Related posts
Erik Hoel Newsletter
The subject this post names, from the same vocabulary the directory files beliefs under, and the words it uses that this site has seen least often elsewhere. Posts are matched on those words alone — nothing here is a summary of this one.
Top people
Showing Profile →
Hiding
Hiding
19 September
18 September
15 September
-
korrents.com
Tokens are not the true unit of AI inference, because better models yield more problem-solving per token.Their words
Although you pay for AI by the token, that's not the unit of inference, because you get more problem solving per token as models improve.
14 September
-
Their words
foundation is ostensibly a sci-fi series about empires, psychohistory, and hard technology, but really it's about individuals with extreme agency and puzzle-solving ability having wildly outsized impact on a universe that would otherwise just sit there waiting to decay
9 September
-
Their words
OpenAI solving one of the most famous math problems is extremely impressive, and of little impact to most people's lives; Meta's Muse agent launch has the potential to be the exact opposite.
7 September
-
Their words
I agree with Jakub that alignment is not a side problem, it is the central problem, if you ‘solved alignment’ in the relevant senses the rest becomes easy and if you don’t the rest is impossible or worse
-
Their words
If you're lamenting writing code by hand like something you love is being taken away from you, see if you can fall in love with solving problems instead. Maybe you'll find out that's what you really loved the whole time
-
korrents.com
The case for building AGI has always been framed around invention, such as curing cancer or solving fusion energy.Their words
The narrative around why building AGI was a good idea has always been about invention -- "it will cure cancer", "it will solve fusion energy", etc.
3 September
2 September
-
korrents.com
Witnessing suffering, rather than solving it, may be the only way we can truly comprehend it.Their words
Seeing suffering, being made to witness it, is not of course a solution to suffering. But perhaps, it's the only comprehension we can really possess.
13 August
12 August
-
Their words
Models being stagnant in long-form, non-fiction writing should be alarming to those reliant on models autonomously solving grand, open science problems in the near future.
-
Their words
and trying to fold two boxes together isn't useful data that will teach the model how to get better at the task. And so that would be kind of wasting a lot of time on the robot attempting to go down the wrong path for solving the problem. And so instead of spending a lot of time trying to do that task, what we'll do is we'll actually have a human intervene and show the robot what to do and how to recover from that situation.
11 August
-
Lovedrcmnd.app
Structure and Interpretation of Computer ProgramsTheir words
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) by Gerald Jay Sussman and Hal Abelson. SICP is my all-time favourite programming book. It's also where I learned about the power of wishful thinking when coding. SICP uses wishful thinking as a design tool: write code as if the abstraction already existed. Pretend. Then, once the ideal abstraction has taken shape, you go ahead and implement those functions. This meta-level is what made SICP so valuable. Ultimately, it's a book that teaches how to think about code and problem solving. I'm tempted to even say that SICP is more a work of art than a pure coding book, but I won't go there. A beautiful book.
7 August
-
korrents.com
Solving a systemic problem by doubling down on the same approach risks creating uncontrollable feedback loops.Their words
As a general matter, trying to solve a systemic problem by doubling down risks creating out-of-control feedback loops.
30 July
From one piece Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AI 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
-
Their words
And often you can actually make the model work better and succeed at that kind of problem by not just adjusting the model parameters which is hard to do from the outside but from you know creating better guidelines for the model you know writing skills for the model to know how to use different tools that would be incredibly useful for solving this particular class of problem.
-
Their words
Um, and that's a very very useful general technique is you know inference time compute to perform search over plausible ways of solving the problem that can get much much higher performance or much more reliability in longunning agent flows.
22 July
-
On changing their mind
If you had asked me this question in the lead up to my 2019 book, Ultralearning, I would have said no. I was a strong advocate for doing hard problem solving and the associated mental effort it requires as a way to learn difficult skills.
19 July
-
Their words
In a world of AI with agents operating across multiple systems, wanting source of truth data, the importance of having preferred paved paths that get the most of the benefits and produce some guardrails so we can make sure we're doing good work, common infrastructure, common paved paths, solving problems once with a core set of capabilities becomes more important.
8 July
-
korrents.com
AI systems are now capable of meaningful contributions to formal mathematics, not only informal problem-solving.Their words
These developments inform our position that AI systems are now capable of meaningful contributions to formal mathematics, not merely informal problem-solving.
9 June
27 May
-
Their words
General problem solving abilities are neither learned nor taught. While some problem-solving methods have broader applicability than others (such as the scientific process of hypothesis testing), students learn these methods better when they’re explicitly taught rather than simply giving students projects and hoping they’ll reinvent them on their own.
24 April
-
Their words
Canada and much of Europe have adopted different interrogation techniques — such as the PEACE method — which emphasize collecting reliable information over coercion. These approaches still garner confessions; they’re just more reliable.
29 March
-
Their words
The product you build is just solving a problem. So, is that like is the more you do that, the better you become at problem solving. And one thing I do believe that it will never change that there will always be problems to solve.
28 March
20 March
From one piece Terence Tao – How the world’s top mathematician uses AI 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
-
Their words
Um so yeah, the the the um the core of what I do, like actually solving um the most difficult part of of a math problem, that hasn't changed too much. I still use pen and paper for that.
-
Their words
So, I think AI-type tools we really will will actually revolutionize the ex- the experimental side of math where where um you don't care so much about uh individual problems and and the process of solving them, but you you want to gather just large-scale data about about what things work, what things don't.
3 March
-
korrents.com
Solving a problem yourself, without searching or prompting, is a form of exercise -- the help makes you weaker.Their words
My brain feels stronger because I work through the problem instead of prompting it away.
18 February
-
Their words
Forecasting AI capabilities is closer in kind to solving a thermodynamics equation than solving the three-body problem.
13 February
-
Their words
I think the trillions of dollars a year market, maybe all of the national security implications and the safety implications that I wrote about in adolescence of technology can happen without it, but I I I also think we, and I imagine others, are working on it. And I think there's a good chance that that, you know, that we get there within the next year or two.
12 February
-
Their words
If you get really good at coding that means you have to be really good at general purpose problem solving. So that's a skill, right? And that just maps into other domains.
8 February
-
korrents.com
Most current software and ways of solving problems are structured the wrong way for the agent era.Their words
Most software is the wrong shape now. Most of the ways we try to solve problems are the wrong shape.
6 February
-
korrents.com
In iterative problem-solving, each failure has value because it rules out one way that doesn't work.Their words
Failure is a good thing because it teaches us another way of how it's not to be accomplished.
30 January
-
korrents.com
Solving your community's problems, not just doing your passion for pay, is the path to a profitable business.Their words
Just doing your thing for money rarely works. My personal take on "follow your passion" is this: find the place where other people have the same passion, then solve their problems.
Follow Your Passion (But Not Like That)thebootstrappedfounder.com
29 December 2025
-
Lovedrcmnd.app
BreakneckTheir words
Wang argues that the US & China each have a dominant form of government problem-solving
19 December 2025
-
Likedrcmnd.app
Claude CodeTheir words
Claude Code (CC) emerged as the first convincing demonstration of what an LLM Agent looks like - something that in a loopy way strings together tool use and reasoning for extended problem solving.
18 November 2025
-
korrents.com
Solving a problem yourself, without searching or prompting, is a form of exercise -- the help makes you weaker.Their words
Learning requires an investment of effort, and AI will make us stupider if that effort is avoided.
21 October 2025
17 October 2025
-
Their words
a lot of what looks like learning is actually a lot more maturation of the brain and I think that actually very little reinforcement learning for animals and I think a lot of the reinforcement learning is actually like more like motor tasks. It's not intelligence tasks. So I actually kind of think humans don't actually like really use RL roughly speaking is what I would say.
30 September 2025
-
Their words
The investigation itself should have never been started. It's an absurd and harmful way of solving an issue such as complicated as regulating social media. It is just the wrong tool.
18 September 2025
-
korrents.com
A job title is a calcification of how a company once solved a problem, not a description of what a person is.Their words
you are you are a sales operations expert, right? Like what is that? That's that's that that's like a title for a particular way how companies end up solving a particular operational problem they had at some point.
23 July 2025
-
Their words
So picking the right question is the hardest part of science and making the right hypothesis. And that's what today's systems definitely they can't do. So I often say it's harder to come up with a conjecture, a really good conjecture than it is to solve it.
14 June 2025
From one piece Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #472 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
-
Their words
Yeah, these are great work that shows what's possible. The approach doesn't scale currently. Three days of Google's server time can solve one high school math format there. This is not a scalable prospect, especially with the exponential increase as the complexity increases.
-
Their words
It's becoming much more a thing of the past. So I think you just have to be adaptable and flexible. I think people will have to get skills that are transferable, like learning one specific programing language or one specific subject of mathematics or something. That itself is not a super transferable skill, but sort of knowing how to reason with abstract concepts or how to problem solve when things go wrong.
20 September 2024
-
Usesrcmnd.app
ChatGPTTheir words
This includes platforms like ChatGPT and Claude. These are my go-to for brainstorming, writing, problem-solving, and even some coding tasks.
15 July 2024
30 January 2023
10 June 2022
-
Their words
The best and easiest-found-by-optimization algorithms for solving problems we want an AI to solve, readily generalize to problems we’d rather the AI not solve; you can’t build a system that only has the capability to drive red cars and not blue cars, because all red-car-driving algorithms generalize to the capability to drive blue cars.
15 July 2020
Nothing matches.
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter, especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked article and a belief on korrents.com are left in their original language.