{"podcast":{"title":"Now I Get It, with Dr. Andy","slug":"now-i-get-it-with-dr-andy-6931085","podcast_index_feed_id":6931085,"rss_url":"https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/665f291eaa134f001225717a","website_url":"https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/now-i-get-it-with-dr-andy","image_url":"https://assets.pippa.io/shows/cover/1717512415837-185b40da2d16be348106d3f9cdadbde8.jpeg","author":"Andrew Winkler","episode_count":50,"summary":"I’m Andrew Winkler, a former Stanford and Columbia math professor. We’ll explore the most interesting insights I’ve come across, ranging across the mental landscape: math, science, personality, how we think and feel, and how we love or feel unloved. We’ll give answers to all the most confusing questions everyone has, have new books and authors, and reach new understandings. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.","last_synced_at":"2026-07-23T18:18:02.871283+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/now-i-get-it-with-dr-andy-6931085"},"episode":{"title":"Why I Built an AI Reading Tool for Ancient Languages (And What Six Months of AI Progress Taught Me)","slug":"why-i-built-an-ai-reading-tool-for-ancient-languages-and-what-six-months-of-ai-progress-taught-me","published_at":"2026-07-23T09:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/now-i-get-it-with-dr-andy-6931085/why-i-built-an-ai-reading-tool-for-ancient-languages-and-what-six-months-of-ai-progress-taught-me","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/now-i-get-it-with-dr-andy-6931085","url":"https://shows.acast.com/now-i-get-it-with-dr-andy/episodes/why-i-built-an-ai-reading-tool-for-ancient-languages-and-wha","audio_url":"https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/665f291eaa134f001225717a/e/6a5dcf6fa87bf583f4b4adcd/media.mp3","summary":"I'm digging into something that's genuinely changed how I spend my free time: using AI to build the tool I've wished existed for decades, one that helps me read the world's great literature in its original language. I tell the story of a chance dinner with a Hertz Fellow who turned out to be a major figure at Anthropic, and how that connection eventually led me back to a project I'd tried and abandoned before, a computer-assisted reader for Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic texts. Six months ago, the AI models I tried couldn't get past writing a single working line of code. This time was different, and I walk through exactly what changed, what these models are actually good at, and where they still fall apart. I also get into the weeds a bit, sharing my process for getting better results out of these tools, why my public writing on Quora turns out to matter, and a wild multi-round debugging session with Gemini that kept insisting it had \"finally\" found all the bugs. I close with a personal aside into a physics insight I've been chasing since the 1970s, and how an AI helped me push it further, even if I lost most of the conversation to a very avoidable software glitch. Along the way I make my case for why AI right now is best thought of as a tireless, brilliant, but occasionally hallucinating army of interns, not a replacement for human judgment. In this episode you will learn: (00:00) How a chance dinner with a Hertz Fellow connected to Anthropic changed my skepticism about the current state of AI (03:37) Why I've always wished a computer could do the tedious lexical lookup work of reading Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic texts (06:35) What large language models actually are under the hood, and why they can \"spout like an idiot\" and \"pontificate like a sage\" with equa…","meta_description":"I'm digging into something that's genuinely changed how I spend my free time: using AI to build the tool I've wished existed for decades, one that helps m…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":1541,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/now-i-get-it-with-dr-andy-6931085/episodes/why-i-built-an-ai-reading-tool-for-ancient-languages-and-what-six-months-of-ai-progress-taught-me/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/now-i-get-it-with-dr-andy-6931085/why-i-built-an-ai-reading-tool-for-ancient-languages-and-what-six-months-of-ai-progress-taught-me.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}