Rachel Thomas argues LLMs discourage building intuition by disrupting long-term memory
math_rachel · x · 2026-10-21
fast.ai co-founder Rachel Thomas reflects on how LLMs affect learning, quoting Joshua Foer: "How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember."
- Her core claim: intuition is built either by working on a single topic for a very long time or by actively learning (memorizing) new concepts — and LLM usage discourages both.
- Before LLMs, concepts encountered daily seeped into long-term memory through repetition; now, we keep feeding the brain new concepts, never giving it the chance to commit anything to long-term memory.
A notable voice weighing in on the debate over whether AI-assisted learning undermines deep understanding.
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