As mathematicians grapple with the impact of AI on their field, Grant Sanderson came out with this interview – he runs one of my favourite YouTube Channels 3Blue1Brown.
Sanderson has that rare gift of making very hard ideas feel human. Not easy exactly, but approachable.
He has a new project, aiming to explain the impact of AI on maths.
One idea from the conversation really stayed with me: the difference between building mountains ⛰️ vs finding little lightning bolts ⚡ between existing ideas.
⛰️ = how some breakthroughs require huge new structures: whole theories, new fields, or years of work.
But other breakthroughs come from spotting a bridge between things that already exist. A data scientist sees one thing. A marketer sees another. They happen to talk over lunch, and suddenly a hidden connection appears. ⚡
Most businesses I speak to are not short of information. They have
- customer data,
- marketing data,
- GA data,
- transaction & SKU data,
- reviews data,
- CRM data,
- +at least one mysterious spreadsheet that everyone is afraid to touch.
The hard part is rarely getting the data. The hard part is seeing what connects.
Where does acquisition quality show up three months later? Where are teams looking at the same customer and seeing completely different stories?
This is the bit we love helping with at Vuzo… the moment where a few disconnected pieces suddenly join up ⚡ and someone can make a better decision.
Sometimes you do need to build the ⛰️. The model, the test framework, the GTM container, the cookie policy. But quite often the breakthrough starts smaller than that. A connection. A reframing. A better question. A little lightning bolt. ⚡
Sanderson is sure that AI will help us find more of those. Maybe the new human job is in deciding which connections are useful, which questions are worth asking, and how to explain the answer in a way that makes someone actually care.
