Pi creature caretaker. Contact/faq: https://xitter.twitterapi.xyz/t.co/brZwdQfdif
Joined October 2014
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@stevenstrogatz on rizz being in demand.
Incidentally, if I had to sum up why talking with him is so consistently delightful in one word, rizz is not a bad choice!
In my recent conversation with Grant Sanderson on his podcast, I mentioned the value of "rizz" for aspiring mathematicians. Grant laughed at that and then Business Insider asked about it (businessinsider.com/cornell-…) so I'd like to say more about what I meant.
Never a dull moment chatting with Steve Strogatz
Thank you to Grant Sanderson @3blue1brown for having me on his podcast – and I hope you enjoy our open-hearted, tentative, exploratory conversation about math in the age of AI. We tried out a lot of ideas on each other. youtu.be/xUSznTR2cwc
I had fun chatting with Exa for their inclusion on the 3b1b talent page. It got me thinking about how a lot of the goals for better search end up aligning with goals of better credit assignment/attribution.
We sat down with @3blue1brown to discuss our research vision of "Attention over all the world's information."
Plus why knowledge should not live in model weights, the compression trick behind cheaper retrieval, and why we hire through work trials.
1:20 – What is “attention over everything”?
4:46 – A knowledge graph of the whole web
11:32 – How do you evaluate search for AI agents?
15:13 – Why not put everything in the weights?
22:55 – Why Exa hires through work trials
25:15 – The compression trick behind cheaper retrieval
27:40 – Dealing with misinformation
Grant Sanderson (@3blue1brown) predicts that in 3 years, there will be an end-to-end AI generated channel better than his! 🤯
He admits to feeling resigned about it:
"There's a part of me thinks, 'hey, even if it only lasts a couple glorious years, like, to fully embrace that.'"
mathematicians have been cooked so he appreciates more deeply than others how creators are in the crosshairs
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Oh, to be clear, I will very happily keep making videos long past when LLMs can generate clear explainers. I hope people have found value in my videos because they explain things clearly, but that's not even the highest-order bit for what makes a video land, in my opinion.
I’m very opinionated. So it’s nearly impossible for me to hear someone’s arguments and *not* find something I disagree with. (This includes reading things I myself wrote years - or weeks - ago.) And yet the amazing Grant Sanderson @3blue1brown has put out a long, detailed video on the future of mathematics, in which I cannot find a single flaw. I’ll be sending this to every PhD student and postdoc I know, and strongly recommend everyone watch it.
youtube.com/watch?v=LKrwhjOI…
(Of course I tried to say many of the same things in my conversation with Thomas Koberda. But Grant’s version, unsurprisingly, does an infinitely better job at communicating those ideas!)
As to whether skills gained from math are transferable, I’d agree a fuller video would dig deeper into assessing that. One could take the stance that technical knowledge is obviated when AIs can solve technical problems, but what I’m seeing now is that
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Your conversation with Thomas Koberda was fantastic, and I've also been enthusiastically recommending it to people. It definitely says much more than I did here!
(Link, for anyone unfamiliar: proofsandprompts.com/2026/10…)
Some reflections on AI in math. I found it helpful to simply list out the various parts of what a mathematician does, why math is valuable, and where the funding comes from. From there, what happens if AI gets more capable?
youtu.be/LKrwhjOI8Nc
Grant Sanderson retweeted
We sat down with @3blue1brown to discuss our research vision of "Attention over all the world's information."
Plus why knowledge should not live in model weights, the compression trick behind cheaper retrieval, and why we hire through work trials.
1:20 – What is “attention over everything”?
4:46 – A knowledge graph of the whole web
11:32 – How do you evaluate search for AI agents?
15:13 – Why not put everything in the weights?
22:55 – Why Exa hires through work trials
25:15 – The compression trick behind cheaper retrieval
27:40 – Dealing with misinformation
YouTube plans to introduce AB testing for videos. I agree with many others that this is a bad idea.
Maybe you squeeze out some more watch time in the short term, but undermining a sense of a shared viewing experience among the audience is too steep a price.
1) The videos I like best feel intentionally crafted, and the whole creative process feels soured the more my own act of viewing it feels like the consequence of some optimization process.
The last IMO problem AI could not solve.
For when you want to sit down for a longer problem-solving saga, here's the full video: youtu.be/Nbwv5wHQoj0
New puzzle, as part of the series of monthly puzzlers with @MoMath1.
As a variant: What if you start with pegs in all four corners of the square, and you want them to end up on corners of a bigger square?
Our video mentioned by @3blue1brown on @dwarkeshpodcast 🗣️🙏
Even Claude doesn't know where that quote is from btw so I might have been heavily misquoting something