Grant Sanderson (@3blue1brown) – AI and the future of math

It's weird to listen to 3blue1brown without the cute visuals

Dwarkesh, I'm kind of bummed that you forgot the most salient question for Grant, which is "How'd you get those triceps?"

Omg " build a man a fire and he's warm for one night, set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life" Grant I never knew your humor got that gritty! Fantastic

All these hints of the Galois quintic 3b1b video make me salivate

Grant’s thinking is amazingly clear

(First time ever for me to comment before actually watching the show.) Absolutely awesome to have Grant on your show. His work on YT meant more for my understanding of math than 10 years of public school/university. I am so looking forward to this :)))

Very happy about this collab!

One thing I'm very excited about is the formal verification efforts being accelerated by AI. I have a hope that as the library of formalized lemmas, theorems, and definitions grow, it's going to enable even more machine automation and verification. I don't think it's crazy to think that in perhaps 10-15 years almost all mathematical knowledge has been formalized in a way that enables models to add new knowledge and connections to math quite rapidly.

about "learning with LLms": i have been a teacher for maths, physics and computer science for a few decades, taught "in presence" and during the pandemic online in zoom meetings and with video lessons and narrated screen captures with/without me visible in the corner and i have been using LLMs basically since they emerged for coding, learning, summarizing, mathematical "work" like turning PDFs into latex and stuff like that. my key learnings from my experience in the "using them for leaning/teaching" are: 1) the style/character/enthusiasm/experience/knowledge of the teacher plays a very large role in teaching/learning and it is more important than the subject, the method, the medium, the material used. 2) with a "good" teacher: students learn better in a setting with the teacher physically present than with the same teacher saying the excact same words in a video or in an online setting 3) a student already curious and used to learning on his/her own with books, online material, ... and trained in critical thinking and questioning sources and can profit a lot from using an LLM. i think the reason is that they already have an internal structure and mental model for what they know and what they dont know, so they are better asking relevant questions and seeing the gaps of their own understanding and the explanations they are getting. e.g. if you just ask an llm "teach me linear algebra" it is a way worse experience than asking "i am learning linear algebra and did not understand how inverting a matrix works and what it is used for. can you give me an explanation with numerical examples and usecases". 4) as a teacher using an LLM was really useful for: creating variations of existing teaching material, like more practice questions (i give it 10 integrals and ask for similar problems, especially gemini was good at this), formatting latex / typst documents or turning scans into latex/typst, creating software solution that create practice material for students, planning courses / breakdown topics into smaller lessons.

Fascinating. One that will be very interesting to come back to in 10 years time. You are doing a great service Dwarkesh and deserve your success.