ckcheng
a year ago
Tao comparing o1 to a mediocre, but not completely incompetent, graduate student went viral. He clarifies that he means it more like a mediocre or incompetent research assistant.
Tao means that it's not like a grad student who's able to learn and do more and more on their own with his specific guidance (it can learn, but Tao's guidance is watered down with all the other things the LLM learns from), but rather AI can serve as a kind of mediocre or incompetent assistant doing the manual, repetitive, grunt work typical in math research.
Tao seems to see that maybe a human can do much more "inspired" work with very little data, by using AI to do much more of the manual, repetitive, grunt work with much more data.