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Comment by ChaitanyaSai | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand any of the math here, but I had two thoughts. Soon we'll have explainer agents that translate these according to my level so I can, with effort and interest, follow along and stretch my understanding boundary bit by bit.

Two, at some point AIs will be able to use other context like the fact that this is Terrence Tao and not your average Joe and change how it answers, either in tone or structure.

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GPT 5.6 already is an explainer agent.

Fork Tao’s convo and prompt this (with your own math level described).

GPT did a great job of translating Tao’s questions and concepts (e.g. “pre image”) into a progression I could understand.

“Ok I have a PhD in financial math and undergrad in engineering math. I have almost zero knowledge of polynomial algebra / geometry, I know what a polynomial is and what roots are but not much beyond that. Could you try and explain to my level what questions the user I the conversation has asked and what the agent has responded with, we can probably go user query by user query to build up”

I want to be able to take a conversation and ask for subconversations as red pen annotations "on the side". The linear nature of the context tends to frustrate this.

There are already browser extensions similar to this.

One thing I've repeatedly told people is that chatbots are often the most patient teachers we'll ever get (especially when explaining "stupid" questions) — compared to what we've encountered on StackOverflow or Reddit.

They lack the empathy to understand where and why you're struggling.

I've given private math lessons and seen students struggle with ai, even though ai gave the right answers.

My intuition is that humans spot xy problems easier when teaching (user ask x but really needs y), whereas llms will oblige writing about x.

That's an interesting observation. I wonder if simply prompting for that in your personal system prompt might help?

"Be aware of 'xy problems': when the user asks x but really, they need the answer to y to further their understanding. ..."

The models are so capable now I think a lot of these real limitations can be solved by prompting, harnesses or fine-tuning.

That's interesting, thanks for sharing. Can you please share a specific example of what you describe? Does the student stop asking why after a while?

Ok, that's fair, and I think that AI isn't that useful for people who don't really know what they want to learn or do.

What I had in mind (and found personally useful myself) was being able to ask a chatbot to break something down into simpler and simpler concepts, until my weak fundamentals or lack of formal education could grasp some bit of it.

I'm not sure many humans (or colleagues at a workplace) would have the patience to tolerate the stupid questions I've been asking.

Maybe that's a point in favor of LLMs? "XY problems" are my pet peevee, because nearly universally whenever I see one called out, it's actually the responder not being able to comprehend that the asker may actually just need X.

I'm not sure an AI will speed things up much. You would probably still need years of layers of foundational understanding to get the advanced material. We don't go through years of school to learn math just because teachers are bad - it's because complex subtle ideas are built on countless other ideas, and aren't necessarily compressible to something every layman can understand.

The years are broad though, the nice thing with AI explanations is that they can go deep quickly, and quite precisely down the path you need for your prior experience.

Oh for sure, I'm not denying the value of AI as a teacher, just saying that it's not going to speed things up much over a quality personal teacher/tutor.

Oh, but it will. Especially in math you depend on definitions and concepts defined earlier, and if you fall behind, perhaps in a class setting, it is hard to catch up, without having somebody who can explain it to you.

But, now, with world class knowledge possessing tutor, you can ask for an explanation of missed concepts, even embarrassingly stupid questions you would never ask a person.

It's not a path, it's a tree, and a downward-facing one at that. To understand the root, you have to understand all of the leaves first, and all of the nodes above them, all the way up.

Most people, if they haven't studied mathematics in university, would need to learn hundreds of concepts just to get to the leaves of the tree, and many of these concepts are truly difficult to understand, requiring weeks of study and practice.

Soon we'll have explainer agents that translate these according to my level so I can, with effort and interest, follow along and stretch my understanding boundary bit by bit.

That's not going to happen. Mathematics isn't just unfamiliar, it's truly difficult to understand. You have to put in a lot of work to understand each concept and the concepts build upon each other to form a vast tower of abstractions that has been growing for thousands of years. Just as there is no royal road to geometry, there is no elevator to the top of the tower.

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