Comment by hellohello2
12 hours ago
AI can do things on its own, without you understanding them yes.
But if you are trying to understand something well, there is no better tool for helping you than AI.
12 hours ago
AI can do things on its own, without you understanding them yes.
But if you are trying to understand something well, there is no better tool for helping you than AI.
I think that AI can sometimes help a lot. But I think doing it correctly is a tightrope and one misstep can easily have terrible results.
First issue is this result from reinforcement learning that tells you that you really want to be doing a large fraction of stuff stuff on policy when possible.
It's true of RL agents, but I think it's actually just a universal learning result that applies to humans. Sure you could ask AI to solve a difficult math problem step by step, and what it can expose you to is tricks you had no idea about and the general method of solving such a problem.
But there is something about the work that you produced without external influence (the on policy epispde) that is sort of irreplaceably important.
The second is that there is something about the speed and conciseness of information AI presents to you. It seems like a super power but there are two problems I have with it.
A) It's too fast. Unless you are artificially slowing yourself down by reading like one sentence per minute there is something about how quickly all you want gets presented to you that seems to have a strong in one ear out the other sort of effect. You need to slow down. You need to appreciate the details.
B) It's also often too consise. There is something about doing research yourself that lets you stumble upon something new that you might not have thought was helpful. Lots of times I've found lots of amazing nuggets on missteps and tangents.
There are more issues as well, but these are the major two I get concerned about. Like you need to be cognizant of the work not being done when you are using AI to do research. And imo it's deeply problematic for young students who have literally never done the hard work of trying to answer questions themselves. Because they might not realize the problem.
> But if you are trying to understand something well, there is no better tool for helping you than AI
Could not disagree more.
The best way to understand something deeply is to practice it. AI is anti-practice. It's like trying to learn something by following a YouTube video step by step. It has an outcome and it feels productive but it's not going to stick in your head at all. It's not practice
I would say a better analogy is using Google… you can use it as a tool to seek information and deepen your understanding. But it requires your brain to be engaged and to be putting that stream of knowledge into practice.
you can use AI to get a faster explanation for what's happening in a big codebase, it makes the timelines on developing features much lower from my experience
am I losing out on something by not having to spend hours clicking through redundant parts of a large codebase to get a concrete answer on something? doesn't feel like it