I am currently trying to figure out how to spend the next semester – I have no courses to teach (for once), plenty of sabbatical time banked up, and a need to get seriously up to speed not just on the current state of tech evolution, but also on putting things in perspective.
So this (hat tip to Bjørn Olstad) podcast was a great inspiration:
This is an extremely wide ranging conversation (more than two hours) and fascinating in many dimensions, not least the way these guys communicate. It reminds me of a passage in Cryptonomicon where Waterhouse (the elder) and Turing communicate by “[…not] talking so much as mentioning certain ideas and then leaving the other to work through the implications. This is a highly efficient way to communicate; it eliminates much of the redundancy […]”. This is done at roughly 1.6x of normal conversation speed and is a delight for someone whose mind tend to wander off when things get too slow.
It also shows that much changes, but much is also the same – for instance, anyone building tools will inevitably discuss the tools they use to build those tools, and I get flashbacks to hearing Eric Raymond discuss key bindings in EMACS or Don Knuth explaining why he built TeK. LLMs, to me, is not so much something revolutionary as the next evolutionary step in our way of interacting with information – we still have work to do on the reward mechanisms, for instance, and we need to figure out a way of asserting scientific authority, so that the most popular and important LLM-based clones will be that of Steven Pinker rather than Steve Bannon. Which actually is kind of important.
Anyway, I really like the vision of building real tutors – and finding the distillation algorithm that matches the explanation to the student, whether you are learning for fun or immediate use.
Digression: As a first-year student, I was given a book of microeconomics, which tried to explain marginal cost through an elaborate example of someone growing tomatoes and selling them, wordily going through pages of text discussing the cost implications of adding another plant, etc. I read and reread it and felt my head swimming, then found a footnote after about 10 pages saying: “For those who have had calculus, the marginal cost is the derivative of the cost function.” I thought “Well, why didn’t you say so right away?” Building a tools that condenses formulaic academic papers into brilliant lunch table explanations – one of the many ideas in this interview – seems to me both a very worthy vision and a method for doing something about the academic research process, where the medium very much has become, if not the message, and least the reward mechanism.
Oh well. But it would be fun to assign this interview for my tech strat course next year – it would go over the head of many students, but for some of them, it would be a great inspiration.
And as a teacher, that is the most you can aspire to, methinks.
That will be all for now.
Applied Abstractions 
In managerial economics, marginal cost is the difference in total cost of making N+1 units instead of N. The units are discrete rather than continuous; taking the derivative of TC gives you the instantaneous rate of increase as if they were continuous. Going from 0 to 1 is an especially big decision; to calculate MC correctly using calculus, one must (while solemnly intoning the fundamental theorem of calculus) integrate that derivative and evaluate at 0 and 1.
Needless to say, evaluating this integral is not the preferred way of introducing marginal cost to MBA students, 50% of whom are mathphobic to the extreme. That’s why the derivative explanation is secondary to the “grow one more” explanation.
Lots of engineers in my classes tried to take the shortcut and got ridiculously wrong answers (which totally ignored fixed costs, for example — the derivative of the constant is zero) whereas the accountants who calculated TC(1)-TC(0) got it right every time. Over the course of 10 years, I remember exactly one student who did the calculus version correctly.
And I thought – that must be Dave speaking!
Yes, I agree with you both on the math and the mathphobia – but the shortcut, the mot juste, made me understand what the long yarn about the tomato plants was all about. Which is why I remember it, 45 years later!