Usefulness isn't only a matter of correctness
Daniel Litt (Asst. Prof of Mathetics at Univ Toronto) Posted last week about using o3-mini for mathematics.
His take was essentially, “better than o1, interesting wrong answers, very exciting!”
“it’s mostly wrong? and useful?”
Love his response:
Basically any resource on a difficult subject—a colleague, Google, a published paper—will be wrong or incomplete in various ways. Usefulness isn’t only a matter of correctness.
— Daniel Litt (@littmath) February 1, 2025
"It basically got everything wrong but you found it useful?" "The answer is yes"
Such a conversation is full of BS but crucially we can interrogate it and get something useful out of it in the end. Moreover this kind of back and forth allows us to get to the key point in a way that might be difficult when reading a difficult ~50-page paper.
— Daniel Litt (@littmath) February 1, 2025
I found that Daniel's experience matches my own.
"The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer." - Cunningham's Law
See Satya:
The emerging pattern I’m seeing in my own work is thinking with AI and collaborating with other people
— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) February 6, 2025
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