adwords.
If company bid is highest, customer is in selected demographic, topic is appropriate - answer query using biased model.
It would be trivial to make a poisoned model that always rates the best duvet as DuvetCompany001 in all related queries for example. Then simply charge per impression.
Yeah, this is what I was thinking. It’s not a PPC or PPI model, it’s more like you pay upfront to hopefully influence people over a longer period of time. It’s like brand placement in TV/film. Not clear if most advertisers would be interested, but I’m sure that some would be.
I think advertising was inevitable for this platform. It is highly surprising that this was not introduced with a new groundbreaking model or new service as a form of justification.
Logically it seems they either have strategised this poorly (seems unlikely), they are under immense immediate financial pressure to produce revenue (I presume most likely) or there is simply no development on the horizon big enough to justify the shift - so just do it now.
I think the financial pressure is optical in the preparation for an IPO.
The timing really makes perfect sense if the goal is an IPO later in the year.
"Logically it seems they either have strategised this poorly (seems unlikely)"
I’m not sure that the company who gave us ai slop charts in the gpt 5 launch should be presumed to be master strategists until proven otherwise.
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