Simon Willison’s Weblog

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.

For example, suppose a colleague has a question she thinks I might know the answer to. Good news: I have some intuition and say something. Then we realize it doesn’t quite make sense, and go back and forth until we converge on something correct.

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.

To be clear o3-mini-high is orders of magnitude less useful for this sort of thing than talking to an expert colleague. But still useful along similar dimensions (and with a much broader knowledge base).

— Daniel Litt