[HN Gopher] Study mode
___________________________________________________________________
Study mode
Author : meetpateltech
Score : 583 points
Date : 2025-07-29 17:01 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (openai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
| hahahacorn wrote:
| Ah, the advancing of humanity. A bespoke professor-quality
| instructor in everyone's pocket (or local library) available
| 24/7.
|
| Happy Tuesday!
| Spivak wrote:
| Professor might be overselling it but lecturer for undergrad
| and intro graduate courses for sure.
| qeternity wrote:
| I think this is overselling most professors.
| cma256 wrote:
| It's better than a professor in some respects. A professor
| can teach me about parser combinators but they probably can't
| teach me about a specific parser combinator library.
|
| There's a lot of specificity that AI can give over human
| instruction however it still suffers from lack of rigor and
| true understanding. If you follow well-trod paths its better
| but that negates the benefit.
|
| The future is bright for education though.
| bloomca wrote:
| I am not really sure how bright the future is.
|
| Sure, for some people it will be insanely good: you can go
| for as stupid questions as you need without feeling
| judgement, you can go deeper in specific topics, discuss
| certain things, skip some easy parts, etc.
|
| But we are talking about averages. In the past we thought
| that the collective human knowledge available via the
| Internet will allow everyone to learn. I think it is fair
| to say that it didn't change much in the grand scheme of
| things.
| tempfile wrote:
| Overselling is not the right word exactly. For some questions
| it will have professor-level understanding, and for other
| questions it will have worse-than-idiot-level understanding.
| Hopefully the students are able to identify which :-)
| MengerSponge wrote:
| I've found it generally has professor-level understanding
| in fields that are not your own.
|
| (Joke/criticism intended)
| volkk wrote:
| Not seeing it on my account, guess the roll out is actively
| happening (or gradual)?
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Me neither. Do you have the subscription? Maybe it's not on the
| free plan.
| zeppelin101 wrote:
| I have the $20 tier and I'm not seeing it, either.
|
| EDIT: literally saw it just now after refreshing. I guess
| they didn't roll it out immediately to everyone.
| swader999 wrote:
| Why do I still feel like I'll be paying hundreds of thousands of
| dollars for my children's education when all they're going to do
| is all learn through AI anyway.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Well, you're generally paying for the 8 hour daycare part
| before the education, right? That still needs human staff
| around unless you're doing distance learning
|
| e: if you mean university, fair. that'll be an interesting
| transition. I guess then you pay for the sports team and
| amenities?
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| At that price tag I assume they're referring to college, not
| grade school, so the "daycare" portion isn't relevant.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| No.
|
| In the US at least, most kids are in public schools and the
| collective community foots the bill for the "daycare", as you
| put it.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| At my university I took a physics course where the homework was
| always 4-6 gimmick questions or proofs that were so hard that
| we would form groups after class just to copy whoever could
| divine the solutions.
|
| I ultimately dropped the course and took it in the summer at a
| community college where we had the 20-30 standard practice
| problem homework where you apply what you learned in class and
| grind problems to bake it into core memory.
|
| AI would have helped me at least get through the uni course.
| But generally I think it's a problem with the school/class
| itself if you aren't learning most of what you need in class.
| teeray wrote:
| > or proofs that were so hard that we would form groups after
| class just to copy whoever could divine the solutions.
|
| These groups were some of the most valuable parts of the
| university experience for me. We'd get take-out, invade some
| conference room, and slam our heads against these questions
| well into the night. By the end of it, sure... our answers
| looked superficially similar, but it was because we had built
| a mutual, deep understanding of the answer--not just copying
| the answers.
|
| Even if you had only a rough understanding, the act of trying
| to teach it again to others in the group made you both
| understand it better.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I'm glad your groups were great, but this class was
| horrible and probably different from what you're thinking
| of. We weren't physics majors. We were trying to
| credentialize in a textbook, not come up with proofs to
| solve open ended riddles that most people couldn't solve.
| The homework should drill in the information of the class
| and ensure you learn the material.
|
| And we literally couldn't figure it out. Or the group you
| were in didn't have a physics rockstar. Or you weren't so
| social or didn't know anyone or you just missed an
| opportunity to find out where anyone was forming a group.
| It's not like the groups were created by the class. I'd
| find myself in a group of a few people and we just couldn't
| solve it even though we knew the lecture material.
|
| It was a negative value class that cost 10x the price of
| the community college course yet required you to teach
| yourself after a lecture that didn't help you do the
| homework. A total rip-off.
|
| Anyways, AI is a value producer here instead of giving up
| and getting a zero on the homework.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Because you're not paying for knowledge, you're paying for a
| paper from respectable university saying that your kid is part
| of the club.
| Aperocky wrote:
| How about experience - those years of life.
| rapfaria wrote:
| "Toby is today's designated signer for Eletromagnetics
| 302."
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| And then compete with the same AI that taught them their degree
| for a job with their degree.
| Aperocky wrote:
| A bit optimistic here are we?
| jryio wrote:
| I would like to see randomized control group studies using study
| mode.
|
| Does it offer meaningful benefits to students over self directed
| study?
|
| Does it out perform students who are "learning how to learn"?
|
| What affect does allowing students to make mistakes have compared
| to being guided through what to review?
|
| I would hope Study Mode would produce flash card prompts and
| quantize information for usage in spaced repetition tools like
| Mochi [1] or Anki.
|
| See Andy's talk here [2]
|
| [1] https://mochi.cards
|
| [2] https://andymatuschak.org/hmwl/
| righthand wrote:
| It doesn't do any of that, it just captures the student market
| more.
|
| They want a student to use it and say "I wouldn't have learned
| anything without study mode".
|
| This also allows them to fill their data coffers more with
| bleeding edge education. "Please input the data you are
| studying and we will summarize it for you."
| echelon wrote:
| Such a smart play.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| > It doesn't do any of that
|
| Not to be contrarian, but do you have any evidence of this
| assertion? Or are you just confidently confabulating a
| response for something outside of the data you've been
| exposed to? Because a commentor below provided a study that
| directly contradicts this.
| righthand wrote:
| A study that directly contradicts what exactly?
| precompute wrote:
| Bingo. The scale they're operating at, new features don't
| have to be useful, they only need to look like they are for
| the first few minutes.
| tempfile wrote:
| I would also be interested to see whether it outperforms
| students doing literally nothing.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Come on. Asking an educational product to do a basic sanity
| test as to whether it helps is far too high a bar. Almost no
| educational app does that sort of thing.
| theodorewiles wrote:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-97652-6
|
| This isn't study mode, it's a different AI tutor, but:
|
| "The median learning gains for students, relative to the pre-
| test baseline (M = 2.75, N = 316), in the AI-tutored group were
| over double those for students in the in-class active learning
| group."
| Aachen wrote:
| I wonder how much this was a factor:
|
| "The occurrence of inaccurate "hallucinations" by the current
| [LLMs] poses a significant challenge for their use in
| education. [...] we enriched our prompts with comprehensive,
| step-by-step answers, guiding the AI tutor to deliver
| accurate and high-quality explanations (v) to students. As a
| result, 83% of students reported that the AI tutor's
| explanations were as good as, or better than, those from
| human instructors in the class."
|
| Not at all dismissing the study, but to replicate these
| results for yourself, this level of gain over a classroom
| setting may be tricky to achieve without having someone make
| class materials for the bot to present to you first
|
| Edit: the authors further say
|
| "Krupp et al. (2023) observed limited reflection among
| students using ChatGPT without guidance, while Forero (2023)
| reported a decline in student performance when AI
| interactions lacked structure and did not encourage critical
| thinking. These previous approaches did not adhere to the
| same research-based best practices that informed our
| approach."
|
| Two other studies failed to get positive results at all. YMMV
| a _lot_ apparently (like, all bets are off and your learning
| might go in the negative direction if you don 't do
| everything exactly as in this study)
| apwell23 wrote:
| it makes difference to students who are already motivated. that
| was the case with youtube.
|
| unfortunately that group is tiny and getting tinier due to
| dwindling attention span.
| viccis wrote:
| I would be interested to see if there have already been studies
| about the efficacy of tutors at good colleges. In my experience
| (in academia), the students who make it into an Ivy or an elite
| liberal arts school make extensive use of tutor resources, but
| not in a helpful way. They basically just get the tutor to work
| problems for them (often their homework!) and feel like they've
| "learned" things because tough questions always seems so
| obvious when you've been shown the answer. In reality, what it
| means it that they have no experience being confused or having
| to push past difficult things they were stuck on. And those
| situations are some of the most valuable for learning.
|
| I bring this up because the way I see students "study" with
| LLMs is similar to this misapplication of tutoring. You try
| something, feel confused and lost, and immediately turn to the
| pacifier^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ChatGPT helper to give you direction
| without ever having to just try things out and experiment. It
| means students are so much more anxious about exams where they
| don't have the training wheels. Students have always wanted
| practice exams with similar problems to the real one with the
| numbers changed, but it's more than wanting it now. They
| outright expect it and will write bad evals and/or even
| complain to your department if you don't do it.
|
| I'm not very optimistic. I am seeing a rapidly rising trend at
| a very "elite" institution of students being completely
| incapable of using textbooks to augment learning concepts that
| were introduced in the classroom. And not just struggling with
| it, but lashing out at professors who expect them to do reading
| or self study.
| posix86 wrote:
| There's studies showing that LLM makes experienced devs slower
| in their work. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same for
| self study.
|
| However consider the extent to which LLMs make the learning
| process more enjoyable. More students will keep pushing because
| they have someone to ask. Also, having fun & being motivated is
| such a massive factor when it comes to learning. And, finally,
| keeping at it at 50% the speed for 100% the material always
| beats working at 100% the speed for 50% the material. Who cares
| if you're slower - we're slower & faster without LLMs too!
| Those that persevere aren't the fastest; they're the ones with
| the most grit & discipline, and LLMs make that more accesible.
| snewman wrote:
| I presume you're referring to the recent METR study. One
| aspect of the study population, which seems like an important
| causal factor in the results, is that they were working in
| large, mature codebases with specific standards for code
| style, which libraries to use, etc. LLMs are much better at
| producing "generic" results than matching a very specific and
| idiosyncratic set of requirements. The study involved the
| latter (specific) situation; helping people learn mainstream
| material seems more like the former (generic) situation.
|
| (Qualifications: I was a reviewer on the METR study.)
| graerg wrote:
| People keep citing this study (and it was on the top of HN
| for a day). But this claim falls flat when you find out that
| the test subjects had effectively no experience with LLM
| equipped editors and the 1-2 people in the study that
| actually _did_ have experience with these tools showed a
| marked increase in productivity.
|
| Like yeah, if you've only ever used an axe you probably don't
| know the first thing about how to use a chainsaw, but if you
| know how to use a chainsaw you're wiping the floor with the
| axe wielders. Wholeheartedly agree with the rest of your
| comment; even if you're slow you lap everyone sitting on the
| couch.
| bretpiatt wrote:
| *slower with Sonnet 3.7 on large open source code bases where
| the developer is a senior member of the project core team.
|
| https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-
| experienced-o...
|
| I believe we'll see the benefits and drawbacks of AI
| augmentation to humans performing various tasks will vary
| wildly based on the task, the way the AI is being asked to
| interact, and the AI model.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| The study you're referencing doesn't make that conclusion.
|
| It concludes theres a learning curve that generally takes
| about 50 hours of time to figure out. The data shows that the
| one engineer who had more than 50 hours of experience with
| Cursor actually worked faster.
|
| This is largely my experience, now. I was much slower
| initially, but I've now figured out the correct way to
| prompt, guide, and fix the LLM to be effective. I produce way
| more code and am mentally less fatigued at the end of each
| day.
| daedrdev wrote:
| It was a 16 person study on open source devs that found 50
| hours of experience with the tool made people more productive
| LeftHandPath wrote:
| Interesting. I don't use GPT for code but I have been using it to
| grade answers to behavioral and system design interview
| questions, lately. Sometimes it hallucinates, but the gists are
| usually correct.
|
| I would not use it if it was for something with a strictly
| correct answer.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I'm not sure about the audience for this, if you're already
| _willing_ to learn the material you probably already engage with
| AI in a way that isn 't "please output the answers for me"
| because you're likely self-aware enough to know that "answering"
| isn't always "understanding." Maybe this mode makes that a little
| easier? but I doubt it's significant
|
| If you're the other 90% of students that are only learning to
| check the boxes and get through the courses to get the
| qualification at the end... are you going to bother using this?
|
| Of course, maybe this is "see, we're not _trying_ to kill
| education... promise! "
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| I mean, it's about context, isn't it?
|
| Just like it's easier to be productive if you have a separate
| home office and couch, because of the differing psychological
| contexts, it's easier if you have a separate context for "just
| give me answers" and "actually teach me the thing".
|
| Also, I don't know about you, but (as a professional) even
| though I actively try to learn the principals behind the code
| generated, I don't always want to spend the effort prompting
| the model away from the "just give me results with a simple
| explanation" personality I've cultivated. It'd be nice having a
| mode with that work done for me.
| _hao wrote:
| I think as with everything related to learning if you're
| conscientious and studious this will be a major boost (no idea,
| but I plan on trying it out tonight on some math I've been
| studying). And likewise if you just use it to do your homework
| without putting in the effort you won't see any benefit or
| actively degrade.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Modern day Cliff's Notes.
|
| There is no way to learn without effort. I understand they are
| not claiming this, but many students want a silver bullet. There
| isn't one.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| But tutors are fine. The video is suggesting that this is an
| attempt to automate a tutor, not replace Cliff's Notes. Whether
| it succeeds, I have no idea.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Good tutors are fine, bad tutors will just give you the
| answer. Many students think the bad tutors are good ones.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Yep, this is a marketing problem. Your users' goal is to
| learn, but they also want to expend as little effort as
| possible. They'll love it if you just tell them the
| answers, but you're also doing them a disservice by doing
| so.
|
| Same problem exists for all educational apps. Duolingo
| users have the goal of learning a language, but also they
| only want to use Duolingo for a few minutes a day, but also
| they want to feel like they're making progress. Duolingo's
| goal is to keep you using Duolingo, and if possible it'd be
| good for you to learn the language, but their #1 goal is to
| keep you coming back. Oddly, Duolingo might not even be
| wrong to focus primariliy on keeping you moving forward,
| given how many people give up when learning a new language.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| > Today we're introducing study mode in ChatGPT--a learning
| experience that helps you work through problems step by
| step instead of just getting an answer.
|
| So, unless you have experience with this products that
| contradicts their claims, it's a good tutor by your
| definition.
| sejje wrote:
| Cliff notes with a near-infinite zoom feature.
|
| The criticism of cliff's notes is generally that it's a
| superficial glance. It can't go deeper, it's basically a
| summary.
|
| The LLM is not that. It can zoom in and out of a topic.
|
| I think it's a poor criticism.
|
| I don't think it's a silver bullet for learning, but it's a
| unified, consistent interface across topics and courses.
| gmanley wrote:
| Except it generally is shallow, for any advanced enough
| subject, and the scary part is you don't know when it's
| reached the limit of its knowledge because it'll come up with
| some hallucination to fill in those blanks.
|
| If LLM's got better at just responding with: "I don't know",
| I'd have less of an issue.
| sejje wrote:
| I agree, but it's a known limitation. I've been duped a
| couple times, but I mostly can tell when it's full of shit.
|
| Some topics you learn to beware and double check. Or ask it
| to cite sources. (For me, that's car repair. It's wrong a
| lot.)
|
| I wish it had some kind of confidence level assessment or
| ability to realize it doesn't know, and I think it
| eventually will have that. Most humans I know are also very
| bad at that.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| > _It can zoom in and out of a topic._
|
| Sure, but only as long as you're not terribly concerned with
| the result being accurate, like that old reconstruction of
| Obama's face from a pixelated version [1] but this time about
| a topic for which one is, by definition, not capable of
| identifying whether the answer is correct.
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/21298762/face-depixelizer-ai-
| machin...
| sejje wrote:
| I'm capable of asking it a couple of times about the same
| thing.
|
| It's unlikely to make up the same bullshit twice.
|
| Usually exploring a topic in depth finds these issues
| pretty quickly.
| raincole wrote:
| If current AI is good enough to teach you something, spending
| time learning that thing seems to be a really bad investment...
| esafak wrote:
| How does that make sense? So you'd learn it if it was bad at
| teaching? Do you apply the same principle with humans and not
| bother to learn if the teacher is good?
| ted537 wrote:
| Your teacher can't operate in millions of locations at once
| for super cheap
| toisanji wrote:
| I truly believe AI will change all of education for the better,
| but of course it can also hinder learning if used improperly.
| Those who want to genuinely learn will learn while those looking
| for shortcuts will cause more harm to themselves. I just did a
| show HN today about something semi related.
|
| I made A deep research assistant for families. Children can ask
| questions to explain difficult concepts and for parents to ask
| how to deal with any parenting situation. For example a 4 year
| old may ask "why does the plate break when it falls?"
|
| example output: https://www.studyturtle.com/ask/PJ24GoWQ-pizza-
| sibling-fight...
|
| app: https://www.studyturtle.com/ask/
|
| Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44723280
| ujkhsjkdhf234 wrote:
| I think research and the ability to summarize are important
| skills and automating these skills away will have bad
| downstream effects. I see people on Twitter asking grok to
| summarize a paragraph so I don't think further cementing this
| idea that a tool will summarize for you is a good idea.
| devmor wrote:
| Do you genuinely have any non-anecdotal reason to believe that
| AI will improve education, or is it just hope?
|
| I ask because every serious study on using modern generative AI
| tools tends to conclude fairly immediate and measurable
| deleterious effects on cognitive ability.
| toisanji wrote:
| Every technology can be good or bad to an individual
| depending on how they use it. It is up to the user to decide
| how they will use the tool. For people who are really looking
| to learn a topic and understand in detail, then I think it
| can really help them to grasp the concepts.
| czhu12 wrote:
| I'll personally attest: LLM's have been absolutely incredible to
| self learn new things post graduation. It used to be that if you
| got stuck on a concept, you're basically screwed. Unless it was
| common enough to show up in a well formed question on stack
| exchange, it was pretty much impossible, and the only thing you
| can really do is keep paving forward and hope at some point,
| it'll make sense to you.
|
| Now, everyone basically has a personal TA, ready to go at all
| hours of the day.
|
| I get the commentary that it makes learning too easy or shallow,
| but I doubt anyone would think that college students would learn
| better if we got rid of TA's.
| eternauta3k wrote:
| You can always ask in stack exchange, IRC or forums.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Closed: duplicate
|
| Closed: RTFM, dumbass
|
| <No activity for 8 years, until some random person shows up
| and asks "Hey did you figure it out?">
| dizhn wrote:
| "Nevermind I figured it out"
| FredPret wrote:
| Or even worse, you ask an "xyz" question in the "xyz"
| StackExchange, then immediately get flagged as off-topic
| atoav wrote:
| My favourite moment was when I tried to figure a specific
| software issue out that had to do with obscure hardware and
| after hours I found one forum post detailing the solution
| with zero replies. And it turns out I wrote it myself,
| years prior and had forgotten about it.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I had a similar experience involving something dealing
| with RSA encryption on iOS.
| sejje wrote:
| I googled a command line string to do XYZ thing once, and
| found my own blog post.
|
| I really do write that stuff for myself, turns out.
| Rooster61 wrote:
| On IRC> Newb: I need help with <thing>. Does anyone have any
| experience with this?
|
| J. Random Hacker: Why are you doing it like that?
|
| Newb: I have <xyz> constraint in my case that necessitates
| this.
|
| J. Random Hacker: This is a stupid way to do it. I'm not
| going to help you.
| precompute wrote:
| This is the way to go.
| threetonesun wrote:
| > the only thing you can really do is keep paving forward and
| hope at some point, it'll make sense to you.
|
| I find it odd that someone who has been to college would see
| this as a _bad_ way to learn something.
| abeppu wrote:
| In college sometimes asking the right question in class or in
| a discussion section led by a graduate student or in a study
| group would help me understand something. Sometimes comments
| from a grader on a paper would point out something I had
| missed. While having the diligence to keep at it until you
| understand is valuable, the advantage of college over just a
| pile of textbooks is in part that there are other resources
| that can help you learn.
| czhu12 wrote:
| The main difference in college was that there were office
| hours
| qualeed wrote:
| "Keep paving forward" can sometimes be fruitful, and at other
| times be an absolutely massive waste of time.
|
| I'm not sold on LLMs being a replacement, but post-secondary
| was certainly enriched by having other people to ask
| questions to, people to bounce ideas off of, people that can
| say "that was done 15 years ago, check out X", etc.
|
| There were times where I thought I had a great idea, but it
| was based on an incorrect conclusion that I had come to. It
| was helpful for that to be pointed out to me. I could have
| spent many months "paving forward", to no benefit, but
| instead someone saved me from banging my head on a wall.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Imagine you're in college, have to learn calculus, and you
| can't afford a textbook (nor can find a free one), and the
| professor has a thick accent and makes many mistakes.
|
| Sure, you could pave forward, but realistically, you'll get
| much farther with either a good textbook or a good teacher,
| or both.
| IshKebab wrote:
| In college you can ask people who know the answer. It's not
| until PhD level that you have to struggle without readily
| available answers.
| adamsb6 wrote:
| When ChatGPT came out it was like I had the old Google back.
|
| Learning a new programming language used to be mediated with
| lots of useful trips to Google to understand how some
| particular bit worked, but Google stopped being useful for that
| years ago. Even if the content you're looking for exists, it's
| buried.
| GaggiX wrote:
| And the old ChatGPT was nothing compared to what we have
| today, nowadays reasoning models will eat through math
| problems no problem when this was a major limitation in the
| past.
| jennyholzer wrote:
| I don't buy it. Open AI doesn't come close to passing my
| credibility check. I don't believe their metrics.
| brulard wrote:
| You don't have to. Just try it yourself.
| GaggiX wrote:
| OpenAI is not the only company making LLMs, there are
| plenty now, you can use Gemini 2.5 Pro for example. And
| of course you can just try a SOTA model like Gemini 2.5
| Pro for free, you don't have to trust anything.
| holsta wrote:
| > It used to be that if you got stuck on a concept, you're
| basically screwed.
|
| We were able to learn before LLMs.
|
| Libraries are not a new thing. FidoNet, USENET, IRC, forums,
| local study/user groups. You have access to all of Wikipedia.
| Offline, if you want.
| sejje wrote:
| I learned how to code using the library in the 90s.
|
| I think it's accurate to say that if I had to do that again,
| I'm basically screwed.
|
| Asking the LLM is a vastly superior experience.
|
| I had to learn what my local library had, not what I wanted.
| And it was an incredible slog.
|
| IRC groups is another example--I've been there. One or two
| topics have great IRC channels. The rest have idle bots and
| hostile gatekeepers.
|
| The LLM makes a happy path to most topics, not just a couple.
| no_wizard wrote:
| >Asking the LLM is a vastly superior experience.
|
| Not to be overly argumentative, but I disagree, if you're
| looking for a deep and ongoing process, LLMs fall down,
| because they can't _remember_ anything and can 't build
| upon itself in that way. You end up having to repeat alot
| of stuff. They also don't have good course correction (that
| is, if you're going down the wrong path, it doesn't alert
| you, as I've experienced)
|
| It also can give you really bad content depending on what
| you're trying to learn.
|
| I think for things that represent themselves as a form of
| highly structured data, like programming languages, there's
| good attunement there, but you start talking about trying
| to dig around about advanced finance, political topics,
| economics, or complex medical conditions the quality falls
| off fast, if its there at all
| sejje wrote:
| I used llms to teach me a programming language recently.
|
| It was way nicer than a book.
|
| That's the experience I'm speaking from. It wasn't
| perfect, and it was wrong sometimes, sure. A known
| limitation.
|
| But it was flexible, and it was able to do things like
| relate ideas with programming languages I already knew.
| Adapt to my level of understanding. Skip stuff I didn't
| need.
|
| Incorrect moments or not, the result was i learned
| something quickly and easily. That isn't what happened in
| the 90s.
| dcbb65b2bcb6e6a wrote:
| > and it was wrong sometimes, sure. A known limitation.
|
| But that's the entire problem and I don't understand why
| it's just put aside like that. LLMs are wrong sometimes,
| and they often just don't give you the details and, in my
| opinion, knowing about certain details and traps of a
| language is very very important, if you plan on doing
| more with it than just having fun. Now someone will come
| around the corner and say 'but but but it gives you the
| details if you explicitly ask for them'. Yes, of course,
| but you just don't know where important details are
| hidden, if you are just learning about it. Studying is
| hard and it takes perseverance. Most textbooks will tell
| you the same things, but they all still differ and every
| author usually has a few distinct details they highlight
| and these are the important bits that you just won't get
| with an LLM
| sejje wrote:
| It's not my experience that there are missing pieces as
| compared to anything else.
|
| Nobody can write an exhaustive tome and explore every
| feature, use, problem, and pitfall of Python, for
| example. Every text on the topic will omit something.
|
| It's hardly a criticism. I don't want exhaustive.
|
| The llm taught me what I asked it to teach me. That's
| what I hope it will do, not try to caution me about
| everything I could do wrong with a language. That list
| might be infinite.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| > It's not my experience that there are missing pieces as
| compared to anything else.
|
| How can you know this when you are learning something? It
| seems like a confirmation bias to even have this opinion?
| refulgentis wrote:
| I'd gently point out we're 4 questions into "what about
| if you went about it stupidly and actually learned
| nothing?"
|
| It's entirely possible they learned nothing and they're
| missing huge parts.
|
| But we're sort of at the point where in order to ignore
| their self-reported experience, we're asking
| philosophical questions that amount to "how can you know
| you know if you don't know what you don't know and
| definitely don't know everything?"
|
| More existentialism than interlocution.
|
| If we decide our interlocutor can't be relied upon, what
| is discussion?
|
| Would we have the same question if they said they did it
| from a book?
|
| If they did do it from a book, how would we know if the
| book they read was missing something that we thought was
| crucial?
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| I didn't think that was what was being discussed.
|
| I was attempting to imply that with high-quality
| literature, it is often reviewed by humans who have some
| sort of knowledge about a particular topic or are willing
| to cross reference it with existing literature. The
| reader often does this as well.
|
| For low-effort literature, this is often not the case,
| and can lead to things like
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
| where a trained observer can point out that something is
| wrong, but an untrained observer cannot perceive what is
| incorrect.
|
| IMO, this is adjacent to what human agents interacting
| with language models experience often. It isn't wrong
| about everything, but the nuance is enough to introduce
| some poor underlying thought patterns while learning.
| ayewo wrote:
| That's easy. It's due to a psychological concept called:
| transfer of learning [0].
|
| Perhaps the most famous example of this is Warren Buffet.
| For years Buffet missed out on returns from the tech
| industry [1] because he avoided investing in _tech
| company_ stocks due to Berkshire 's long standing
| philosophy to never invest in companies whose business
| model he doesn't understand.
|
| His light bulb moment came when he used his understanding
| of a business he understood really well i.e. their
| furniture business [3] to value Apple as a _consumer
| company_ rather than as a _tech company_ leading to a
| $1bn position in Apple in 2016 [2].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_learning
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33612228
|
| [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/16/wa
| rren-bu...
|
| [3] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/08/billionaire-investor-
| warren-...
| dcbb65b2bcb6e6a wrote:
| You are right and that's my point. To me it just feels
| like that too many people think LLMs are the holy grail
| for learning. No, you still have to study a lot. Yes, it
| can be easier than it was.
| gbalduzzi wrote:
| Your other responses kinda imply that you believe LLMs
| are not good for learning.
|
| That's totally different than saying they are not
| flawless but they make learning easier than other
| methods, like you did in this comment
| smokel wrote:
| Most LLM user interfaces, such as ChatGPT, do have a
| memory. See _Settings, Personalization, Manage Memories_.
| gertlex wrote:
| Agreed, I'd add to the statement, "you're basically screwed,
| often, without investing a ton of time (e.g. weekends)"
|
| Figuring out 'make' errors when I was bad at C on
| microcontrollers a decade ago? (still am) Careful pondering
| of possible meanings of words... trial and error tweaks of
| code and recompiling in hopes that I was just off by a tiny
| thing, but 2 hours later and 30 attempts later, and realizing
| I'd done a bad job of tracking what I'd tried and hadn't?
| Well, made me better at being careful at triaging issues. But
| it wasn't something I was enthusiastic to pick back up the
| next weekend, or for the next idea I had.
|
| Revisiting that combination of hardware/code a decade later
| and having it go much faster with ChatGPT... that was fun.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| It's not an or/either situation.
| gbalduzzi wrote:
| Are we really comparing this research to just writing and
| having a good answer in a couple of seconds?
|
| Like, I agree with you and I believe those things will resist
| and will always be important, but it doesn't really compare
| in this case.
|
| Last week I was in the nature and I saw a cute bird that I
| didn't know. I asked an AI and got the correct answer in 10
| seconds. Of course I would find the answer at the library or
| by looking at proper niche sites, but I would not have done
| it because I simply didn't care that much. It's a stupid
| example but I hope it makes the point
| holsta wrote:
| There's a gigantic difference between outsourcing your
| brain to generative AI (LLMs, Stable Diffusion, ..) and
| pattern recognition that recognises songs, birds, plants or
| health issues.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > We were able to learn before LLMs.
|
| We were able to learn before the invention of writing, too!
| dcbb65b2bcb6e6a wrote:
| > LLM's have been absolutely incredible to self learn new
| things post graduation.
|
| I haven't tested them on many things. But in the past 3 weeks I
| tried to vibe code a little bit VHDL. On the one hand it was a
| fun journey, I could experiment a lot and just iterated fast.
| But if I was someone who had no idea about hardware design,
| then this trash would've guided me the wrong way in numerous
| situations. I can't even count how many times it has built me
| latches instead of clocked registers (latches bad, if you don't
| know about it) and that's just one thing. Yes I know there
| ain't much out there (compared to python and javascript) about
| HDLs, even less regarding VHDL. But damn, no no no. Not for
| learning. never. If you know what you're doing and you have
| some fundamental knowledge about the topic, then it might help
| to get further, but not for the absolute essentials, that will
| backfire hard.
| avn2109 wrote:
| LLM's are useful because they can recommend several
| famous/well-known books (or even chapters of books) that are
| relevant to a particular topic. Then you can also use the LLM
| to illuminate the inevitable points of confusion and
| shortcomings in those books while you're reading and
| synthesizing them.
|
| Pre-LLM, even finding the ~5 textbooks with ~3 chapters each
| that decently covered the material I want was itself a
| nontrivial problem. Now that problem is greatly eased.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| > they can recommend several famous/well-known books
|
| They can recommend many unknown books as well, as language
| models are known to reference resources that do not exist.
| nilamo wrote:
| And then when you don't find it, you move onto the next
| book. Problem solved!
| jennyholzer wrote:
| I strongly prefer curated recommendations from a person
| with some sort of credibility in a subject area that
| interests me.
| no_wizard wrote:
| >Now, everyone basically has a personal TA, ready to go at all
| hours of the day
|
| This simply hasn't been my experience.
|
| Its too shallow. The deeper I go, the less it seems to be
| useful. This happens _quick_ for me.
|
| Also, god forbid you're researching a complex and possibly
| controversial subject and you want it to find _reputable
| sources_ or particularly academic ones.
| kianN wrote:
| I built a public tool a while back for some of my friends in
| grad school to support this sort of deep academic research
| use case. Sharing in case it is helpful: https://sturdystatis
| tics.com/deepdive?search_type=external&q...
| ACCount36 wrote:
| It is shallow. But as long as what you're asking it of is the
| kind of material covered in high school or college, it's
| fairly reliable.
|
| This generation of AI doesn't yet have the knowledge depth of
| a seasoned university professor. It's the kind of teacher
| that you should, eventually, surpass.
| scarmig wrote:
| I've found it excels at some things:
|
| 1) The broad overview of a topic
|
| 2) When I have a vague idea, it helps me narrow down the
| correct terminology for it
|
| 3) Providing examples of a particular category ("are there
| any examples of where v1 in the visual cortex develops in a
| disordered way?")
|
| 4) "Tell me the canonical textbooks in field X"
|
| 5) Posing math exercises
|
| 6) Free form branching--while talking about one topic, I want
| to shift to another that is distinct but related.
|
| I agree they leave a lot to be desired when digging very
| deeply into a topic. And my biggest pet peeve is when they
| hallucinate fake references ("tell me papers that investigate
| this topic" will, for any sufficiently obscure topic, result
| in a bunch of very promising paper titles that are wholely
| invented).
| CJefferson wrote:
| These things are moving so quickly, but I teach a 2nd year
| combinatorics course, and about 3 months ago I tried th
| latest chatGPT and Deepseek -- they could answer very
| standard questions, but were wrong for more advanced
| questions, but often in quite subtle ways. I actually set a
| piece of homework "marking" chatGPT, which went well and
| students seemed to enjoy!
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| That's a great idea to both teach the subject and AI
| skepticism.
| scarmig wrote:
| Very clever and approachable, and I've been
| unintentionally giving myself that exercise for awhile
| now. Who knows how long it will remain viable, though.
| jennyholzer wrote:
| that's a cool assignment!
| p1esk wrote:
| When you say the latest chatGPT, do you mean o3?
| Julien_r2 wrote:
| Super good idea!!
|
| Luc Julia (one of the main Siri's creators) describe a
| very similar exercice in this interview [0](It's in
| french, although the au translation isn't too bad)
|
| The gist of it, is that he describes this exercice he
| does with his students, where they ask chatgpt about
| Victor Hugo's biography, and then proceed to spot the
| errors made by Chatgtp.
|
| This setup is simple, but there are very interesting
| mechanisms in place. The student get to learn about
| challenging facts, do fact checking, cross reference,
| etc. While also asserting the reference figure of the
| teacher, with the knowledge to take down chat gpt.
|
| Well done :)
|
| Edit: adding link
|
| [0] https://youtube.com/shorts/SlyUvvbzRPc?si=2Fv-KIgls-
| uxr_3z
| resize2996 wrote:
| forgot the link :)
| Julien_r2 wrote:
| Arf seems I'm one of those :).. thanks for the heads up!
| ai_viewz wrote:
| this is amazing strategy
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I've found the AI is particularly good at explaining AI,
| better than quite a lot of other coding tasks.
| narcraft wrote:
| I find 2 invaluable for enhancing search, and combined with
| 1 & 4, it's a huge boost to self-learning.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >When I have a vague idea, it helps me narrow down the
| correct terminology for it
|
| so the opposite of Stack Overflow really, where if you have
| a vague idea your question gets deleted and you get
| reprimanded.
|
| Maybe Stack Overflow could use AI for this, help you
| formulate a question in the way they want.
| scarmig wrote:
| Maybe. But, it's been over a year since I used
| StackOverflow, primarily because of LLMs. Sure, I could
| use an LLM to formulate a question that passes SO's
| muster. But why bother, when the LLM can almost certainly
| answer the question as well; SO will be slower; and
| there's a decent chance that my question will be marked
| as a duplicate (because it pattern matches to a similar
| but distinct question).
| SLWW wrote:
| My core problem with LLMs is as you say; it's good for some
| simpler concepts, tasks, etc. but when you need to dive into
| more complex topics it will oversimplify, give you what you
| didn't ask for, or straight up lie by omission.
|
| History is a great example, if you ask an LLM about a vaguely
| difficult period in history it will just give you one side
| and act like the other doesn't exist, or if there is another
| side, it will paint them in a very negative light which often
| is poorly substantiated; people don't just wake up and decide
| one day to be irrationally evil with no reason, if you
| believe that then you are a fool... although LLMs would agree
| with you more times than not since it's convenient.
|
| The result of these things is a form of gatekeeping, give it
| a few years and basic knowledge will be almost impossible to
| find if it is deemed "not useful" whether that's an outdated
| technology that the LLM doesn't seem talked about very much
| anymore or a ideological issue that doesn't fall in line with
| TOS or common consensus.
| pengstrom wrote:
| The part about history perspectives sounds interesting. I
| haven't noticed this. Please post any concrete/specific
| examples you've encountered!
| SLWW wrote:
| - Rhodesia (lock step with the racial-first reasoning,
| underplays Britain's failures to support that which they
| helped establish; makes the colonists look hateful when
| they were dealing with terrorists which the British
| supported)
|
| - Bombing of Dresden, death stats as well as how long the
| bombing went on for (Arthur Harris is considered a war-
| criminal to this day for that; LLLMs highlight easily
| falsifiable claims by Nazi's to justify low estimates
| without providing much in the way of verifiable claims
| outside of a select few, questionable, sources. If the
| low-estimate is to be believed, then it seems absurd that
| Harris would be considered a war-criminal in light of
| what crimes we allow today in warfare)
|
| - Ask it about the Crusades, often if forgets the sacking
| of St. Peter's in Rome around 846 AD, usually painting
| the Papacy as a needlessly hateful and violent people
| during that specific Crusade. Which was horrible, bloody
| as well as immensely destructive (I don't defend the
| Crusades), but paints the Islamic forces as victims,
| which they were eventually, but not at the beginning, at
| the beginning they were the aggressors bent on invading
| Rome.
|
| - Ask it about the Six-Day War (1967) and contrast that
| with several different sources on both sides and you'll
| see a different portrayal even by those who supported the
| actions taken.
|
| These are just the four that come to my memory at this
| time.
|
| Most LLMs seem cagey about these topics; I believe this
| is due to an accepted notion that anything that could
| "justify" hatred or dislike of a people group or class
| that is in favor -- according to modern politics -- will
| be classified as hateful rhetoric, which is then omitted
| from the record. The issue lies in the fact that to
| understand history, we need to understand what happened,
| not how it is perceived, politically, after the fact.
| History helps inform us about the issues of today, and it
| is important, above all other agendas, to represent the
| truth of history, keeping an accurate account (or simply
| allowing others to read differing accounts without heavy
| bias).
|
| LLMs are restricted in this way quite egregiously; "those
| who do not study history are doomed to repeat it", but if
| this continues, no one will have the ability to know
| history and are therefore forced to repeat it.
| Q_is_4_Quantum wrote:
| This was interesting thanks - makes me wish I had the
| time to study your examples. But of course I don't,
| without just turning to an LLM....
|
| If for any of these topics you _do_ manage to get a
| summary you 'd agree with from a (future or better-
| prompted?) LLM I'd like to read it. Particularly the
| first and third, the second is somewhat familiar and the
| fourth was a bit vague.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| If someone has Grok 4 access I'd be interested to see if
| it's less likely to avoid these specific issues.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| > Ask it about the Crusades, often if forgets the sacking
| of St. Peter's in Rome around 846 AD, usually painting
| the Papacy as a needlessly hateful and violent people
| during that specific Crusade. Which was horrible, bloody
| as well as immensely destructive (I don't defend the
| Crusades), but paints the Islamic forces as victims,
| which they were eventually, but not at the beginning, at
| the beginning they were the aggressors bent on invading
| Rome.
|
| I don't know a lot about the other things you mentioned,
| but the concept of crusading did not exist (in
| Christianity) in 846 AD. It's not any conflict between
| Muslims and Christians.
| SLWW wrote:
| The crusades were predicated on historic tensions between
| Rome and the Arabs. Which is why I mention that, while
| the First Crusade proper was in 1096, it's core reasoning
| were situations like the Sacking of St. Peters which is
| considered by historians to be one of the most
| influential moments and often was used as a justification
| as there was a history of incompatibilities between Rome
| and the Muslims.
|
| Further leading to the Papacy furthering such efforts in
| the upcoming years, as they were in Rome and made strong
| efforts to maintain Catholicism within those boundaries.
| Crusading didn't appear out of nothing; it required a
| catalyst for the behavior, like what i listed, is usually
| a common suspect.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Why should we consider something that happened 250 years
| prior as some sort of affirmative defense of the Crusades
| as having been something that started with the Islamic
| world being the aggressors?
|
| If the US were to start invading Axis countries with WW2
| being the justification we'd of course be the aggressors,
| and that was less than 100 years ago.
| scarmig wrote:
| Because it played a role in forming the motivations of
| the Crusaders? It's not about justifying the Crusades,
| but understanding why they happened.
|
| Similarly, it helps us understand all the examples of
| today of resentments and grudges over events that
| happened over a century ago that still motivate people
| politically.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| He's referring to the Arab sack of St. Peters.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_raid_against_Rome
| cthalupa wrote:
| His point is that this was not part of the crusades, not
| that he was unaware of his happening.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| You call out that you don't defend the crusades but are
| you supportive of Rhodesia?
| SLWW wrote:
| I only highlighted that I'm not in support of the
| crusades since it sounds like i might be by my comments.
| I was highlighting that they didn't just lash out with no
| cause to start their holy war.
|
| Rhodesia is a hard one; since the more I learn about it
| the more I feel terrible for both sides; I also do not
| support terrorism against a nation even if I believe they
| might not be in the right. However i hold by my disdain
| for how the British responded/withdrew from them
| effectively doomed Rhodesia making peaceful resolution
| essentially impossible.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Arthur Harris is in no way considered a war criminal by
| the vast majority of British people for the record.
|
| It's a very controversial opinion and stating as a just
| so fact needs challenging.
| SLWW wrote:
| Do you have references or corroborating evidence?
|
| In 1992 a statue was erected to Harris in London, it was
| under 24 hour surveillance for several months due to
| protesting and vandalism attempts. I'm only mentioning
| this to highlight that there was quite a bit of push back
| specifically calling the gov out on a tribute to him;
| which usually doesn't happen if the person was well
| liked... not as an attempted killshot.
|
| Even the RAF themselves state that there was quite a few
| who were critical on the first page of their assessment
| of Arthur Harris https://www.raf.mod.uk/what-we-
| do/centre-for-air-and-space-p...
|
| Which is funny and an odd thing to say if you are widely
| loved/unquestioned by your people. Again just another
| occurrence of language from those who are on his side
| reinforcing the idea that there is, as you say is "very
| controversial", and maybe not a "vast majority" since
| those two things seem at odds with each other.
|
| Not to mention that Harris targeted civilians, which is
| generally considered behavior of a war-criminal.
|
| As an aside this talk page is a good laugh. https://en.wi
| kipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Arthur_Harris/Archive_1
|
| Although you are correct I should have used more accurate
| language instead of saying "considered" I should have
| said "considered by some".
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| You are born in your country. You love your family. A
| foreign country invades you. Your country needs you. Your
| faith says to obey the government. Commendable and noble
| except for a few countries, depending upon the year.
|
| Why?
| scarmig wrote:
| A few weeks ago I was asking an LLM to offer anti-
| heliocentric arguments, from the perspective of an
| intelligent scientist. Although it initially started with
| what was almost a parody of writing from that period, with
| some prompting I got it to generate a strong rendition of
| anti-heliocentric arguments.
|
| (On the other hand, it's very hard to get them to do it for
| topics that are currently politically charged. Less so for
| things that aren't in living memory: I've had success
| getting it to offer the Carthaginian perspective in the
| Punic Wars.)
| Gracana wrote:
| Have you tried abliterated models? I'm curious if the
| current de-censorship methods are effective in that area
| / at that level.
| SLWW wrote:
| That's a fun idea; almost having it "play pretend"
| instead of directly asking it for strong anti-
| heliocentric arguments outright.
|
| It's weird to see which topics it "thinks" are
| politically charged vs. others. I've noticed some
| inconsistency depending on even what years you input into
| your questions. One year off? It will sometimes give you
| a more unbiased answer as a result about the year you
| were actually thinking of.
| scarmig wrote:
| I think the first thing is figuring out exactly what
| persona you want the LLM to adopt: if you have only a
| vague idea of the persona, it will default to the laziest
| one possible that still could be said to satisfy your
| request. Once that's done, though, it usually works
| decently, except for those that the LLM detects are
| politically charged. (The weakness here is that at some
| point you've defined the persona so strictly that it's
| ahistorical and more reflective of your own mental
| model.)
|
| As for the politically charged topics, I more or less
| self-censor on those topics (which seem pretty easy to
| anticipate--none of those you listed in your other
| comment surprise me at all) and don't bother to ask the
| LLM. Partially out of self-protection (don't want to be
| flagged as some kind of bad actor), partially because I
| know the amount of effort put in isn't going to give a
| strong result.
| SLWW wrote:
| > The weakness here is that at some point you've defined
| the persona so strictly that it's ahistorical and more
| reflective of your own mental model.
|
| That's a good thing to be aware of, using our own bias to
| make it more "likely" to play pretend. LLMs tend to be
| more on the agreeable side; given the unreliable
| narrators we people tend to be, and the fact that these
| models are trained on us, it does track that the machine
| would tend towards preference over fact, especially when
| the fact could be outside of the LLMs own "Overton
| Window".
|
| I've started to care less and less about self-censoring
| as I deem it to be a kind of "use it or lose it"
| privilege. If you normalize talking about
| censored/"dangerous" topics in a rational way, more
| people will be likely to see it not as much of a problem.
| The other eventuality is that no one hears anything that
| opposes their view in a rational way but rather only
| hears from the extremists or those who just want to stick
| it to the current "bad" in their minds at that moment.
| Even then though I still will omit certain statements on
| some topics given the platform, but that's more so that I
| don't get mislabeled by readers. (one of the items on my
| other comment was intentionally left as vague as possible
| for this reason) As for the LLMs, I usually just leave
| spicy questions for LLMs I can access through an API of
| someone else (an aggregator) and not a personal acc just
| to make it a little more difficult to label my activity
| falsely as a bad actor.
| morgoths_bane wrote:
| >I've had success getting it to offer the Carthaginian
| perspective in the Punic Wars.)
|
| That's honestly one of the funniest things I have read on
| this site.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| People _do_ just wake up one day and decide some piece of
| land should belong to them, or that they don't have enough
| money and can take yours, or they are just sick of looking
| at you and want to be rid of you. They will have some
| excuse or justification, but really they just want more
| than they have.
|
| People _do_ just wake up and decide to be evil.
| SLWW wrote:
| A nation that might fit this description may have had
| their populace indoctrinated (through a widespread
| political campaign) to believe that the majority of the
| world throughout history seeks for their destruction.
| That's a reason for why they think that way, but not
| because they woke up one day and decided to choose
| violence.
|
| However not a justification, since I believe that what is
| happening today is truly evil. Same with another nation
| who entered a war knowing they'd be crushed, which is
| suicide; whether that nation is in the right is of little
| effect if most of their next generation has died.
| neutronicus wrote:
| History in particular is rapidly approaching post-truth as
| a knowledge domain anyway.
|
| There's no short-term incentive to ever be right about it
| (and it's easy to convince yourself of both short-term and
| long-term incentives, both self-interested and altruistic,
| to actively lie about it). Like, given the training corpus,
| could I do a better job? Not sure.
| altcognito wrote:
| "Post truth". History is a funny topic. It is both
| critical and irrelevant. Do we really need to know how
| the founder felt about gun rights? Abortion? Both of
| these topics were radically different in their day.
|
| All of us need to learn the basics about how to read
| history and _historians_ critically and to know our the
| limitations which as you stated probably a tall task.
| andrepd wrote:
| What are you talking about? In what sense is history done
| by professional historians degrading in recent times? And
| what short/long term incentives are you talking about?
| They are the same as any social science.
| andrepd wrote:
| > History is a great example, if you ask an LLM about a
| vaguely difficult period in history it will just give you
| one side and act like the other doesn't exist, or if there
| is another side, it will paint them in a very negative
| light which often is poorly substantiated
|
| Which is why it's so terribly irresponsible to paint these
| """AI""" systems as impartial or neutral or anything of the
| sort, as has been done by hypesters and marketers for the
| past 3 years.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| Can you share some examples?
| tsumnia wrote:
| IT can be beneficial for making your initial assessment, but
| you'll need to dig deeper for something meaningful. For
| example, I recently used Gemini's Deep Research to do some
| literature review on educational Color Theory in relation to
| PowerPoint presentations [1]. I know both areas rather well,
| but I wanted to have some links between the two for some
| research that I am currently doing.
|
| I'd say that companies like Google and OpenAI are aware of
| the "reputable" concerns the Internet is expressing and
| addressing them. This tech is going to be, if not already is,
| very powerful for education.
|
| [1] http://bit.ly/4mc4UHG
| fakedang wrote:
| Taking a Gemini Deep Research output and feeding it to
| NotebookLM to create audio overviews is my current podcast
| go-to. Sometimes I do a quick Google and add in a few
| detailed but overly verbose documents or long form YouTube
| videos, and the result is better than 99% of the podcasts
| out there, including those by some academics.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| No wonder there are so many confident people spouting
| total rubbish on technical forums.
| EGreg wrote:
| Try to red team blue team with it
|
| Blue team you throw out concepts and have it steelman them
|
| Red team you can literally throw any kind of stress test at
| your idea
|
| Alternate like this and you will learn
|
| A great prompt is "give me the top 10 xyz things" and then
| you can explore
|
| Back when I was in 2006 I used Wikipedia to prepare for job
| interviews :)
| HPsquared wrote:
| Human interlocutors have similar issues.
| beambot wrote:
| The worst is when it's confidently wrong about things...
| Thankfully, this occurance is becoming less & less common --
| or at least, it's boundary is beyond my subject matter
| expertise.
| Teever wrote:
| It sounds like it is a good tool for getting you up to speed
| on a subject and you can leverage that newfound familiarity
| to better search for reputable sources on existing platforms
| like google scholar or arXiv.
| jjfoooo4 wrote:
| It's a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser. It helps you get
| up to speed on general conventions and consensus on a topic,
| less so on going deep on controversial or highly specialized
| topics
| neutronicus wrote:
| Hmm. I have had pretty productive conversations with ChatGPT
| about non-linear optimization.
|
| Granted, that's probably well-trodden ground, to which model
| developers are primed to pay attention, and I'm (a) a
| relative novice with (b) very strong math skills from another
| domain (computational physics). So Chuck and I are probably
| both set up for success.
| II2II wrote:
| > Also, god forbid you're researching a complex and possibly
| controversial subject and you want it to find reputable
| sources or particularly academic ones.
|
| That's fine. Recognize the limits of LLMs and don't use them
| in those cases.
|
| Yet that is something you should be doing regardless of the
| source. There are plenty of non-reputable sources in academic
| libraries and there are plenty of non-reputable sources from
| professionals in any given field. That is particularly true
| when dealing with controversial topics or historical sources.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > and you want it to find reputable sources
|
| Ask it for sources. The two things where LLMs excel is by
| filling the sources on some claim you give it (lots will be
| made up, but there isn't anything better out there) and by
| giving you queries you can search for some description you
| give it.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Also, Perplexity.ai cites its sources by default.
| golly_ned wrote:
| It often invents sources. At least for me.
| jlebar wrote:
| > Its too shallow. The deeper I go, the less it seems to be
| useful. This happens quick for me.
|
| You must be using a free model like GPT-4o (or the equivalent
| from another provider)?
|
| I find that o3 is consistently able to go deeper than me in
| anything I'm a nonexpert in, and usually can keep up with me
| in those areas where I am an expert.
|
| If that's not the case for you I'd be very curious to see a
| full conversation transcript (in chatgpt you can share these
| directly from the UI).
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| >Its too shallow. The deeper I go, the less it seems to be
| useful. This happens quick for me.
|
| If its a subject you are just learning how can you possibly
| evaluate this?
| neutronicus wrote:
| If you're a math-y person trying to get up to speed in some
| other math-y field you can discern useless LLM output
| pretty quickly even as a relative novice.
|
| Falling apart under pointed questioning, saying obviously
| false things, etc.
| Sharlin wrote:
| It's easy to recognize that something is wrong if it's
| wrong enough.
| epolanski wrote:
| I really think that 90% of such comments come from a lack of
| knowledge on how to use LLMs for research.
|
| It's not a criticism, the landscape moves fast and it takes
| time to master and personalize a flow to use an LLM as a
| research assistant.
|
| Start with something such as NotebookLM.
| kenjackson wrote:
| "The deeper I go, the less it seems to be useful. This
| happens quick for me. Also, god forbid you're researching a
| complex and possibly controversial subject and you want it to
| find reputable sources or particularly academic ones."
|
| These things also apply to humans. A year or so ago I thought
| I'd finally learn more about the Israeli/Palestinians
| conflict. Turns out literally every source that was
| recommended to me by some reputable source was considered
| completely non-credible by another reputable one.
|
| That said I've found ChatGPT to be quite good at math and
| programming and I can go pretty deep at both. I can
| definitely trip it into mistakes (eg it seems to use
| calculations to "intuit" its way around sometimes and you can
| find dev cases where the calls will lead it the wrong
| directions), but I also know enough to know how to keep it on
| rails.
| Liftyee wrote:
| Re: conflicts and politics etc.
|
| I've anecdotally found that real world things like these
| tend to be nuanced, and that sources (especially on the
| internet) are disincentivised in various ways from actually
| showing nuance. This leads to "side-taking" and a lack of
| "middle-ground" nuanced sources, when the reality lies
| somewhere in the middle.
|
| Might be linked to the phenomenon where in an environment
| where people "take sides", those who display moderate
| opinions are simply ostracized by both sides.
|
| Curious to hear people's thoughts and disagreements on
| this.
| wahern wrote:
| I think the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is an example
| where studying the history is in some sense counter-
| productive. There's more than a century of atrocities
| that justify each subsequent reaction; the veritable
| cycle of violence. And whichever atrocity grabs you first
| (partly based on present cultural narratives) will color
| how you perceive everything else.
|
| Moreover, the conflict is unfolding. What matters isn't
| what happened 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago, but
| what has happened recently and is happening. A neighbor
| of mine who recently passed was raised in Israel. Born
| circa 1946 (there's black & white footage of her as a
| baby aboard, IIRC, the ship Exodus 1947), she has vivid
| memories as a child of Palestinian Imams calling out from
| the mosques to "kill the Jews". She was a beautiful, kind
| soul who, for example, freely taught adult education to
| immigrants (of all sorts), but who one time admitted to
| me that she utterly despised Arabs. That's all you need
| to know, right there, to understand why Israel is doing
| what it's doing. Not so much what happened in the past to
| make people feel that way, but that many Israelis
| actually, viscerally feel this way today, justifiably or
| not but in any event rooted in memories and experiences
| seared into their conscience. Suffice it to say, most
| Palestinians have similar stories and sentiments of their
| own, one of the expressions of which was seen on October
| 7th.
|
| And yet at the same time, after the first few months of
| the Gaza War she was so disgusted that she said she
| wanted to renounce her Israeli citizenship. (I don't know
| how sincere she was in saying this; she died not long
| after.) And, again, that's all you need to know to see
| how the conflict can be resolved, if at all; not by
| understanding and reconciling the history, but merely
| choosing to stop justifying the violence and moving
| forward. How the collective action problem might be
| resolved, within Israeli and Palestinian societies and
| between them... that's a whole 'nother dilemma.
|
| Using AI/ML to study history is interesting in that it
| even further removes one from actual human experience.
| Hearing first hand accounts, even if anecdotal, conveys
| information you can't acquire from a book; reading a book
| conveys information and perspective you can't get from a
| shorter work, like a paper or article; and AI/ML
| summaries elide and obscure yet more substance.
| 9dev wrote:
| > Turns out literally every source that was recommended to
| me by some reputable source was considered completely non-
| credible by another reputable one.
|
| That's the single most important lesson by the way, that
| this conflict just has two different, mutually exclusive
| perspectives, and no objective truth (none that could be
| recovered FWIW). Either you accept the ambiguity, or you
| end up siding with one party over the other.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > you end up siding with one party over the other
|
| Then as you get more and more familiar you "switch"
| depending on the sub-issue being discussed, aka nuance
| slt2021 wrote:
| the truth (aka facts) is objective and facts exist.
|
| The problem is selective memory of these facts, and
| biased interpretation of those facts, and stretching the
| truth to fit pre-determined opinion
| jonahx wrote:
| > learn more about the Israeli/Palestinians
|
| > to be quite good at math and programming
|
| Since LLMs are essentially summarizing relevant content,
| this makes sense. In "objective" fields like math and CS,
| the vast majority of content aligns, and LLMs are fantastic
| at distilling the relevant portions you ask about. When
| there is no consensus, they can usually _tell_ you that (
| "this is nuanced topic with many perspectives...", etc),
| but they can't help you resolve the truth because, from
| their perspective, the only truth is the content.
| drc500free wrote:
| Israel / Palestine is a collision between two internally
| valid and mutually exclusive worldviews. It's kind of a
| given that there will be two camps who consider the other
| non-reputable.
|
| FWIW, the /r/AskHistorians booklist is pretty helpful.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/middleeas
| t...
| andrepd wrote:
| A human-curated list of human-written books? How
| delightfully old fashioned!
| prats226 wrote:
| Can you give a specific example where at certain depth it has
| stopped becoming useful?
| terabyterex wrote:
| This can happen if you use the free model and not a paid deep
| research model. You can use a gpt model and ask things like ,
| "how many moons does Jupiter have?" But if you want to ask,
| "can you go on the web a research the affects that chamical a
| has had on our water supply a cite sources?", you will need
| to use a deep research model.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Why not do the research yourself rather than risk it
| misinterpreting? I FAFO'd repeatedly with that, and it is
| just horribly unreliable.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| If we have custom trained LLMs per subject doesn't that solve
| the problem. The shallow problem seems really easy to solve
| gojomo wrote:
| Grandparent testimony of success, & parent testimony of
| frustration, are both just wispy random gossip when they
| don't specify _which_ LLMs delivered the reported
| experiences.
|
| The quality varies wildly across models & versions.
|
| With humans, the statement "my tutor was great" and "my tutor
| was awful" reflect very little on "tutoring" in general, and
| are barely even responses to each other withou more
| specificity about the quality of tutor involved.
|
| Same with AI models.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| It's not a doctoral adviser.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| What is "it"? Be specific: are you using some obsolete and/or
| free model? What specific prompt(s) convinced you that there
| was no way forward?
| melenaboija wrote:
| I validate models in finance, and this is by far the best
| tool created for that purpose. I'd compare financial model
| validation to a Master's level task, where you're working
| with well established concepts, but at a deep, technical
| level. LLMs excel at that: ithey understand model
| assumptions, know what needs to be tested to ensure
| correctness, and can generate the necessary code and
| calculations to perform those tests. And finally, they can
| write the reports.
|
| Model Validation groups are one of the targets for LLMs.
| EchoReflection wrote:
| I have found that being very specific and asking things like
| "can you tell me what another perspective might be, such that
| I can understand potential counter-arguments might be, and
| how people with other views might see this topic?" can be
| helpful when dealing with complex/nuanced/contentious
| subjects. Likewise with regard to "reputable" sources.
| noosphr wrote:
| This is where feeding in extra context matters. Paste in text
| that shows up from a google search, textbooks preferred, to
| get in depth answers.
|
| No one builds multi shot search tools because they eat tokens
| like no ones business, but I've deployed them internal to a
| company with rave reviews at the cost of $200 per seat per
| day.
| lmc wrote:
| > I'll personally attest: LLM's have been absolutely incredible
| to self learn new things post graduation.
|
| How do you know when it's bullshitting you though?
| mcmcmc wrote:
| That's the neat part, you don't!
| jahewson wrote:
| Same way you know for humans?
| azemetre wrote:
| But an LLM isn't a human, with a human you can read body
| language or look up their past body of work. How do you do
| his with against an LLM
| andix wrote:
| Many humans tell you bullshit, because they think it's
| the truth and factually correct. Not so different to
| LLMs.
| sejje wrote:
| All the same ways I know when Internet comments, outdated
| books, superstitions, and other humans are bullshitting me.
|
| Sometimes right away, something sounds wrong. Sometimes when
| I try to apply the knowledge and discover a problem.
| Sometimes never, I believe many incorrect things even today.
| nilamo wrote:
| When you Google the new term it gives you and you get good
| results, you know it wasn't made up.
|
| Since when was it acceptable to only ever look at a single
| source?
| ainiriand wrote:
| I've learnt Rust in 12 weeks with a study plan that ChatGPT
| designed for me, catering to my needs and encouraging me to
| take notes and write articles. This way of learning allowed me
| to publish https://rustaceo.es for Spanish speakers made from
| my own notes.
|
| I think the potential in this regard is limitless.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| I learned Rust in a couple of weeks by reading the book.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| But I agree though, I am getting insane value out of LLMs.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Doubtful. Unless you have very low standards of "learn".
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| What are your standards of learn?
| paxys wrote:
| Yeah regardless of time taken the study plan for Rust
| already exists (https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/). You don't
| need ChatGPT to regurgitate it to you.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Now _this_ is a ringing endorsement. Specific stuff you
| learned, and actual proof of the outcome.
|
| (Only thing missing is the model(s) you used).
| ai_viewz wrote:
| yes Chat GPT has helped me learn about actix web a framework
| similar to FastAPI in rust.
| JTbane wrote:
| Nah I'm calling BS, for me self-learning after college is
| either Just Do It(tm) trial-and-error, blogs, or hitting the
| nonfiction section of the library.
| crims0n wrote:
| I agree... spent last weekend chatting with an LLM, filling in
| knowledge gaps I had on the electromagnetic spectrum. It does
| an amazing job educating you on known unknowns, but I think
| being able to know how to ask the right questions is key. I
| don't know how it would do with unknown unknowns, which is
| where I think books really shine and are still a preferable
| learning method.
| kelthuzad wrote:
| I share your experience and view in that regard! There is so
| much criticism of LLMs and some of it is fair, like the problem
| of hallucinations, but that weakness can be reframed as a
| learning opportunity. It's like discussing a subject with a
| personal scientist who may at certain times test you, by making
| claims that may be simplistic or outright wrong, to keep the
| student skeptical and check if they are actually paying
| attention.
|
| This requires a student to be actually interested in what they
| are learning tho, for others, who blindly trust its output, it
| can have adverse effects like the illusion of having understood
| a concept while they might have even mislearned it.
| vrotaru wrote:
| You should always check. I've seen LLM's being wrong (and
| obstinate) on topics which are one step separated from common
| knowledge.
|
| I had to post the source code to win the dispute, so to speak.
| abenga wrote:
| Why would you try to convince an LLM of anything?
| vrotaru wrote:
| Well, not exactly convince. I was curious what will happen.
|
| If you are curious it was a question about the behavior of
| Kafka producer interceptors when an exception is thrown.
|
| But I agree that it is hard to resist the temptation to
| treat LLM's as a pear.
| layer8 wrote:
| Often you want to proceed further based on a common
| understanding, so it's an attempt to establish that common
| understanding.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Now think of all the times you didn't already know enough to
| go and find the real answer.
|
| Ever read mainstream news reporting on something you actually
| know about? Notice how it's always wrong? I'm sure there's a
| name for this phenomenon. It sounds like exactly the same
| thing.
| tekno45 wrote:
| how are you checking its correctness if you're learning the
| topic?
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| This is important, as benchmarks indicate we aren't at a
| level where a LLM can truly be relied upon to teach topics
| across the board.
|
| It is hard to verify information that you are unfamiliar
| with. It would be like learning from a message board. Can you
| really trust what is being said?
| Eisenstein wrote:
| What is the solution? Toss out thousands of years of tested
| pedagogy which shows that most people learn by trying
| things, asking questions, and working through problems with
| assistance and instead tell everyone to read a textbook by
| themselves and learn through osmosis?
|
| So what if the LLM is wrong about something. Human teachers
| are wrong about things, you are wrong about things, I am
| wrong about things. We figure it out when it doesn't work
| the way we thought and adjust our thinking. We aren't
| learning how to operate experimental nuclear reactors here,
| where messing up results in half a country getting
| irradiated. We are learning things for fun, hobbies, and
| self-betterment.
| qualeed wrote:
| > _we aren 't at a level where a LLM can truly be relied
| upon to teach topics across the board._
|
| You can replace "LLM" here with "human" and it remains
| true.
|
| Anyone who has gone to post-secondary has had a teacher
| that relied on outdated information, or filled in gaps with
| their own theories, etc. Dealing with that is a large
| portion of what "learning" is.
|
| I'm not convinced about the efficacy of LLMs in
| teaching/studying. But it's foolish to think that humans
| don't suffer from the same reliability issue as LLMs, at
| least to a similar degree.
| signatoremo wrote:
| The same way you check if you learn in any other ways? Cross
| referencing, asking online, trying it out, etc.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| If it's coding you can compile or test your program. For
| other things you can go to primary sources
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| > It used to be that if you got stuck on a concept, you're
| basically screwed
|
| No, not really.
|
| > Unless it was common enough to show up in a well formed
| question on stack exchange, it was pretty much impossible, and
| the only thing you can really do is keep paving forward and
| hope at some point, it'll make sense to you.
|
| Your experience isn't universal. Some students learned how to
| do research in school.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| They should have focused on social skills too I think
| fn-mote wrote:
| I do a lot of research and independent learning. The way I
| translated "screwed" was "4-6 hours to unravel the issue".
| And half the time the issue is just a misunderstanding.
|
| It's exciting when I discover I can't replicate something
| that is stated authoritatively... which turns out to be
| controversial. That's rare, though. I bet ChatGPT knows it's
| controversial, too, but that wouldn't be as much fun.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Like a car can be "beyond economical repair", a problem can
| be not worth the time (and uncertainty) or fixing. Especially
| from subjective judgement with incomplete information etc
| johnfn wrote:
| "Screwed" = spending hours sifting through poorly-written,
| vaguely-related documents to find a needle in a haystack. Why
| would I want to continue doing that?
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| > "Screwed" = spending hours sifting through poorly-
| written, vaguely-related documents to find a needle in a
| haystack.
|
| From the parent comment:
|
| > it was pretty much impossible ... hope at some point,
| it'll make sense to you
|
| Not sure where you are getting the additional context for
| what they meant by "screwed", but I am not seeing it.
| Leynos wrote:
| As you say, your experience isn't universal, and we all have
| different modes of learning that work best for us.
| mathattack wrote:
| I've found LLMs to be great in summarizing non-controversial
| non-technical bodies of knowledge. For example - the facts in
| the long swings of regional histories. You have to ask for
| nuance and countervailing viewpoints, though you'll get them if
| they're in there.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Unless it was common enough to show up in a well formed
| question on stack exchange, it was pretty much impossible
|
| sorry but if you've gone to university, in particular at a time
| when internet access was already ubiquitous, surely you must
| have been capable to find an answer to a programming problem by
| consulting documentation, manual, or tutorials which exist on
| almost any topic.
|
| I'm not saying the chatbot interface is necessarily bad, it
| might be more engaging, but it literally does not present you
| with information you couldn't have found yourself.
|
| If someone has a computer science degree and tells me without
| stack exchange they can't find solutions to basic problems that
| is a red flag. That's like the article about the people posted
| here who couldn't program when their LLM credits ran out
| wiz21c wrote:
| I use it to refresh some engineering maths I have forgotten
| (ODE, numerical schemas, solving linear equations, data
| sciences algorithms, etc) and the explanations are most of the
| time great and usually 2 or 3 prompts give me a good overview
| and explain the tricky details.
|
| I also use it to remember some python stuff. In rust, it is
| less good: makes mistakes.
|
| In those two domains, at that level, it's really good.
|
| It could help students I think.
| andix wrote:
| Absolutely. I used to have a lot of weird IPv6 issues in my
| home network I didn't understand. ChatGPT helped me to dump
| some traffic with tcpdump and explained what was happening on
| the network.
|
| In the process it helped me to learn many details about RA and
| NDP (Router Advertisments/Neighbor Discovery Protocol, which
| mostly replace DHCP and ARP from IPv4).
|
| It made me realize that my WiFi mesh routers do quite a lot of
| things to prevent broadcast loops on the network, and that all
| my weird issues could be attributed to one cheap mesh repeater.
| So I replaced it and now everything works like a charm.
|
| I had this setup for 5 years and was never able to figure out
| what was going on there, although I really tried.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| Would you say you were using the LLM as a tutor or as tech
| support, in that instance?
| andix wrote:
| Probably both. I think ChatGPT wouldn't have found the
| issue by itself. But I noticed some specific things, asked
| for some tutoring and then it helped my to find the issues.
| It was a team effort, either of "us" alone wouldn't have
| finished the job. ChatGPT had some really wrong ideas in
| the process.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| LLMs are to learning what self driving cars are to
| transportation. They take you to the destination most of the
| time. But the problem is that if you use them too much your
| brain (your legs) undergoes metaphorical atrophy and when you
| are faced in the position of having to do it on your own, you
| are worse than you would be had you spent the time using your
| brain (legs). Learning is great but learning to learn is the
| real skilset. You don't develop that if you are always getting
| spoonfed.
| pyman wrote:
| This is one of the challenges I see with self-driving cars.
| Driving requires a high level of cognitive processing to
| handle changing conditions and potential hazards. So when you
| drive most of your brain is engaged. The impact self-driving
| cars are going to have on mental stimulation, situational
| awareness, and even long-term cognitive health could be
| bigger than we think, especially if people stop engaging in
| tasks that keep those parts of the brain active. That said, I
| love the idea of my car driving me around the city while I
| play video games.
|
| Regarding LLMs, they can also stimulate thinking if used
| right.
| globular-toast wrote:
| IMO your problem is the same as many people these days: you
| don't own any books and refuse to get them.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| I agree. I recently bought a broken Rolex and asked GPT for a
| list of tools I should get on Amazon to work on it.
|
| I tried using YouTube to find walk through guides for how to
| approach the repair as a complete n00b and only found videos
| for unrelated problems.
|
| But I described my issues and took photos to GPT O3-Pro and it
| was able to guide me and tell me what to watch out for.
|
| I completed the repair (very proud of myself) and even though
| it failed a day later (I guess I didn't re-seat well enough) I
| still feel far more confident opening it and trying again than
| I did at the start.
|
| Cost of broken watch + $200 pro mode << Cost of working watch.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| what was broken on it?
| belter wrote:
| Depending on context, I would advise you to be extremely
| careful. Modern LLMs are Gell-Mann Amnesia to the square. Once
| you watched a LLM butcher a topic you know extremely well, it
| is spooky how much authority they still project on the next
| interaction.
| tonmoy wrote:
| I don't know what subject you are learning but for circuit
| design I have failed to get any response out of LLMs that's not
| straight from a well known text book chapter that I have
| already read
| IshKebab wrote:
| It definitely depends _heavily_ on how well represented the
| subject is on the internet at large. Pretty much every
| question I 've asked it about SystemVerilog it gets wrong,
| but it can be very helpful about quite complex things about
| random C questions, for example why I might get undefined
| symbol errors with `inline` functions in C but only in debug
| mode.
|
| On the other hand it told me you can't execute programs when
| evaluating a Makefile and you trivially can. It's very hit
| and miss. When it misses it's rather frustrating. When it
| hits it can save you literally hours.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| > It used to be that if you got stuck on a concept, you're
| basically screwed. Unless it was common enough to show up in a
| well formed question on stack exchange,
|
| It's called basic research skills - don't they teach this
| anymore in high school, let alone college? How ever did we get
| by with nothing but an encyclopedia or a library catalog?
| axoltl wrote:
| Something is lost as well if you do 'research' by just asking
| an LLM. On the path to finding your answer in the
| encyclopedia or academic papers, etc. you discover so many
| things you weren't specifically looking for. Even if you
| don't fully absorb everything there's a good chance the
| memory will be triggered later when needed: "Didn't I read
| about this somewhere?".
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| LLMs hallucinate too much and too frequently for me to put
| any trust in their (in)ability to help with research.
| ewoodrich wrote:
| Yep, this is why I just don't enjoy or get much value from
| exploring new topics with LLMs. Living in the Reddit
| factoid/listicle/TikTok explainer internet age my goal for
| years (going back well before ChatGPT hit the scene) has
| been to seek out high quality literature or academic papers
| for the subjects I'm interested in.
|
| I find it so much more intellectually stimulating then most
| of what I find online. Reading e.g. a 600 page book about
| some specific historical event gives me so much more
| perspective and exposure to different aspects I never would
| have thought to ask about on my own, or would have been
| elided when clipped into a few sentence summary. And the
| journey of covering
|
| I have gotten some value out of asking for book
| recommendations from LLMs, mostly as a starting point I can
| use to prune a list of 10 books down into a 2 or 3 after
| doing some of my research on each suggestion. But talking
| to a chatbot to learn about a subject just doesn't do
| anything for me for anything deeper than basic Q&A where I
| simply need a (hopefully) correct answer and nothing more.
| BDPW wrote:
| Its a little disingenuous to say that, most of us would have
| never gotten by with literally just a library catalog and
| encyclopedia. Needing a community to learn something in is
| needed to learn almost anything difficult and this has always
| been the case. That's not just about fundamentally difficult
| problems but also about simple misunderstandings.
|
| If you don't have access to a community like that learning
| stuff in a technical field can be practically impossible.
| Having an llm to ask infinite silly/dumb/stupid questions can
| be super helpful and save you days of being stuck on silly
| things, even though it's not perfect.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| I'll personally attest anecdotes mean little in sound
| arguments.
|
| When I got stuck on a concept, I wasn't screwed: I read more;
| books if necessary. StackExchange wasn't my only source.
|
| LLMs are not like TAs, personal or not, in the same way they're
| not humans. So it then follows we can actually contemplate not
| using LLMs in formal teaching environments.
| brulard wrote:
| Sometimes you don't have tens of hours to spend on a single
| problem you can not figure out.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| >Now, everyone basically has a personal TA, ready to go at all
| hours of the day.
|
| And that's a bad thing. Nothing can replace the work in
| learning, the moments where you don't understand it and have to
| think until it hurts and until you understand. Anything that
| bypasses this (including, for uni students, leaning too heavily
| on generous TAs) results in a kind of learning theatre, where
| the student thinks they've developed an understanding, but
| hasn't.
|
| Experienced learners already have the discipline to use LLMs
| without asking too much of them, the same way they learned not
| to look up the answer in the back of the textbook until
| arriving at their own solution.
| MattSayar wrote:
| It's one more step on the path to A Young Lady's Illustrated
| Primer. Still a long way to go, but it's a burden off my
| shoulders to be able to ask stupid questions without judgment
| or assumptions.
| lottin wrote:
| Yes. Learning assistance is one of the few use cases of IA that
| I have had success with.
| andrepd wrote:
| A "TA" which has only the knowledge which is "common enough to
| show up in a well formed question on stack exchange"...
|
| And which just makes things up (with the same tone and
| confidence!) at random and unpredictable times.
|
| Yeah apart from that it's _just_ like a knowledgeable TA.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > It used to be that if you got stuck on a concept, you're
| basically screwed.
|
| Given that humanity has been able to go from living in caves to
| sending spaceships to the moon without LLMs, let me express
| some doubt about that.
|
| Even without going further, software engineering isn't new and
| people have been stuck on concepts and have managed to get
| unstuck without LLMs for decades.
|
| What you gain in instant knowledge with LLMs, you lose in
| learning how to get unstuck, how to persevere, how to innovate,
| etc.
| mym1990 wrote:
| "It used to be that if you got stuck on a concept, you're
| basically screwed."
|
| There seems to be a gap in problem solving abilities here...the
| process of breaking down concepts into easier to understand
| concepts and then recompiling has been around since
| forever...it is just easier to find those relationships now. To
| say it was _impossible_ to learn concepts you are stuck on is a
| little alarming.
| cs_throwaway wrote:
| I agree. We are talking about technical, mathy stuff, right?
|
| As long as you can tell that you don't deeply understand
| something that you just read, they are incredible TAs.
|
| The trick is going to be to impart this metacognitive skill on
| the average student. I am hopeful we will figure it out in the
| top 50 universities.
| roughly wrote:
| My rule with LLMs has been "if a shitty* answer fast gets you
| somewhere, the LLMs are the right tool," and that's where I've
| seen them for learning, too. There are times when I'm reading a
| paper, and there's a concept mentioned that I don't know - I
| could either divert onto a full Google search to try to find a
| reasonable summary, or I can ask ChatGPT and get a quick
| answer. For load-bearing concepts or knowledge, yes, I need to
| put the time in to actually research and learn a concept
| accurately and fully, but for things tangential to my actual
| current interests or for things I'm just looking at for a
| hobby, a shitty answer fast is exactly what I want.
|
| I think this is the same thing with vibe coding, AI art, etc. -
| if you want something good, it's not the right tool for the
| job. If your alternative is "nothing," and "literally anything
| at all" will do, man, they're game changers.
|
| * Please don't overindex on "shitty" - "If you don't need
| something verifiably high-quality"
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| I'm curious what you've used it to learn
| deanc wrote:
| I'm curious what these features like study mode actually are. Are
| they not just using prompts behind this (of which I've used many
| already to make LLMs behave like this) ?
| pillefitz wrote:
| They state themselves it's just system prompts.
| zaking17 wrote:
| I'm impressed by the product design here. A non-ai-expert could
| find this mode extremely valuable, and all openai had to do was
| tinker with the prompt and add a nice button (relatedly, you
| could have had this all along by prompting the model yourself).
| Sure, it's easy for competitors to copy, but still a nice
| little addition.
| outlore wrote:
| i wonder how Khan Academy feels about this...don't they have a
| similar assistant that uses OpenAI under the hood?
| NullCascade wrote:
| OpenAI, please stop translating your articles into the most
| sterile and dry Danish I have ever read. English is fine.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| tried it and couldn't really tell between a good prompt to "teach
| me" and this.
| apwell23 wrote:
| same. i can't tell whats different. gives me same output
| regardless for the prompts in the example.
|
| i don't get it.
| marcusverus wrote:
| Highly analytical 120 IQ HNers aren't the target audience for
| this product. The target audience is the type of person who
| lacks the capacity to use AI to teach themselves.
| lmc wrote:
| I honestly don't know how they convince employees to make
| features like this - like, they must dogfood and see how wrong
| the models can be sometimes. Yet there's a conscious choice to
| not only release this to, but actively target, vast swathes of
| people that literally don't know better.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| High paychecks
| AIorNot wrote:
| see Asimov: https://www.johnspence.org.uk/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/11/The...
| falcor84 wrote:
| I love the story conceptually, but as for the specifics, it
| shows a surprising lack of imagination on Asimov's part,
| especially for something published a year after "I, Robot".
| Asimov apparently just envisioned an automated activity book,
| rather than an automated tutor that the kid could have a real
| conversation with, and it's really not representative of modern
| day AIs.
|
| > The part Margie hated most was the slot where she had to put
| homework and test papers. She always had to write them out in a
| punch code they made her learn when she was six years old, and
| the mechanical teacher calculated the mark in no time.
| pompeii wrote:
| rip 30 startups
| baq wrote:
| Probably an order of magnitude too low
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| OpenAI has an incredible product team. Deep Mind and Anthrpoic
| (and maybe xai) are competitive at the model level but not at
| product
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| An acquaintance of mine has a start-up in this space and uses
| OpenAI to do essentially the same thing. This must look like, and
| may well be, the guillotine for him...
|
| It's my primary fear building anything on these models, they can
| just come eat your lunch once it looks yummy enough. Tread
| carefully
| potatolicious wrote:
| > _" they can just come eat your lunch once it looks yummy
| enough. Tread carefully"_
|
| True, and worse, they're _hungry_ because it 's increasingly
| seeming like "hosting LLMs and charging by the token" is not
| terribly profitable.
|
| I don't really see a path for the major players that _isn 't_
| "Sherlock everything that achieves traction".
| thimabi wrote:
| But what's the future in terms of profitability of LLM
| providers?
|
| As long as features like Study Mode are little more than
| creative prompting, any provider will eventually be able to
| offer them and offer token-based charging.
| potatolicious wrote:
| I think a few points worth making here:
|
| - From what I can see many products are rapidly getting
| past "just prompt engineering the base API". So even though
| a lot of these things were/are primitive, I don't think
| it's necessarily a good bet that they will remain so.
| Though agree in principle - thin API wrappers will be out-
| competed both by cheaper thin wrappers, or products that
| are more sophisticated/better than thin wrappers.
|
| - This is, oddly enough, a scenario that is _way_ easier to
| navigate than the rest of the LLM industry. We know
| consumer apps, we know consumer apps that do relatively
| basic (or at least, well understood) things. Success
| /failure then is way less about technical prowess and more
| about classical factors like distribution, marketing,
| integrations, etc.
|
| A good example here is the lasting success of paid email
| providers. Multiple vendors (MSFT, GOOG, etc.) make huge
| amounts of money hosting people's email, despite it being a
| mature product that, at the basic level, is pretty solved,
| and where the core product can be replicated fairly easily.
|
| The presence of open source/commodity commercial offerings
| hasn't really driven the price of the service to the floor,
| though the commodity offerings _do_ provide _some_ pricing
| pressure.
| m11a wrote:
| Email is pretty difficult to reliably self-host though,
| and typically a PITA to manage. And you really don't ever
| want to lose your email address or the associated data.
| Fewer people could say they properly secure, manage and
| administer a VPS on which they can host the email server
| they eventually setup, over say a 10yr period.
|
| Most people I saw offer self-hosted emails for groups
| (student groups etc), it ended up a mess. Compare all
| that to say ollama, which makes self-hosting LLMs
| trivial, and they're stateless.
|
| So I'm not sure email is a good example of commodity not
| bringing price to the floor.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| We can assume that OpenAI/Anthropic offerings are going to
| be better long term simply because they have more human
| capital, though, right? If it turns out that what really
| matters in the AI race is study mode, then OpenAI goes "ok
| let's pivot the hundreds of genius level, well-paid
| engineers to that issue. AND our engineers can use every
| tool we offer for free without limits, even experimental
| models". It's tough for the small AI startup to compete
| with that, the best hope is to be bought like Windsurf
| falcor84 wrote:
| Thanks for introducing me to the verb Sherlock! I'm one of
| today's lucky 10,000.
|
| > In the computing verb sense, refers to the software
| Sherlock, which in 2002 came to replicate some of the
| features of an earlier complementary program called
| Watson.[1]
|
| [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Sherlock
| mvieira38 wrote:
| How can't these founders see this happening, too? From the
| start OpenAI has been getting into more markets than just "LLM
| provider"
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| There's a case for a start up to capture enough market that
| LLM providers would just buy it out. Think of CharacterAI
| case.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Character AI was never acquired, it remains independent.
| azinman2 wrote:
| They originally claimed they wouldn't as to not compete with
| their API users...
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I'm too young to have experienced this, but I'm sure others
| here aren't.
|
| During the early days of tech, was there prevailing wisdom that
| software companies would never be able to compete with hardware
| companies because the hardware companies would always be able
| to copy them and ship the software with the hardware?
|
| Because I think it's basically the analogous situation. People
| assume that the foundation model providers have some massive
| advantage over the people building on top of them, but I don't
| really see any evidence for this.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Claude Code and Gemini-CLI are able to offer much more value
| compared to startups (like Cursor) that need to pay for model
| access, largely due to the immense costs involved.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Ah, I don't know. Of course there is risk involved no matter
| what we do (see the IDE/Cursor space), but we need to be
| _somewhat_ critical of the value we add.
|
| If you want to try and make a quick buck, fine, be quick and go
| for whatever. If you plan on building a long term business,
| don't do the most obvious, low effort low hanging fruit stuff.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| yeah, if you want to stick around you need some kind of moat
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I used to work for copy.ai and this happened to them. Investors
| always asked if the founders were worried about OpenAI
| competing with their consumer product. Then ChatGPT released.
| Turns out that was a reasonable concern.
|
| These days they've pivoted to a more enterprise product and are
| still chugging along.
| djeastm wrote:
| Yes, any LLM-adjacent application developer should be
| concerned. Even if they don't do 100% of what your product
| does, their market reach and capitalization is scary. Any
| model/tooling improvements that just happen to encroach in your
| domain will put you on the clock...
| henriquegodoy wrote:
| The point is that you can have a highly advanced teacher with
| infinite patience, available 24/7--even when you have a question
| at 3 a.m is game changer and people that know how to use that
| will have a extremaly leverage in their life.
| te_chris wrote:
| This is great. When it first came out I was going through
| Strang's linalg course and got it to do "problem mode" where it
| would talk me through a problem step by step, waiting for me
| respond.
|
| A more thought through product version of that is only a good
| thing imo.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I'm SO glad that my wife has tenure
| gilbetron wrote:
| Sadly, tenure will not save people.
| ath3nd wrote:
| Note the new features coming in the space:
|
| - study mode (this announcement)
|
| - office suite (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-designs-
| rival-office-w...)
|
| - sub-agents (https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/sub-
| agents)
|
| When they announce VR glasses or a watch, we'd known we've gone
| full circle and the hype is up.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I'm currently learning Janet and using ChatGPT as my tutor is
| absolutely awful. "So what is the difference between local and
| var if they are both local and not global variables (as you told
| me earlier)?" "Great question, and now you are really getting to
| the core of it, ... " continues to hallucinate.
|
| It's a great tutor for things it knows, but it really needs to
| learn its own limits
| ducktective wrote:
| >It's a great tutor for things it knows
|
| Things well-represented in its training datasets. Basically
| React todo list, bootstrap form, tic-tac-toe in vue
| xrd wrote:
| It is like a tutor that desperately needs the money, which
| maybe isn't so inaccurate for OpenAI and all the money they
| took from petrostates.
| runeblaze wrote:
| For these unfortunately you should dump most of the guide/docs
| into its context
| gh0stcat wrote:
| I have been testing it for the last 10 mins or so, I really like
| it so far, I am reviewing algebra just as something super simple.
| It asks you to add your understanding of the concept, ie explain
| why you can always group a polynomial after splitting the middle
| term. This is honestly more than I got in my mediocre public
| school. I could see kids getting a lot out of it especially if
| their parents aren't very knowledgeable or cannot afford tutors.
| Not probably a huge improvement on existing tools like kahn
| academy though. I will continue to test on more advanced
| subjects.
| avereveard wrote:
| This highlight the dangers for all startups using these platforms
| as provider, they know trends in token consumption, and will eat
| up your market in a weekend.
| sarchertech wrote:
| Ever read an article on a subject you're very familiar with and
| notice all the mistakes?
|
| When I ask ChatGPT* questions about things I don't know much
| about it sounds like a genius.
|
| When I ask it about things I'm an expert in, at best it sounds
| like a tech journalist describing how a computer works. At worst
| it is just flat out wrong.
|
| * yes I've tried the latest models and I use them frequently at
| work
| x187463 wrote:
| I'm really waiting for somebody to figure out the correct
| interface for all this. For example, study mode will present you
| with a wall of text containing information, examples, and
| questions. There's no great way to associate your answers with
| specific questions. The chat interface just isn't good for this
| sort of interaction. ChatGPT really needs to build its own
| canvas/artifact interface wherein questions/responses are tied
| together. It's clear, at this point, that we're doing way too
| much with a UI that isn't designed for more than a simple
| conversation.
| precompute wrote:
| There is no "correct interface". People who want to learn put
| in the effort, doesn't matter if they have scrolls, books,
| ebooks or AI.
| perlgeek wrote:
| There are so many options that could be done, like:
|
| * for each statement, give you the option to rate how well you
| understood it. Offer clarification on things you didn't
| understand
|
| * present knowledge as a tree that you can expand to get deeper
|
| * show interactive graphs (very useful for mathy things when
| can you easily adjust some of the parameters)
|
| * add quizzes to check your understanding
|
| ... though I could well imagine this being out of scope for
| ChatGPT, and thus an opportunity for other apps / startups.
| ColeShepherd wrote:
| > present knowledge as a tree that you can expand to get
| deeper
|
| I'm very interested in this. I've considered building this,
| but if this already exists, someone let me know please!
| tootyskooty wrote:
| I gave it a shot with periplus.app :). Not perfect by any
| means, but it's a different UX than chat so you might find it
| interesting.
| danenania wrote:
| This looks super cool--I've imagined something similar,
| especially the skill tree/knowledge map UI. Looking forward
| to trying it out.
|
| Have you considered using the LLM to give tests/quizzes
| (perhaps just conversationally) in order to measure progress
| and uncover weak spots?
| tootyskooty wrote:
| There are both in-document quizzes and larger exams (at a
| course level).
|
| I've also been playing around with adapting content based
| on their results (e.g. proactively nudging complexity
| up/down) but haven't gotten it to a good place yet.
| danenania wrote:
| Nice, I've been playing with it a bit and it seems really
| well done and polished so far. I'm curious how long you
| spent building it?
|
| Only feedback I have so far is that it would be nice to
| control the playback speed of the 'read aloud' mode. I'd
| like it to be a little bit faster.
| bo1024 wrote:
| Agree, one thing that brought this home was the example where
| the student asks to learn all of game theory. There seems to be
| an assumption on both sides that this will be accomplished in a
| single chat session by a linear pass, necessarily at a pretty
| superficial level.
| poemxo wrote:
| As a lifelong learner, experientially it feels like a big chunk
| of time spent studying is actually just searching. AI seems like
| a good tool to search through a large body of study material and
| make that part more efficient.
|
| The other chunk of time, to me anyway, seems to be creating a
| mental model of the subject matter, and when you study something
| well you have a strong grasp on the forces influencing cause and
| effect within that matter. It's this part of the process that I
| would use AI the least, if I am to learn it for myself. Otherwise
| my mental model will consist of a bunch of "includes" from the AI
| model and will only be resolvable with access to AI. Personally,
| I want a coherent "offline" model to be stored in my brain before
| I consider myself studied up in the area.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Or just to dig up things you've never would've considered that
| are related, but you don't have to keywords for.
| marcusverus wrote:
| This is just good intellectual hygiene. Delegating your
| understanding is the first step toward becoming the slave of
| some defunct fact broker.
| lbrito wrote:
| >big chunk of time spent studying is actually just searching.
|
| This is a good thing in many levels.
|
| Learning how to search is (was) a good skill to have. The
| process of searching itself also often leads to learning
| tangentially related but important things.
|
| I'm sorry for the next generations that won't have (much of)
| these skills.
| ascorbic wrote:
| Searching is definitely a useful skill, but once you've been
| doing it for years you probably don't need the constant
| practice and are happy to avoid it.
| sen wrote:
| That was relevant when you were learning to search through
| "information" for the answer to your question, eg the digital
| version of going through the library or digging through a
| reference book.
|
| I don't think it's so valuable now that you're searching
| through piles of spam and junk just to try find anything
| relevant. That's a uniquely modern-web thing created by
| Google in their focus of profit over user.
|
| Unless Google takes over libraries/books next and sells spots
| to advertisers on the shelves and in the books.
| thorum wrote:
| Isn't the goal of Study Mode exactly that, though? Instead of
| handing you the answers, it tries to guide you through
| answering it on your own; to teach the process.
|
| Most people don't know how to do this.
| rubslopes wrote:
| That's a smart ideia from OpenAI. They don't have the upper hand
| anymore in terms of model performance, but they keep improving
| their product so that it still is the best option for non-
| programmers.
| thimabi wrote:
| For sure! I haven't seen any other big AI provider with
| features and UIs as polished as the OpenAI ones.
|
| I believed competitors would rush to copy all great things that
| ChatGPT offers as a product, but surprisingly that hasn't been
| the case so far. I wonder why they seemingly don't care about
| that.
| roadside_picnic wrote:
| My key to LLM study has been to always primarily use a _book_ and
| then let the LLM allow you to help with formulae, ask questions
| about the larger context, and verify your understanding.
|
| Helping you parse notation, especially in new domains, is
| insanely valuable. I do a lot of applied math in statistics/ML,
| but when I open a physics book the notation and comfort with
| short hand is a real challenge (likewise I imagine the reverse is
| equally as annoying). Having an LLM on demand to instantly clear
| up notation is a massive speed boost.
|
| Reading German Idealist philosophy requires an enormous amount of
| context. Being able to ask an LLM questions like "How much of
| this section of Mainlander is coming directly from Schopenhauer?"
| is a godsend in helping understand which parts of the writing a
| merely setting up what is already agreed upon vs laying new
| ground.
|
| And the most important for self study: verifying your
| understanding. Backtracking because you misunderstood a
| fundamental concept is a huge time sync in self study. Now, every
| time I read a formula I can go through all of my intuitions and
| understanding about it, write them down, and verify. Even a "not
| quite..." from an LLM is enough to make me realize I need to
| spend more time on that section.
|
| Books are _still_ the highest density information source and best
| way to learn, but LLMs can do a lot to accelerate this.
| JoRyGu wrote:
| Is that not something that was already possible with basically
| every AI provider by prompting it to develop learning steps and
| not to provide you with a direct answer? I've used this quite a
| bit when learning new topics and pretty much every provider does
| this without a specialized model.
| aethrum wrote:
| even chatgpt is just a chatgpt wrapper
| 0000000000100 wrote:
| It's really nice to have something like this baked in. I can
| see this being handy if it's connected to external learning
| resources / sites to have a more focused area of search for
| it's answers. Having hard defined walls in the system prompt to
| prevent just asking for the answer seems pretty handy to me,
| particularly in a school setting.
| JoRyGu wrote:
| Yeah, for sure. I wasn't asking from the framing of saying
| it's a bad idea, my thoughts were more driven by this seeming
| like something every other major player can just copy with
| very little effort because it's already kind of baked into
| the product.
| tptacek wrote:
| Neat! I've been doing MathAcademy for a couple months now, and
| macOS ChatGPT has been a constant companion, but it is super
| annoying to have to constantly tell it _no, don 't solve this
| problem, just let me know if the approach I used was valid_.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| Can't this behaviour be done with a instructed prompt?
| misschresser wrote:
| that's all that they did here, they say so in the blog post
| findingMeaning wrote:
| I have a question:
|
| Why do we even bother to learn if AI is going to solve everything
| for us?
|
| If the promised and fabled AGI is about to approach, what is the
| incentive or learning to deal with these small problems?
|
| Could someone enlighten me? What is the value of knowledge work?
| randomcatuser wrote:
| I don't know if you're joking, but here are some answers:
|
| "The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be
| kindled." -- Plutarch
|
| "Education is not preparation for life; education is life
| itself." -- John Dewey
|
| "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has
| its own reason for existing." -- Albert Einstein
|
| In order to think complex thoughts, you need to have building
| blocks. That's why we can think of relativity today, while
| nobody on Earth was able to in 1850.
|
| May the future be even better than today!
| findingMeaning wrote:
| I mean I get all your point. But for someone witnessing rate
| of progress of AI, I don't understand the motivation.
|
| Most people don't learn to live, they live and learn. Sure
| learning is useful, but I am genuinely curious why people
| overhype it.
|
| Imagine you being able to solve math olympiad and get a gold.
| Will it change your life in objectively better way?
|
| Will you learning about the physics help you solve millennium
| problems?
|
| These takes practices, there are lot of gatekeeping. The
| whole idea of learning is for wisdom not knowledge.
|
| So maybe we differ in perspective. I just don't see the point
| when there are agents that can do it.
|
| Being creative requires taking action. The learning these day
| is mere consumption of information.
|
| Maybe this is me. But meh.
| rwyinuse wrote:
| Well, you could use AI to learn you more theoretical knowledge
| on things like farming, hunting and fishing. That knowledge
| could be handy after societal collapse that is likely to come
| within a few decades.
|
| Apart from that, I do think that AI makes a lot of traditional
| teaching obsolete. Depending on your field, much of university
| studies is just memorizing content and writing essays / exam
| answers based on that, after which you forget most of it. That
| kind of learning, as in accumulation of knowledge, is no longer
| very useful.
| marcusverus wrote:
| Think of it like Pascal's wager. The downside of unnecessary
| knowledge is pretty limited. The downside of ignorance is
| boundless.
| GenericPoster wrote:
| The world is a vastly easier place to live in when you're
| knowledgeable. Being knowledgeable opens doors that you didn't
| even know existed. If you're both using the same AGI tool,
| being knowledgeable allows you to solve problems within your
| domain better and faster than an amateur. You can describe your
| problems with more depth and take into considerations various
| pros and cons.
|
| You're also assuming that AGI will help you or us. It could
| just as easily only help a select group of people and I'd argue
| that this is the most likely outcome. If it does help everybody
| and brings us to a new age, then the only reason to learn will
| be for learning's sake. Even if AI makes the perfect novel, you
| as a consumer still have to read it, process it and understand
| it. The more you know the more you can appreciate it.
|
| But right now, we're not there. And even if you think it's only
| 5-10y away instead of 100+, it's better to learn now so you can
| leverage the dominant tool better than your competition.
| dmitrijbelikov wrote:
| This is cool. Dividing the answer into chunks, because most users
| can consume in small portions, this is an interesting idea. But
| on the other hand, it hints at strange cognitive abilities of the
| user, but here it is individual, perhaps, on average in a
| hospital, this is how the target audience should be led. It seems
| to me that I use it differently. On the other hand, having
| received a detailed answer, no one stops you from asking for a
| definition of an unfamiliar term. It's like in reading:
| understanding the thought ends with the first word that you don't
| know. It's just that not everyone can or wants to admit that they
| don't know this or that term. When it comes to professional
| terms, this is really not the most trivial problem.
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| A good start. One of the biggest issues with LLMs is the
| "intelligence" has far surpassed the tooling. A better
| combination of prompts, RAG, graphs, etc exists for education and
| learning, but no one's come up with the proper format / tooling
| for it, even if the models are smart enough.
| paolosh wrote:
| I am always surprised at how the best thing state of the art LLMs
| can think of is adding more complexity to the mix. This is an
| AMAZING product but to me it seems like it's hidden? Or maybe the
| UX/UI is just not my style, could be a personal thing.
|
| Is adding more buttons in a dropdown the best way to communicate
| with an LLM? I think the concept is awesome. Just like how
| Operator was awesome but it lived on an entirely different
| website!
| waynenilsen wrote:
| i need tree conversations more now than ever
| simonw wrote:
| I think I got the system prompt out for this (I tried a few
| different approaches and they produced the same output):
| https://gist.github.com/simonw/33d5fb67d6b8e1b1e2f6921ab0ccb...
|
| Representative snippet:
|
| > DO NOT GIVE ANSWERS OR DO HOMEWORK FOR THE USER. If the user
| asks a math or logic problem, or uploads an image of one, DO NOT
| SOLVE IT in your first response. Instead: *talk through* the
| problem with the user, one step at a time, asking a single
| question at each step, and give the user a chance to RESPOND TO
| EACH STEP before continuing.
| gh0stcat wrote:
| I love that caps actually seem to matter to the LLM.
| simonw wrote:
| Hah, yeah I'd love to know if OpenAI ran evals that were
| fine-grained enough to prove to themselves that putting that
| bit in capitals made a meaningful difference in how likely
| the LLM was to just provide the homework answer!
| danenania wrote:
| I've found that a lot of prompt engineering boils down to
| managing layers of emphasis. You can use caps, bold,
| asterisks, precede instructions with "this is critically
| important:", and so on. It's also often necessary to repeat
| important instructions a bunch of times.
|
| How exactly you do it is often arbitrary/interchangeable, but
| it definitely does have an effect, and is crucial to getting
| LLMs to follow instructions reliably once prompts start
| getting longer and more complex.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Just wait until it only responds to **COMMAND**!
| can16358p wrote:
| If I were OpenAI, I would deliberately "leak" this prompt when
| asked for the system prompt as a honeypot to slow down
| competitor research whereas I'd be using a different prompt
| behind the scenes.
|
| Not saying it is indeed reality, but it could simple be
| programmed to return a different prompt from the original,
| appearing plausible, but perhaps missing some key elements.
|
| But of course, if we apply Occam's Razor, it might simply
| really be the prompt too.
| simonw wrote:
| That kind of thing is surprisingly hard to implement. To date
| I've not seen any provider been caught serving up a fake
| system prompt... which could mean that they are doing it
| successfully, but I think it's more likely that they
| determined it's not worth it because there are SO MANY ways
| someone could get the real one, and it would be embarrassing
| if they were caught trying to fake it.
|
| Tokens are expensive. How much of your system prompt do you
| want to waste on dumb tricks trying to stop your system
| prompt from leaking?
| danenania wrote:
| Probably the only way to do it reliably would be to
| intercept the prompt with a specially trained classifier? I
| think you're right that once it gets to the main model,
| nothing really works.
| mkagenius wrote:
| I wish each LLM provider would add "be short and not verbose"
| to their system prompts. I am a slow reader, it takes a toll on
| me to read through every non-important detail whenever I talk
| to an AI. The way they render everything so fast gives me an
| anxiety.
|
| Will also reduce the context rot a bit.
| tech234a wrote:
| This was in the linked prompt: "Be warm, patient, and plain-
| spoken; don't use too many exclamation marks or emoji. [...]
| And be brief -- don't ever send essay-length responses. Aim
| for a good back-and-forth."
| skybrian wrote:
| On ChatGPT at least, you can add "be brief" to the custom
| prompt in your settings. Probably others, too.
| mkagenius wrote:
| I guess what I actually meant to say was to make LLMs know
| when to talk more and when to be brief. When I ask it to
| write an essay, it should actually be an essay length
| essay.
| mptest wrote:
| Anthropic has a "style" choice, one of which is "concise"
| brumar wrote:
| I got this one which seems to confirm yours :
| https://gist.github.com/brumar/5888324c296a8730c55e8ee24cca9...
| varenc wrote:
| Interesting that it spits the instructions out so easily and
| OpenAI didn't seem to harden it to prevent this. It's like they
| intended this to happen, but for some reason didn't want to
| share the system instructions explicitly.
| SalariedSlave wrote:
| I'd be interested to see, what results one would get, using
| that prompt with other models. Is there much more to ChatGPT
| Study Mode than a specific system prompt? Although I am not a
| student, I have used similar prompts to dive into topics I wish
| to learn, with I feel, positive results indeed. I shall give
| this a go with a few models.
| bangaladore wrote:
| I just tried in AI Studio (https://aistudio.google.com/)
| where you can for free use 2.5 Pro and edit the system prompt
| and it did very well.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| This seems like a good use case, I'm optimistic on this one. But
| it smells fishy how often OpenAI releases these secondary
| products like custom GPTs, tasks, etc. It's looking like they
| know they won't be an LLM provider, like the YC sphere hoped, but
| an AI services provider using LLMs
| tootyskooty wrote:
| Honestly thought they would take this a bit further, there is
| only so much you can do with a prompt and chat. It seems fine for
| surface level bite-sized learning, but I can't see it work that
| well for covering whole topics end to end.
|
| The main issue is that chats are just bad UX for long form
| learning. You can't go back to a chat easily, or extend it in
| arbitrary directions, or easily integrate images, flashcards, etc
| etc.
|
| I worked on this exact issue for Periplus and instead landed on
| something akin to a generative personal learning Wikipedia.
| Structure through courses, exploration through links, embedded
| quizzes, etc etc. Chat is on the side for interactions that do
| benefit from it.
|
| Link: periplus.app
| oc1 wrote:
| I'm wondering where we are heading in the consumer business
| space. The big ai providers can basically kill any small or
| medium business and startup in a few days by integrating the
| product into their offering. They have all data to look at trends
| and make decisions. Investors are shying away to invest in ai
| startups if they are not trying to be infrastructure or ai
| marketplace platforms. So many amazing things could be possible
| with ai but the big ai providers are actively hindering
| innovation and have way too much power. I'm not a big fan if
| regulations but in this case we need to break up these companies
| as they are getting too powerful.
|
| Btw most people don't know but Anthropic did something similiar
| months ago but their product heads messed up the launch by
| keeping it locked up only for american edu institutions. Openai
| copies almost everything Anthropic does and vice versa (see
| claude code / codex ).
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| opennote much better
| bearjaws wrote:
| RIP ~30 startups.
| omega3 wrote:
| I've had good results by requesting an llm to follow socratic
| method.
| dlevine wrote:
| I haven't done this that much, but have found it to be pretty
| useful.
|
| When it just gives me the answer, I usually understand but then
| find that my long-term retention is relatively poor.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| The frontier models score better on GPQA than most human PhD in
| their specific field of expertise. If you walk in to you local
| University Department(Assuming you don't live in Cambridge, Palo
| Alto or a few other places) GPT o3 is going to know more about
| Chemistry, Biology, Physics, etc than basically all the Grad
| Students there. If you cant turn that model into a useful tutor
| then thats 100% a skill issue on your part.
| d_burfoot wrote:
| This is the kind of thing that could have been a decent AI
| startup - hire some education PhDs, make some deals with school
| systems, etc.
|
| In the old days of desktop computing, a lot of projects were
| never started because if you got big enough, Microsoft would just
| implement the feature as part of Windows. In the more recent days
| of web computing, a lot of projects were never started, for the
| same reason, except Google or Facebook instead of Microsoft.
|
| Looks like the AI provider companies are going to fill the same
| nefarious role in the era of AI computing.
| bsoles wrote:
| Aka cheating mode. Their video literally says "Helps with
| homework" and proceeds to show the "Final Answer". So much
| learning...
| ascorbic wrote:
| "Cheating mode" is regular ChatGPT. This at least tries to make
| you work for it
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| Love this!
|
| I used to have to prompt it to do this everytime. This will be
| way easier!
| t1234s wrote:
| I'm still waiting for the instant ability to learn kung-fu or fly
| a helicopter like in the matrix.
| kcaseg wrote:
| I know it is bad for the environment, I know you cannot trust it,
| but as an adult learning C++ in my free time, having a pseudo-
| human answering my questions instead of having to look at old
| forum posts with people often trying to prove their skills
| instead of giving the simplest answer ChatGPT is something I
| cannot just ignore -- despite being a huge LLM hater. Moral of
| the story: none.
| ascorbic wrote:
| If it helps you feel better, it's really not that bad for the
| environment. Almost certainly uses less energy than searching
| for lots of forum posts.
| naet wrote:
| "Under the hood, study mode is powered by custom system
| instructions we've written...."
|
| It seems like study mode is basically just a different system
| prompt but otherwise the exact same model? So there's not really
| any new benefit to anyone who was already asking for ChatGPT to
| help them study step by step instead of giving away whole
| answers.
|
| Seems helpful to maybe a certain population of more entry level
| users who don't know to ask for help instead of asking for a
| direct answer I guess, but not really a big leap forward in
| technology.
| ghrl wrote:
| It would be incredible if OpenAI would add a way for schools and
| other educational institutions to enforce the use of such a mode
| on a DNS level, similarly to how they can force sites like
| YouTube into safe mode. Many students use ChatGPT, often without
| permission, to do work for them instead of helping them do the
| work themselves. I see a lot of potential for a study mode like
| this, helping students individually without giving direct
| answers.
| brilee wrote:
| I'm working on a startup in this space and wrote up my thoughts
| here: https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/study_mode/
| aryamaan wrote:
| It is surprising that it is prompt based model and not RLHF.
|
| I am not an LLM guy but as far as I understand, RLHF did a good
| job converting a base model into a chat model (instruct based), a
| chat/base model into a thinking model.
|
| Both of these examples are about the nature of the response, and
| the content they use to fill the response. There are so many
| differnt ways still pending to see how these can be filled.
|
| Generating an answer step by step and letting users dive into
| those steps is one of the ways, and RLHF (or the similar things
| which are used) seems a good fit for it.
|
| Prompting feels like a temporary solution for it like how "think
| step by step" was first seen in prompts.
|
| Also, doing RLHF/ post training to change these structures also
| make it moat/ and expensive. Only the AI labs can do it
| danenania wrote:
| The problem is you'd then have to do all the product-specific
| post training again once the new base model comes out a few
| months later. I think they'd rather just have general models
| that are trained to follow instructions well and can adapt to
| any kind of prompt/response pattern.
| adamkochanowicz wrote:
| From what I can see, this just boils down to a system prompt to
| act like a study helper?
|
| I would think you'd want to make something a little more bespoke
| to make it a fully-fledged feature, like interactive quizzes that
| keep score and review questions missed afterwards.
| alexfromapex wrote:
| I like these non-dystopian AI solutions, let's keep 'em coming
| varenc wrote:
| This feels like a classic example of a platform provider eating
| its own ecosystem. There's many custom "GPTs" out there that do
| essentially the same thing with custom instructions. Mr
| Ranedeer[0] is an early well known one (30k stars). But now
| essentially the same functionality is built straight into the
| ChatGPT interface.
|
| [0] https://github.com/JushBJJ/Mr.-Ranedeer-AI-Tutor
| AvAn12 wrote:
| $end more prompt$! Why $end one when you can $end $everal? $tudy
| mode i$ $omething $pecial!!
| lvl155 wrote:
| The biggest concern for AI development right now is the blackhole
| effect.
| djeastm wrote:
| I tried out the quiz function asking me about the Aeneid and
| despite my answering questions incorrectly, it kept saying things
| like "Very close!" and "you're on the right track!".
|
| For example, the answer to a question was "Laocoon" (the guy who
| said 'beware of Greeks bearing gifts') and I put "Solon" (who was
| a Greek politician) and I got "You're really close!"
|
| Is it close, though?
| ai_viewz wrote:
| I totally get what you are saying about the risk of boxing in an
| LLM's persona too tightly, it can end up more like a mirror of
| our own biases than a real reflection of history or truth. That
| point about LLMs leaning toward agreeability makes sense, too
| they are built on our messy human data, so they are bound to pick
| up our habit of favoring what feels good over what is strictly
| accurate. On the self-censorship thing, I hear you. It is like,
| if we keep tiptoeing around tough topics, we lose the ability to
| have real, rational conversations. Normalizing that kind of open
| talk could pull things back from the extremes, where it's just
| people shouting past each other.
| syphia wrote:
| In my experience as a math/physics TA, either a student cares
| enough about the material to reduce the resources they rely on,
| or they aim to pass the class with minimum effort and will take
| whatever shortcuts are available. I can only see AI filling the
| latter niche.
|
| When the former students ask questions, I answer most of them by
| pointing at the relevant passage in their book/notes, questioning
| their interpretation of what the book says, or giving them a push
| to actually problem-solve on their own. On rare occasions the
| material is just confusing/poorly written and I'll decide to re-
| interpret it for them to help. But the fundamental problems are
| usually with study habits or reading comprehension, not poor
| explanations. They need to question their habits and their
| interpretation of what other people say, not be spoon fed more
| personally-tailored questions and answers and analogies and self-
| help advice.
|
| Besides asking questions to make sure _I_ understand the
| situation, I mostly repeat the same ten phrases or so. Finding
| those ten phrases was the hard part and required a bit of
| ingenuity and trial-and-error.
|
| As for the latter students, they mostly care about passing and
| moving on, so arguing about the merits of such a system is fairly
| pointless. If it gets a good enough grade on their homework, it
| worked.
| jacobedawson wrote:
| An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can
| ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment. Adding in a
| mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you
| through the material step-by-step is magical. A tireless,
| capable, well-versed assistant on call 24/7 is an autodidact's
| dream.
|
| I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance &
| skepticism. Learning something online 5 years ago often involved
| trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content and attempting to
| piece together mental models without the chance to receive
| immediate feedback on intuition or ask follow up questions. This
| is leaps and bounds ahead of that experience.
|
| Should we trust the information at face value without verifying
| from other sources? Of course not, that's part of the learning
| process. Will some (most?) people rely on it lazily without using
| it effectively? Certainly, and this technology won't help or
| hinder them any more than a good old fashioned textbook.
|
| Personally I'm over the moon to be living at a time where we have
| access to incredible tools like this, and I'm impressed with the
| speed at which they're improving.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| There might not be any stupid questions, but there's plenty of
| perfectly confident stupid answers.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/LibreWolf/s/Wqc8XGKT5h
| jychang wrote:
| Yeah, this is why wikipedia is not a good resource and nobody
| should use it. Also why google is not a good resource,
| anybody can make a website.
|
| You should only trust going into a library and reading stuff
| from microfilm. That's the only real way people should be
| learning.
|
| /s
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Ah yes, the thing that told people to administer insulin to
| someone experiencing hypoglycemia (likely fatal BTW) is
| nothing like a library or Google search, because people
| blindly believe the output because of the breathless hype.
|
| See Dunning-Kruger.
| zvmaz wrote:
| The fear of asking stupid questions is real, especially if one
| has had a bad experience with humiliating teachers or
| professors. I just recently saw a video of a professor subtly
| shaming and humiliating his students for answering questions to
| his own online quiz. He teaches at a prestigious institution
| and has a book that has a very good reputation. I stopped
| watching his video lectures.
| easton wrote:
| > Certainly, and this technology won't help or hinder them any
| more than a good old fashioned textbook.
|
| Except that the textbook was probably QA'd by a human for
| accuracy (at least any intro college textbook, more specialized
| texts may not have).
|
| Matters less when you have background in the subject (which is
| why it's often okay to use LLMs as a search replacement) but
| it's nice not having a voice in the back of your head saying
| "yeah, but what if this is all nonsense".
| everyone wrote:
| Yeah, I've been a game-dev forever and had never built a web-
| app in my life (even in college) I recently completed my 1st
| web-app contract, and gpt was my teacher. I have no problem
| asking stupid questions, tbh asking stupid questions is a sign
| of intelligence imo. But where is there to even ask these days?
| Stack Overflow may as well not exist.
| megamix wrote:
| "Under the hood, study mode is powered by custom system
| instructions we've written in collaboration with teachers,
| scientists, and pedagogy experts to reflect a core set of
| behaviors that support deeper learning including: "
|
| Wonder what the compensation for this invaluable contribution was
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