AI Gave Us Answers. The Most Expensive Thing Is the Question.

The dark night gave me dark eyes, yet I use them to seek the light.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

AI gave us answers. Yet we finally discovered that the most expensive thing is the question.

“ The dark night gave me dark eyes, yet I use them to seek the light. ” —Gu Cheng, A Generation, April 1979

Today, 47 years later, AI gave us answers. Yet we use it to seek the questions that truly matter.

Yes, the most expensive thing is the question. It is taste. It is elegance.

It is light. It is electricity. It is energy. It is the value far from the crowd. It is the outliers.

Nothing in the world has changed. And yet the world is changing so quickly.

Last month, we saw a meteor. Yes, the funniest thing is that Wu, the Wu of Wu et al. 2024 meteor, finally saw a meteor two years later.

Yes, not one person in this car is in CS, yet every one of us is doing AI. Beneath the Milky Way, Shuhan, Zhongling, and I talked about the meaning of life. One is in MSIS. One is a PhD in Operations. “Lie flat.” “Go get some fries by the sea.” Then Mingda, Cai Shuixing, and I traded melodramatic relationship stories that began with, “I have a friend”; talked about why meteors come to Earth, why they glow, and what plasma is. Cai Shuixing insisted on taking that photo that was both hilarious and dreamcore. Unbeatable.

A meteor flashed before my eyes. I was no less awestruck than when I saw the giant wind turbines on the grasslands.

This year, I heard the NUS rooster crow and sheep baa in Hulunbuir; rode a roller coaster as the plane passed through thick clouds—a roller plane—and welcomed the first light of dawn over the North American continent.

This is how life goes, flowing from one moment to the next. Humans should not conquer nature. It is already enough just to pass through these moments.

AI can already answer so many questions. We still have meteors to watch and people to talk nonsense with.

Perhaps this is the best of times.