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vatsachakon The internet discovers TLA+. Now what?

If you don't even check what you're formalizing you must REALLY trust the agents.

I guess if they found real verifiable bugs then it's good

vatsachakon We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians

The models get things wrong in the way that humans don't.

They will never make a logical error yet make terrible assumptions and poor long scale decisions.

Wake me up when an agent swarm can write gcc in a box sealed from the internet.

vatsachakon Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead'

- Only highly self motivated learners can learn from a book. Most students needed lecture and office hours.

- Students (Humans) aren't going to struggle on average. They're always going to take the path of least resistance. I know of some successful algebraic geometers who did indeed hit their head on heartshorne in grad school.

- a) Structured content generated on long scales is way more effective because you can tie together many details. It would be weird to learn from chapters, each unrelated to each other in style and content.

- b) We're actually not short on students getting help. Office hours were abound at my university. I actually found that customized help was detrimental; if a TA answered every question a student had, the student wouldn't put the effort into trying to learn the material. Imo you want to see students struggle. I've seen students go from F to A- by just forcing them to struggle on the content.

- Not really. I discuss complicated math and programming with models regularly and when I say something like "actually you're wrong" they say "yes, you're right". If I ask them to be confident, they will not change their wrong answers. Humans have a much better conception of self and opinions than LLMs

vatsachakon Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead'

Okay I was a professor for a bit. Few things I found

- LLMs cannot motivate a person to learn because they aren't people

- Learning requires rewiring your brain; you need to try and read content without explanations of every question you might have. Struggling is required for learning

- LLMs cannot generate structured content on long scales. I have tried this many times. Your average TA can easily write a calculus textbook.

- LLMs are RLHFd to just agree with you. Learning requires disagreement and tutoring requires assuredness

vatsachakon My weird new hobby: Wandering around Tokyo on Google Maps

Gaijin moment

vatsachakon Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead'

Only if you already could read the pdf yourself. Otherwise you're learning without structure. Think CS undergrad vs script-kiddie

vatsachakon Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead'

That is a bad idea, but at least they primarily interact with other kids and teachers

vatsachakon Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead'

It can be worse. The prolonged interaction with AI means that your paying 40k a year to make your child an Ipad kid

vatsachakon Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead'

Okay, please ask an LLM to produce a 200 page intro book to Abstract Algebra. Even Astra high can barely write 30 pages coherently.

Humans have LOOONG contexts

vatsachakon Contrastive Language Models

Why is ML so misleading these days? No this model does not score 80%+ on DeepSWE, it merely chooses the best possible idea of Opus 5 at every stage, increasing the performance by 5%.

vatsachakon Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead'

Learning from an LLM is nearly impossible because it has no opinions on how to structure the content.

It's great at giving you the illusion that you're learning though.

If you know an outline of the material and want to structure it your own way (ex, explain attention to me using Haskell notation) it's really great. But otherwise, human notes win.

vatsachakon Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead'

Sounds like a good way to f**k up your kid

vatsachakon GPT-6 Sol and Luna

I really wish that LLMs could generate good quality code without repeated instructing.

Here's where I think the issue is; they are trained to solve a problem. Not how, just whether or not they did.

Example: I asked Luna to use parser combinators to parse an Excel sheet that was represented as sparse triples (row, column, data). It imported the library and wrote spaghetti if-statement soup to get it to work. I asked Astra to fix it and it just refined the spaghetti slightly. I was able to browbeat Astra into actually using the library to complete the task. Was it faster than me doing it by hand? Probably. Was it more frustrating? Way more.

And every time I review vibe code it's always the same. Bespoke functions everywhere, no greater themes or ideas. No bigger picture. Your code can't support much if it has no central themes. You can probably one-shot a three js game to post on r/singularity for updoots. Not real code though.

I feel like the optimal way to use an LLM is to code until you feel like the rest of a problem is trivial and then you hand it off. And sometimes they still erase my code and add their own style lol

vatsachakon GPT-6 Sol and Luna

These things still can't solve problems in the right way. The benchmarks prove that they can solve problems. But in practice they will make your codebase look like the output of some compilation process

vatsachakon GPT-6 Sol and Luna

Tell the model, spawn a <model_n> to do <task_n> and it will do it

vatsachakon Writing Rust code that's fast by asking agents to make the code faster

I've found that this is a good way to introduce bespoke code into the codebase whose perf gains don't generalize.

Unless its an easy memory/parallel/algorithmic win, its not worth it.

vatsachakon The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence

Okay so more ivory tower slop.

Why aren't they consulting the younger mathematicians whom this actually affects?

Anyways, this is overblown. Let me know when AI swarms can create a research program or library from scratch. We're really missing long term planning and abstraction creation in these things.

vatsachakon MiMo v2.6

Wow, the chinese labs are getting good at advertising model releases. The moat is thin.

Some features of the release I like:

- Demonstration of diverse tasks, such as using a DAW

- Graphs from various benchmarks and price ranges

- Real world use of the model in scientific environments

vatsachakon Why do we need human mathematicians anymore?

They used an agent swarm. Could humanity? Of course; it was close to being solved. It might have taken five years

vatsachakon Fable 5 – Median thinking declined in August

THIS EXACTLY.

The only regulation that we need right now is the model that's on tap

vatsachakon Why do we need human mathematicians anymore?

You're right. But...

Spending 132 billion tokens is definitely way more energy than human mathematicians would have thrown at the problem and probably would have solved within two years.

vatsachakon Why do we need human mathematicians anymore?

He's expressed similar fears of being replaced in a recent talk

vatsachakon Why do we need human mathematicians anymore?

No it's not though. Can OpenAI prove Navier-Stokes from a vacuum with no human knowledge?

vatsachakon Why do we need human mathematicians anymore?

Why is Terry Tao even talking these arguments when all OpenAI did was a sophisticated brute force search with LLMs?

Give them Navier-Stokes in a vacuum

vatsachakon Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM

China should invest in an analog inference chip. It's a hail mary but why not.

vatsachakon If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it

No. Starting in a sandbox given only the C specification and assembly code specification build a gcc equivalent (maintainability and performance) from the ground up.

vatsachakon If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it

No, not that is does anything more...

It's that gcc is an old and reliable piece of software built on abstractions that have stood the test of time.

vatsachakon If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it

I said gcc, not a C compiler

vatsachakon If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it

Okay tell me why that's not even close to gcc. You can use an LLM

vatsachakon If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it

Math academia 2025

> Sorry, only epic problem solvers allowed here

Math academia 2026

> We were more than just problem solvers

I think people are overblowing this though. Wake me up when GPT-whatever writes gcc from scratch, then by the Curry-Howard I'd be impressed