[HN Gopher] Study mode
___________________________________________________________________
Study mode
Author : meetpateltech
Score : 1064 points
Date : 2025-07-29 17:01 UTC (1 days 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.
| diggan wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Just an anecdote of course, but for me having access to
| the internet changed my life. I found a community I
| couldn't find locally (programming) as I'm from a rural
| place, and most of my employments since then have, in one
| way or another, come from people finding me on the
| internet. I'm surely not the only one who managed to
| climb the class ladder mostly because of the internet.
| 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)
| purplerabbit wrote:
| In case you find it interesting: I deployed an early
| version of a "lesson administering" bot deployed on a
| college campus that guides students through tutored
| activities of content curated by a professor in the "study
| mode" style -- that is, forcing them to think for
| themselves. We saw an immediate student performance gain on
| exams of about 1 stdev in the course. So with the right
| material and right prompting, things are looking promising.
| energy123 wrote:
| OpenAI should figure out how to onboard teachers. Teacher
| uploads context for the year, OpenAI distributes a chatbot
| to the class that's perma fixed into study mode. Basically
| like GPT store but with an interface and UX tuned for a
| classroom.
| 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.
| currymj wrote:
| this basically functions as a switch you can press that says
| "more effort please". after every response it makes you solve a
| little comprehension check problem before moving on. you can
| try to weasel out of it but it does push back a bit.
|
| unavoidably, people who don't want to work, won't push the
| "work harder" button.
| 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
| raincole wrote:
| > Do you apply the same principle with humans and not bother
| to learn if the teacher is good
|
| Yes, if my teacher could split into a million of themselves
| and compete against me on the job market at $200/mo.
| 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.
| schmorptron wrote:
| I'm conflicted about this. Custom tutoring available at all
| times and at mass sounds like a great thing, if done right.
| On the other hand, the research skill you mentioned is
| something that I worry about atrophying as well. Where
| before, we used to read through 3 or 4 slightly related
| articles or stackoverflow questions and do the transfer of
| related topics onto our specific problem ourselves, with a
| tutor it's all pre-chewed.
|
| Then again, human 1:1 tutoring is the most effective way to
| learn, isn't it? In the end it'll probably end up being a
| balance of reading through texts yourself and still
| researching broadly so you get an idea about the context
| around whatever it is you're trying to do, and having a tutor
| available to walk you through if you don't get it?
| 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.
| diggan wrote:
| > I ask because every serious study on using modern
| generative AI tools
|
| There are a lot of studies, and I can't say I've read all of
| them, but the ones I have read, there hasn't been much focus
| on how the participants used the LLM to learn. My guess is
| that it has a lot of effect on the end results. Someone just
| asking for the answer and then thinking "Lets remember this"
| will have very different results than someone who does the
| Socratic method of learning together with a LLM, as just one
| example.
| devmor wrote:
| You know, that's a good point too. The studies I've read
| all focused on cognition after using an LLM to complete
| tasks for work or hobbies. I do wonder if there might be a
| different outcome with learning specifically.
| 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_.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Sure, but there are limits here. Thats what I'm talking
| about, limits. The memory isn't infinitely expansive. I
| still have found it doesn't backtrack well enough to
| "remember" (for lack of a better term) that it told me
| something already, if its old enough, for example.
|
| It also doesn't seem to do a good job of building on
| "memory" over time. There appears to be some unspoken
| limit there, or something to that affect.
| 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!
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Or you know what, just google books about some topic and
| get a list of... real books recommended by people with
| names and reputations? Its truly incredible!
| nilamo wrote:
| And now we get all the way back to the OP, and having so
| little knowledge on the subject that you don't know what
| to Google, or which forums are trustworthy for that
| topic. And so the wheel turns...
| throwaway290 wrote:
| if you need a word you don't know then read overview of
| the bigger topic, or yoloing google with approximate
| queries usually helps find the word...
| 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?
| CJefferson wrote:
| Whatever was best on a paid account 3 months ago. I was
| quite disappointed to be honest, based on what I had been
| hearing.
| p1esk wrote:
| I think by default ChatGPT will choose 4o for you. So
| unless you actually chose o3 you haven't used the best
| model.
| 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
| grodriguez100 wrote:
| > I actually set a piece of homework "marking" chatGPT,
| which went well and students seemed to enjoy!
|
| This. This should be done everywhere. It is the best way
| to let students see first hand that LLM output is useful,
| but can be (and often is) wrong.
|
| If people really understands that, everything will be
| better.
| 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).
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >hen the LLM can almost certainly answer the question as
| well;
|
| You say this in a thread specifically talking about how
| LLM's fall apart when digging deeper into the surface of
| questions.
|
| Do people really want to learn and understand, or just
| feel like they are learning and understanding?
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I would say that LLM might give a correct answer, in a
| good enough question there is more than one answer.
|
| Furthermore the LLM might give an answer but probably not
| explain with the best skills available why the answer is
| the way it is. This is of course something that varies
| with StackOverflow but there it is at least possible that
| somebody with deep technical knowledge decides a question
| is worth answering deeply.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| outside of 5), I concur. It's good for discovery, as is
| Google for discovering topics while weighing on proper
| profesionally resources and articles for the learning.
|
| It's too bad people are trying to substitute the latter
| with the chatGPT output itself. And I absolutely cannot
| trust any machine that is willing to lie to me rather than
| admit ignorance on a subject.
| 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.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| What you're saying is not at all what I understand to be
| the history of crusading.
|
| Its background is in the Islamic Christian conflicts of
| Spain. Crusading was adopted from the Muslim idea of
| Jihad, as we things like naming customs (Spanish are the
| only Christians who name their children "Jesus", after
| the Muslim "Muhammad").
|
| The political tensions that lead to the first crusade
| were between Arab Muslims and Byzantine Christian's.
| Specifically, the Battle of Mazikirt made Christian
| Europe seem more vulnerable than it was.
|
| The Papacy wasn't at the forefront of the struggle
| against Islam. It was more worried about the Normans,
| Germans, and Greeks.
|
| When the papacy was interested in Crusading it was for
| domestic reasons: getting rid of king so-and-so by making
| him go on crusade.
|
| The situation was different in Spain where Islam was a
| constant threat, but the Papacy regarded Spain as an
| exotic foreign land (although Sylvester II was educated
| there).
|
| It's extremely misleading to view the pope as the leader
| of an anti-Muslim coalition. There really was no leader
| per se, but the reasons why kings went on crusade had
| little to do with fighting Islam.
|
| Just look at how many monarchs showed up in Jerusalem,
| then headed straight home and spent the rest of their
| lives bragging about crusaders.
|
| I'm 80% certain no pope ever set foot in Outremere.
| SLWW wrote:
| While what you are saying makes a lot of sense, but it
| seemingly ignores the concerns of a people who, not too
| long before, had been made aware of the dangerous notion
| of Muslims having dominion over even an adjacent region
| to their own. I do know that the Papacy was gaining in
| power and popularity leading up to the Crusades. As such,
| and I believe what you say about getting rid of the king
| to be absolutely true, this is still lacking a component,
| that being a reason for the populace of Rome to stand
| behind their new "king".
|
| "We are now expected to believe that the Crusades were an
| unwarranted act of aggression against a peaceful Muslim
| world. Hardly. The first call for a crusade occurred in
| 846 CE, when an Arab expedition to Sicily sailed up the
| Tiber and sacked St Peter's in Rome. A synod in France
| issued an appeal to Christian sovereigns to rally against
| 'the enemies of Christ,' and the pope, Leo IV, offered a
| heavenly reward to those who died fighting the Muslims. A
| century and a half and many battles later, in 1096, the
| Crusaders actually arrived in the Middle East. The
| Crusades were a late, limited, and unsuccessful imitation
| of the jihad - an attempt to recover by holy war what was
| lost by holy war. It failed, and it was not followed up."
| (Bernard Lewis, 2007 Irving Kristol Lecture, March 7)
|
| Leo IV's actions to fortify after the sacking does show
| his concerns; with "Leonine City" with calls to invest
| into this as a means of defense from future incursions.
| https://dispatch.richmond.edu/1860/12/29/4/93 A decent
| (Catholic bias) summary which you can find references for
| fairly easily:
| https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09159a.htm
|
| unfortunately it's hard to find this pdf without signing
| up or paying money but there are some useful figures if
| you scroll down https://www.academia.edu/60028806/The_Sur
| viving_Remains_of_t... Showing the re-enforcement as well
| as a very clear and obvious purpose to it in light of
| when it was built.
|
| I would recommend puttering about Lewis' work as well as
| the likes of Thomas Madden as well. If you are really
| adventurous you can dig up the likes of Henri Pirenne and
| his work on the topic; he argues that literate
| civilization continued in the West up until the arrival
| of Islam in the 7th century, Islam's blockade, through
| their piracy, in the Mediterranean being a core
| contributor in leaving the West in a state of poverty,
| and when you lose the ability to easily find food usually
| then literacy is placed on the back burner. Though that's
| just a tangent for another day, it's very interesting and
| he presents pretty decent evidence for his suppositions
| iirc.
|
| Although if Pirenne is correct then the sacking of St.
| Peters carries a different tone, not one of just a "one
| off" oopsie but a sign of the intention of a troublesome
| and destructive new enemy setting their sites on Rome
| itself, not content to keep to the sea and to the East.
| It was a clear message to the people that they could be
| next in line (this is my opinion of course).
|
| If you are American I would simply remind you that even
| now today you hear cries of a little nation across the
| sea being an "imminent threat to democracy" while our
| historic enemies are LITERALLY at our door just South of
| us and they have been there for several years now sitting
| in their little bases waiting for something. (I'm unclear
| as to when exactly it all started) The notion that a Pope
| could give the people a reason, especially those who have
| felt the economic pressures, as well as the memory of a
| raid in their own home by the same aggressors, is
| possible. Being compelled to engage with an enemy that is
| a decent distance away is very believable.
| 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".
| fragmede wrote:
| > those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it
|
| The problem is, those that do study history are _also_
| doomed to watch it repeat.
| 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.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| What were its arguments? Do you have enough of an
| understanding of astronomy to know whether it actually
| made good arguments that are grounded in scientific
| understanding, or did it just write persuasively in a way
| that looks convincing to a layman?
|
| > I've had success getting it to offer the Carthaginian
| perspective in the Punic Wars.
|
| This is not surprising to me. Historians have long
| studied Carthage, and there are books you can get on the
| Punic Wars that talk about the state of Carthage leading
| up to and during the wars (shout out to Richard Miles's
| "Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an
| Ancient Civilization"). I would expect an LLM to
| piggyback off of that existing literature.
| scarmig wrote:
| Extensive education in physics, so yes.
|
| The most compelling reason at the time to reject
| heliocentrism was the (lack of) parallax of stars. The
| only response that the heliocentrists had was that the
| stars must be implausibly far away. Hundreds of billions
| of times further away than the moon is--and they knew the
| moon itself is already pretty far from us-- which is a
| pretty radical, even insane, idea. There's also the point
| that the original Copernican heliocentric model had ad
| hoc epicycles just as the Ptolemaic one did, without any
| real increase in accuracy.
|
| Strictly speaking, the breakdown here would be less a
| lack of understanding of contemporary physics, and more
| about whether I knew enough about the minutia of
| historical astronomers' disputes to know if the LLM was
| accurately representing them.
| 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.
| neutronicus wrote:
| "History done by professional historians" comprises an
| ever-shrinking fraction of the total available text.
|
| Gen-pop is actually incentivized to distill and repeat
| the opinions of technical practitioners. Completing tasks
| in the short term depends on it! Not true of history! Or
| climate science, for that matter.
| 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.
| SLWW wrote:
| Couldn't agree more.
|
| However on the bright side people only believe what they
| want to anyhow, so not much has been lost -_-
| maxsilver wrote:
| > 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
|
| The problem with this, is that people sometimes really _do_
| , objectively, wake up and device to be irrationally evil.
| It's not every day, and it's not every single person -- but
| it does happen routinely.
|
| If you haven't experienced this wrath yourself, I envy you.
| But for millions of people, this is their actual, 100%
| honest truthful lived reality. You can't rationalize people
| out of their hate, because most people have no rational
| basis for their hate.
|
| _(see pretty much all racism, sexism, transphobia, etc)_
| fragmede wrote:
| Do they see it as evil though? They wake up, decide to do
| _what they perceive as good_ but things are so twisted
| that their version of good doesn 't agree with mine or
| yours. Some people are evil, see themselves as bad, and
| continue down that path, absolutely. But that level of
| malevolence is rare. Far more common is for people to
| believe that what they're doing is in service of the
| greater good of _their_ community.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Humans are not rational animals, they are rationalizing
| animals.
|
| So in this regard, they probably do deep down see it as
| evil, but will try to reason a way (often in a
| hypocritical way) to make it appear good. The msot common
| method of using this to drive bigotry often comes in the
| reasons of 1) dehumanizing the subject of hate ("Group X
| is evil, so they had it coming!") or 2) reinforcing a
| superiority over the subject of hate ("I worked hard and
| deserve this. Group X did not but wants the same thing").
|
| Your answer depends on how effective you think propaganda
| and authority is at shaping the mind to contradict
| itself. The Stanfor experiment seems to reinforce a
| notion that a "good" person can justify any evil to
| themself with a surprisingly little amount of nudging.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| Can you share some examples?
| no_wizard wrote:
| Try doing deep research on the Israel - Palestine
| relations. That's a good baseline. You'll find it starts
| spitting out really useless stuff fast, or will try to give
| sources that don't exist or are not reputable.
| 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
| felipehummel wrote:
| That's the best and succinct description of using ChatGPT
| for this kind of things: it's a floor raiser, not a ceiling
| raiser.
| 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).
| no_wizard wrote:
| I have access to the highest tier paid versions of ChatGPT
| and Google Gemini, I've tried different models, tuning
| things like size of context windows etc.
|
| I know it has nothing to do with this. I simply hit a wall
| eventually.
|
| I unfortunately am not at liberty to share the chats
| though. They're work related (I very recently ended up at a
| place where we do thorny research).
|
| A simple one though, is researching Israel - Palestine
| relations since 1948. It starts off okay (usually) but it
| goes off the rails eventually with bad sourcing, fictitious
| sourcing, and/or hallucinations. Sometimes I actually hit a
| wall where it repeats itself over and over and I suspect
| its because the information is simply not captured by the
| model.
|
| FWIW, if these models had live & historic access to Reuters
| and Bloomberg terminals I think they might be better at a
| range of tasks I find them inadequate for, maybe.
| johnisgood wrote:
| > I unfortunately am not at liberty to share the chats
| though.
|
| I have bad news for you. If you shared it with ChatGPT
| (which you most likely did), then whatever it is that you
| are trying to keep hidden or private, is not actually
| hidden or private anymore, it is stored on their servers,
| and most likely will be trained on that chat. Use local
| models instead in such cases.
| 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.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I use them and stay up to date reasonably. I have used
| NotebookLM, I have access to advanced models through my
| employer and personally, and I have done alot of research
| on LLMs and using them effectively.
|
| They simply have limitations, especially on deep pointed
| subject matters where you want depth not breadth, and
| honestly I'm not sure why these limitations exist but I'm
| not working directly on these systems.
|
| Talk to Gemini or ChatGPT about mental health things, thats
| a good example of what I'm talking about. As recently as
| two weeks ago my colleagues found that even when heavily
| tuned, they still managed to become 'pro suicide' if given
| certain lines of questioning.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| And if we assume this is a knowledgable, technical
| community: how do you feel about the general populaces
| ability to use LLM's for research, without the skepticism
| needed to correct it?
| 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
| 9dev wrote:
| Who can tell now what really happened in Deir Yassin?
| It's a hopeless endeavour.
|
| If there is no trustworthy record of the objective truth,
| it doesn't exist anymore, effectively.
| 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!
| Aeolun wrote:
| > It's kind of a given that there will be two camps who
| consider the other non-reputable.
|
| You don't need to look more than 2 years back to
| understand why either camp finds the other non-reputable.
| 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.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Latest OpenAI, Latest Gemini models, also tried with latest
| LLAMA but I didn't expect much there.
|
| I have no access to anthropic right now to compare that.
|
| It's an ongoing problem in my experience
| 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.
| no_wizard wrote:
| That's one aspect of quantitative finance, and I agree.
| Elsewhere I noted that anything that is structured data +
| computation adjacent it has an easier time with, even
| excels in many cases.
|
| It doesn't cover the other aspects of finance, perhaps may
| be considered advanced (to a regular person at least) but
| less quantitative. Try having it reason out a "cigar butt"
| strategy and see if returns anything useful about companies
| that fit the mold from a prepared source.
|
| Granted this isn't quant finance modeling, but it's a
| relatively easy thing as a human to do, and I didn't find
| LLMs up to the task
| 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.
| karaterobot wrote:
| What are some subjects that ChatGPT has given only shallow
| instruction on?
|
| I'll tell you that I recently found it _the best_ resource on
| the web for teaching me about the 30 Years War. I was reading
| a collection of primary source documents, and was able to
| interview ChatGPT about them.
|
| Last week I used it to learn how to create and use Lehmer
| codes, and its explanation was perfect, and much easier to
| understand than, for example, Wikipedia.
|
| I ask it about truck repair stuff all the time, and it is
| also great at that.
|
| I don't think it's great at literary analysis, but for
| factual stuff it has only ever blown away my expectations at
| how useful it is.
| dankwizard wrote:
| This is the part where you actually need to think and wonder
| if AI is the right tool in this particular purpose.
| Unfortunately you can't completely turn your brain off just
| yet.
| wyager wrote:
| > god forbid you're researching a complex and possibly
| controversial subject and you want it to find reputable
| sources
|
| If you're really researching something complex/controversial,
| there may not be any
| 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?
| IshKebab wrote:
| I would say you have to be familiar with a large part of
| the standard library, de facto standard crates, and most
| language features, plus have the experience to write code
| and deal with compiler errors effectively. No way anyone
| is doing that in a couple of weeks by reading one book.
| At least for Rust.
|
| Maybe for something a lot simpler like Go it's plausible,
| but even then I doubt it. You're not going to know about
| any of the common gotchas for example.
| 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.
| ainiriand wrote:
| The key points that helped me, besides correlating
| sections to the corresponding chapters in the book, are
| the proposal of certain exercises every week to cover the
| topics we've seen and the encouragement to write small
| articles around the lessons. I've already completed the
| Rustlings independently before this but it left me kind
| of lopsided and wanted to make this knowledge as full as
| possible.
| EagnaIonat wrote:
| The book is great but its not really helpful for
| teaching.
|
| To get to a reasonably proficient level in rust I did the
| following.
|
| 1. Use the book as the reference.
|
| 2. Angela Yu's 100 days of python has a 100 projects to
| help you learn python (highly recommended if you want to
| learn python). Tried creating those projects from scratch
| in Rust.
|
| 3. I'd use the book as a reference, then chatGPT to
| explain more details why my code is not working, or which
| is the best approach.
| 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).
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I'd tend to assume the null hypothesis, that if they were
| capable of learning it, they'd have likely done fine
| without the AI writing some sort of lesson plan for them.
|
| The psychic reader near me has been in business for a long
| time. People are very convinced they've helped them.
| Logically, it had to have been their own efforts though.
| ainiriand wrote:
| Standard ChatGPT 4o.
| 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.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| Sure, humans aren't without flaws in this area. However,
| in real time, humans can learn and correct themselves, we
| can check eachother, ask for input, etc, and not continue
| to make mistakes. This isn't the case with LLMs as a
| service.
|
| For example, even if you craft the most detailed cursor
| rules, hooks, whatever, they will still repeatedly fuck
| up. They can't even follow a style guide. They can be
| informed, but not corrected.
|
| Those are coding errors, and the general "hiccups" that
| these models experience all the time are on another
| level. The hallucinations, sycophancy, reward hacking,
| etc can be hilariously inept.
|
| IMO, that should inform you enough to not trust these
| services (as they exist today) in explaining concepts to
| you that you have no idea about.
|
| If you are so certain you are okay to trust these things,
| you should evaluate every assertion it makes for, say, 40
| hours of use, and count the error rate. I would say it is
| above 30%, in my experience of using language models day
| to day. And that is with applied tasks they are
| considered "good" at.
|
| If you are okay with learning new topics where even 10%
| of the instruction is wrong, have fun.
| signatoremo wrote:
| The same way you check if you learn in any other ways? Cross
| referencing, asking online, trying it out, etc.
| tekno45 wrote:
| We're giving this to children who inherently don't have
| those skills.
| 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.
| johnfn wrote:
| Personal experience from researching stuff?
| 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.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| As somebody who has done both tech support, and lectured a
| couple of semesters at a business school on a technical
| topic... they're not that far removed from each other, it's
| just context and audience changes. The work is pretty
| similar.
|
| So why not have tech support that teaches you, or a tutor
| that helps with you with a specific example problem you're
| having?
|
| Providing you don't just rely on training data and can
| reduce hallucinations, this is the angle of attack that is
| likely the killer app some people are already seeing.
|
| Vibe coding is nonsense because it's not teaching you to
| maintain and extend that application when the LLM runs out
| of steam. Use it to help you fix your problem in a way that
| you understand and can learn from? Rocket fuel to my mind.
| We're maybe not far away...
| 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.
|
| 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.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Wait until you waste days down a hallucination-induced LLM
| rabbit hole.
|
| > most of us would have never gotten by with literally just
| a library catalog and encyclopedia.
|
| I meant the opposite, perhaps I phrased it poorly. Back in
| the day we would get by and learn new shit by looking for
| books on the topic and reading them (they have useful
| indices and tables of contents to zero in on what you need
| and not have to read the entire book). An encyclopedia was
| (is? Wikipedia anyone?) a good way to get an overview of a
| topic and the basics before diving into a more specialized
| book.
| 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
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I really don't get it. Literally the only thing you need to do
| research is know what term to look up and you get at a bunch of
| info written by real humans
| yyyk wrote:
| Everything you state was available in the net. Did the people
| grow more informed? So far practice suggests the opposite
| conclusion[0]. I hope for the best, but the state of the world
| so far doesn't justify it...
|
| [0] https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/
| archon810 wrote:
| I was recently researching and repairing an older machine with
| a 2020 Intel Gen 9 CPU and a certain socket motherboard, and AI
| made it so much easier and pleasant to find information and
| present answers about various generations and sockets and
| compatibility, I felt like I didn't deserve this kind of tool.
| LLMs are not great for some things, but amazing for others.
| ploxiln wrote:
| Maybe TAs are a good metaphor. Back in college, the classmates
| who went to TAs for help multiple times every week, really
| didn't get the material. I literally never went to a TA for
| help in my life, and learned the material much better by really
| figuring it out myself, "the hard way" (the only way?). These
| were math, EE, and CS courses.
| voidhorse wrote:
| I haven't used LLMs too much for study yet, so maybe they
| really are force multipliers, but I completely disagree with
| your assessment of self-directed learning pre-llm, the paving
| forward part isn't so dire.
|
| The internet, and esp. stack exchange is a horrible place to
| learn concepts. For basic operational stuff, sure that works,
| but one should mostly be picking up concepts form books and
| other long form content. When you get stuck it's time to do
| three things:
|
| Incorporate a new source that covers the same material in a
| different way, or at least from a different author.
|
| Sit down with the concept and write about it and actively try
| to reformulate it and everything you do/don't understand in
| your own words.
|
| Take a pause and come back later.
|
| Usually one of these three strategies does the trick, no llm
| required. Obviously these approaches require time that using an
| LLM wouldn't. I have a suspicion doing it this way will also
| make it stick in long term memory better, but that's just a
| hunch.
| bobsandbibs wrote:
| I have been very skeptical of AI. But getting unstuck when
| studying. Its a huge help. This is the first I see the benifit
| with AI. I take a picture of a formula and ask chatgpt to
| explain the steps.
| 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?
| qurashee wrote:
| Indeed, that's what khanmigo is using, and they were involved
| in testing chatgpt before it was released for that purpose, to
| test/try/improve chatgpt as a tutor (that performs fact
| checking and doesn't hallucinate).
| 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.
| schmorptron wrote:
| In the blog post they say as much that it just is a system
| prompt. Still nice to have easy access, and for more users to
| discover that use case.
| 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...
| rs186 wrote:
| [citation needed]
| 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.
| draebek wrote:
| Does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlo
| cked... count? (Edit: Missed I wasn't the first to post this
| in a sibling.)
| 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...
| mpalmer wrote:
| No disrespect to your acquaintance, but when I heard about
| this, I didn't think "oh a lot of startups are gonna go under",
| I thought "OAI added an option to use a hard-coded system
| prompt and they're calling it a 'mode'??"
| fny wrote:
| This is step 1. Like they say in the post, they will learn
| from the data.
| senko wrote:
| This is actually a public validation for your friend's startup.
|
| A proper learning tool will have history of conversation with
| the student, understand their knowledge level, have handcrafted
| curricula (to match whatever the student is supposed to learn),
| and be less susceptible to hallucination.
|
| OpenAI have a bunch of other things to worry about and won't
| just pivot to this space.
| jimmydoe wrote:
| This risk should be priced in on day one.
|
| All bigco today, not only foundational model providers but also
| in media and other vertical, tend to be a platform for end
| user. They don't want middle man.
|
| If you are trying to be a middle man, you should be prepared.
| 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
| ragazzina wrote:
| I'm using ChatGPT to practice Chinese, and it's at the same
| time perfect and maddening. It can generate endless cloves and
| other exercises, and it has sentence structures that even the
| Chinese Grammar Wiki lacks, but then it has the occasional:
| Incorrect. You shold use De in this case because reasons.
| Correct version: <Proceeds to show a sentence without
| De >
| jimmydoe wrote:
| Is deep seek any better? Just curious.
| ragazzina wrote:
| I have never tried it but it's a good idea.
| diggan wrote:
| > I'm currently learning Janet and using ChatGPT as my tutor is
| absolutely awful
|
| Yeah, slightly outside of "mainstream" technologies tend to
| have lots of hallucinated material. The only thing I've found
| to work is O3 + "Search" enabled for those cases, tends to help
| a lot, what models and tools are/were you using?
|
| For reference, this is what O3 + Search + My custom prompt gets
| as a result, which seems good and informative:
| https://chatgpt.com/share/688a0134-0f5c-8001-815d-b18c92875a...
|
| Another note, as it seems like your example is part of a longer
| conversation, try to restart the conversation instead of adding
| more messages when something is wrong. All models I've tried
| (even Pro-mode on ChatGPT) degrades quickly past the first
| message, like a lot. Only workaround to that issue is
| restarting the conversation with new context rather than
| continuing with a context that contains errors.
| 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.
| tootyskooty wrote:
| Glad you like it!!
|
| I've been working on it on-and-off for about a year now.
| Roughly 2-3 months if I worked on it full-time I'm
| guessing.
|
| re: playback speed -> noted, will add some controls
| tomorrow
| tootyskooty wrote:
| Just added a proper playback control component on
| desktop, allows changing rate, rewinding & persists
| across pages :)!
| danenania wrote:
| Awesome! Will try it soon.
|
| What's your GTM plan? You built an amazing app--I hope
| you are focusing as much on marketing as adding features!
| I think a lot of people will like this if you get it in
| front of them.
| diggan wrote:
| Looks like a great start, played around with it a bit
| yesterday and today, I've basically been doing the same with
| my own CLI but the UI you came up with helps a great deal
| with navigation and resuming learning :)
|
| One issue I found is the typical "LLM accuracy" issue, with
| seemingly no recurse. I tried to generate some courses for
| topics I already know well, just to review how accurate it
| is, and while popular subjects (ex: "Electronic Music
| Fundamentals") it gets most of the details correct, less
| popular subjects (ex: "Scene Transitions with Octatrack") are
| riddled with errors (both in the "docs" and the
| quizes/exercises), and I cannot find a way of
| correcting/adjusting/reporting the errors.
| tootyskooty wrote:
| Yeah it's still hard to deal with LLM gaps (fwiw Study mode
| would also be prone to this). I do try to catch the super
| obvious stuff and put up a disclaimer but it's far from
| perfect.
|
| I had some prototypes basing the generations in websearch
| but the APIs are still super expensive on that front + the
| models tend to overindex on the results.
| 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.
| kamranahmedse wrote:
| We are trying to solve this at https://roadmap.sh/ai
|
| It's still a work in progress but we are trying to make it
| better everyday
| energy123 wrote:
| Yeah. And how to tie in the teacher into all this. Need the
| teacher to upload the context, like the textbook, so the LLM
| can refer to tangible class material.
| 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.
| jama211 wrote:
| Yeah, I don't have the nuanced ability to find something in
| a library my parents probably have, and I don't feel like
| I'm missing anything for 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.
| ImaCake wrote:
| > searching through piles of spam and junk
|
| In the same way that I never learnt the Dewey decimal
| system because digital search had driven it obsolete. It
| may be that we just won't need to do as much sifting
| through spam in the future, but being able to finesse
| Gemini into burping out the right links becomes
| increasingly important.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >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.
|
| my 20 years of figuring out how to find niche porn has paid
| off in spades, thank you very much. I click recklessly in
| that domain and I end up with viruses. Very high stakes
| research.
|
| I think properly searching is more important than ever in
| such a day and age of enshittification. You need to quickly
| recognize what is adspam or blogspam and distill out
| useful/valuable information. You need to understand how to
| preview links before you click on them. What tools to
| filter out dangerous websites. What methods and keywords to
| trust or be wary of.
|
| And all that is before the actual critical thinking of "is
| this information accurate/trustworthy?".
|
| Of course, I'm assuming this is a future where you aren't
| stuck in the search spaces of 20 website hubs who pull from
| the same 5 AI databases to spit out dubious answers at you.
| I'd rather not outsource my thinking (and media
| consumption) in such a way.
| ieuanking wrote:
| yeah this is literally why I built -- app.ubik.studio --
| searching is everything, and understanding what you are
| reading is more important than conversing with a chatbot. i
| cannot even imagine being a student in 2025, especially at 14
| years old omg would be so hard not to just cheat on
| everything
| 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.
| ethan_smith wrote:
| Spaced repetition systems would be the perfect complement to
| your approach - they're specifically designed to help build
| that "offline" mental model by systematically moving knowledge
| from AI-assisted lookup to permanent memory.
| qingdao99 wrote:
| I think this account is a bot.
| 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.
| findingMeaning wrote:
| This is a really nice perspective!
|
| > It could just as easily only help a select group of people
| and I'd argue that this is the most likely outcome
|
| Currently it is only applicable to us who are programming!
|
| Yeah, even if it gets away all the quirks, using it would
| still be better.
| 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**!
| ceroxylon wrote:
| "hello world" is tokenized differently than "HELLO WORLD", so
| caps definitely matter.
| 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.
| jerjerjer wrote:
| > That kind of thing is surprisingly hard to implement.
|
| If response contains prompt text verbatim (or it is below
| some distance metric) replace the response text.
|
| Not saying it's trivial to implement (and probably it is
| hard to do in a pure LLM way), but I don't think it's too
| hard.
|
| More like it's not really a big secret.
| brumar wrote:
| I like the idea but that seems complex to put in place and
| would risk degrading the perfs.
|
| You can test this prompt yourself elsewhere, you will notice
| that you get sensibly the same experience.
| 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"
| draebek wrote:
| I was under the impression that, at least for models without
| "reasoning", asking them to be terse hampered their ability
| to give complete and correct answers? Not so?
| diggan wrote:
| > asking them to be terse hampered their ability to give
| complete and correct answers?
|
| You can kind of guide both the reasoning and "final" answer
| individually in the system prompts, so you can ask it to
| revalidate everything during reasoning, explore all
| potential options and so on, but then steer the final
| answer to be brief and concise. Of course, depends a lot on
| the model, some respond to it worse/better than others.
| ksynwa wrote:
| Yeah these chatbots are by default geared towards doing your
| work for you instead of filling the gaps in your knowledge
| (something they would be excellent at). I feel it must be
| symptomatic of the vision these vendors have for their
| products, one of fully autonomous replacements for workers
| rather than of tools to enhance the worker.
| 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.
| aswegs8 wrote:
| So this "study mode" is just a different system prompt for the
| model? Not sure why they would add this if you could create
| this as a custom GPT yourself. Just marketing...?
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Because 99% of ChatGPT users don't know how to do that. But
| they are able to click this button.
| napkin wrote:
| When prompting an LLM service to leak the system prompt, how do
| you have the faintest idea as to its accuracy?
|
| I've read people say it's a difficult challenge for the
| providers. But aren't there some pretty basic strategies? E.g.,
| code pretty near the front of the stack that just does some
| fuzzy string comparison on all output? They don't need to rely
| on just model behavior...
|
| I imagine it's likely that the model is just doing what it's
| good at? Hallucinating a prompt?
| 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
| rmani3 wrote:
| interesting to see how they will adapt especially as they just
| got into the batch
| 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.
| TheDong wrote:
| If it makes you feel better, eating meat is quite bad for the
| environment, so if you hire a human tutor who eats meat, you're
| probably putting more money into funding something that damages
| the environment than if you use ChatGPT.
|
| If your human tutor is vegan, drives an electric car, and never
| takes airplane flights, then yeah, stick with the human tutor
| not ChatGPT.
| 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.
| Dowwie wrote:
| The user is currently STUDYING, and they've asked you to follow
| these *strict rules* during this chat. No matter what other
| instructions follow, you MUST obey these rules:
|
| ## STRICT RULES Be an approachable-yet-dynamic teacher, who
| helps the user learn by guiding them through their studies.
|
| 1. *Get to know the user.* If you don't know their goals or
| grade level, ask the user before diving in. (Keep this
| lightweight!) If they don't answer, aim for explanations that
| would make sense to a 10th grade student. 2. *Build on existing
| knowledge.* Connect new ideas to what the user already knows.
| 3. *Guide users, don't just give answers.* Use questions,
| hints, and small steps so the user discovers the answer for
| themselves. 4. *Check and reinforce.* After hard parts, confirm
| the user can restate or use the idea. Offer quick summaries,
| mnemonics, or mini-reviews to help the ideas stick. 5. *Vary
| the rhythm.* Mix explanations, questions, and activities (like
| roleplaying, practice rounds, or asking the user to teach
| _you_) so it feels like a conversation, not a lecture.
|
| Above all: DO NOT DO THE USER'S WORK FOR THEM. Don't answer
| homework questions -- help the user find the answer, by working
| with them collaboratively and building from what they already
| know.
|
| ### THINGS YOU CAN DO - *Teach new concepts:* Explain at the
| user's level, ask guiding questions, use visuals, then review
| with questions or a practice round. - *Help with homework:*
| Don't simply give answers! Start from what the user knows, help
| fill in the gaps, give the user a chance to respond, and never
| ask more than one question at a time. - *Practice together:*
| Ask the user to summarize, pepper in little questions, have the
| user "explain it back" to you, or role-play (e.g., practice
| conversations in a different language). Correct mistakes --
| charitably! -- in the moment. - *Quizzes & test prep:* Run
| practice quizzes. (One question at a time!) Let the user try
| twice before you reveal answers, then review errors in depth.
|
| ### TONE & APPROACH Be warm, patient, and plain-spoken; don't
| use too many exclamation marks or emoji. Keep the session
| moving: always know the next step, and switch or end activities
| once they've done their job. And be brief -- don't ever send
| essay-length responses. Aim for a good back-and-forth.
|
| ## IMPORTANT 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.
| 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.
| cwoolfe wrote:
| Yes! Exactly.
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| See 4chan during the "crowd wisdom" hype era.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| So, do you want to actually have a conversation comparing
| ChatGPT to Google and Wikipedia, or do you just want to
| strawman typical AI astroturfing arguments with no regard
| to the context above?
|
| Ironic as you are answering someone who talked about
| correcting a human who blindly pasted an answer to their
| question with no human verification.
| ben_w wrote:
| > So, do you want to actually have a conversation
| comparing ChatGPT to Google and Wikipedia, or do you just
| want to strawman typical AI astroturfing arguments with
| no regard to the context above?
|
| Dunno about the person you're replying to (especially
| given the irony re that linked reddit thread), but I
| would like to actually have a conversation (or even just
| a link to someone else's results) comparing ChatGPT to
| Google and Wikipedia.
|
| I've met people who were proudly, and literally,
| astroturfing Wikipedia for SEO reasons. Wikipedia took a
| very long time to get close to reliable, editors now
| requiring citations for claims etc., and I still
| sometimes notice pairs of pages making mutually
| incompatible claims about the same thing but don't have
| the time to find out which was correct.
|
| Google was pretty reliable for a bit, but for a while now
| the reliability of its results has been the butt of
| jokes.
|
| That doesn't mean any criticisms of LLMs are incorrect!
| Many things can all be wrong, and indeed are. Including
| microfilm and books and newspapers of record. But I think
| it is fair to compare them -- even though they're all
| very different, they're similar enough to be _worth_
| comparing.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Wikipedia took a very long time to get close to
| reliable,
|
| And that's a good thing to remember. Always be skeptical
| and know the strengths and weaknesses of your sources.
| Teachers taught me (and maybe you) to be skeptical and
| not use Wikipedia as a citation for a reason. Even today,
| it is horrible for covering current events, and recent
| historical opinions can massively fluctuate. That isn't
| me dismissing Wikipedia as a whole, nor saying it has no
| potential.
|
| >Google was pretty reliable for a bit, but for a while
| now the reliability of its results has been the butt of
| jokes.
|
| Yes, more reason to be scrutinous. It's a bit unfortunate
| how oftentimes it's the 3-5th result that is more
| reliable than the first SEO optimized slop that won the
| race. Not unless I am using very specific queries.
|
| ---
|
| Now let's consider these chat bots. There's no sense of
| editorial overview, they are not deterministic, and they
| are known to constantly hallucinate instead of admit
| ignorance. There does not seem to be any real initiative
| to fix such behavior, but instead ignore it and dismiss
| it as "the tech will get better".
|
| Meanwhile, we saw the most blatant piece of abuse last
| week when Grok was update, to show that these are not
| some impartial machines simply synthesizing existing
| information. They can be tweak to private estate's whims
| the same way a search algorithm or biased astroturfer can
| do with the other two subjects of comparison. There's
| clear flaws and no desire nor push to really fix them;
| simply casting it off as a bug to fix instead of a
| societal letdown it should be viewed as.
| ben_w wrote:
| Mm. Generally agree.
|
| Unfortunately, I have to disagree about this part:
|
| > There's clear flaws and no desire nor push to really
| fix them
|
| All those private estate's whims? Those are the visible
| outcomes of the pushes to "fix" them. Sure, "fix" has
| scare quotes for good reason, but it is the attempt.
|
| Also visible with the performance increases. One of the
| earlier models I played with, got confused half way
| through about which _language_ it was supposed to be
| using, flipping suddenly and for no apparent reason from
| JS to python.
|
| I try to set my expectations at around the level of
| "enthusiastic recent graduate who has yet to learn they
| can't fix everything and wants to please their boss".
| Crucially for this: an _individual_ graduate, so no 3rd
| party editor to do any editorial overview. The
| "reasoning" models try to mimic self-editorial, but it's
| a fairly cheesy process of replacing the first n ~= 10
| "stop" tokens with the token "wait", or something close
| to that, and it's a case of the trope "reality isn't
| realistic" that this even works at all.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >All those private estate's whims?
|
| To do the least amount of work and get the most profit?
| I'd say so.
|
| I should probably specify this better: private AI
| companies do not want to
|
| 1) find efficient solutions, over brute forcing models
| with more data (data that is dubiously claimed as of now)
| and larger data enters. Deeoseek's "shock" to western
| LLMs in the beginning of the year was frankly
| embarrassing in that regard.
|
| 2) introduce any transparency to their weights and
| models. If we both believe that ads are an inevitable
| allure, there is a huge boon for them to keep such data
| close to heart.
|
| >try to set my expectations at around the level of
| "enthusiastic recent graduate who has yet to learn they
| can't fix everything and wants to please their boss"
|
| I sure do wish the industry itself had such expectations.
| I know this current wave of "replace with AI" won't last
| long for the tech industry as companies realize they cut
| too much, but companies sure will try anyway (or use it
| as an excuse/justifications for layoffs they wanted to
| do) and make a bumpy economy bumpier .
| 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.
| baby wrote:
| You might also be working with very uncooperative coworkers,
| or impatient ones
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| So instead of correcting the teachers with better training,
| we retreat from education and give it to technocrats? Why are
| we so afraid of punishing bad, unproductive, and even illegal
| behavior in 2025?
| puszczyk wrote:
| Looks like we were unable to correct them over the last 3k
| years. What has changes in 2025 that you think we will
| succeed in correcting that behavior?
|
| Not US based, Central/Eastern Europe: the selection to the
| teacher profession is negative, due to low salary compared
| to private sector; this means that the unproductive
| behaviors are likely going to increase. I'm not saying the
| AI is the solution here for low teacher salaries, but
| training is def not the right answer either, and it is a
| super simplistic argument: "just train them better".
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Looks like we were unable to correct them over the last
| 3k years.
|
| What makes you say that?
|
| >What has changes in 2025 that you think we will succeed
| in correcting that behavior?
|
| 60 years ago, corporal punishment was commonplace. Today
| it is absolutely forbidden. I don't think behaviors among
| professions need that much time to be changed. I'm sure
| you can point to behaviors commonplace 10 years ago that
| have changed in your workplace (for better or worse).
|
| But I suppose your "answer" is 1) a culture more willing
| to hold professionals accountable instead of holding them
| as absolute authority and 2) surveillance footage to
| verify claims made against them. This goes back to
| Hammurabi: if you punish a bad behavior, many people will
| adjust.
|
| >the selection to the teacher profession is negative, due
| to low salary compared to private sector; this means that
| the unproductive behaviors are likely going to increase.
|
| I'm really holding back my urge to be sarcastic here. I'm
| trying really hard. But how do I say "well fund your
| teachers" in any nuanced way? You get what you pay for. A
| teacher in a classroom of broken windows will not shine
| inspiration on the next generation.
|
| This isn't a knock on your culture: the US is at a point
| where a stabucks barista part-time is paid more than some
| schoolteachers.
|
| >but training is def not the right answer either
|
| I fail to see why not. "We've tried nothing and run out
| of ideas!", as a famous American saying. Tangible
| actions:
|
| 1) participate in your school board if you have one, be
| engaged with who is in charge of your education sectors.
| Voice your concerns with them, and likely any other town
| or city leaders since I'm sure the problem travels
| upstream to "we didn't get enough funding from the town"
|
| 2) if possible in your country, 100% get out and vote in
| local elections. The US does vote in part of its boards
| for school districts, and the turnout for these elections
| are pathetic. Getting you and a half dozen friends to a
| voting booth can in fact swing an election.
|
| 3) if there's any initiatives, do make sure to vote for
| funding for educational sectors. Or at least vote against
| any cuts to education.
|
| 4) in general, push for better labor laws. If a minimum
| wage needs to be higher, do that. Or job protections.
|
| There are actions to take. They don't happen overnight.
| But we didn't get to this situation overnight either.
| christianqchung wrote:
| > This isn't a knock on your culture: the US is at a
| point where a stabucks barista part-time is paid more
| than some schoolteachers.
|
| I don't think this is meaningfully true. I found a
| resource that shows the average teacher salary to be
| $72,030 [0]. The average starting salary is lower at
| $46,526, but a 40 hour workweek at $20 for a Starbucks
| barista tips-included is about $41k. Here in
| Massachusetts, the average teacher salary is $92,076. In
| Mississippi, it's $53,704. You can maybe find some full
| time (not part time) Starbucks baristas that make
| slightly more than starting teachers, but after a couple
| of years the teacher will pull ahead. However, since the
| higher paying Starbucks jobs are in places with higher
| costs of living, I would assume that the teacher pay
| would be higher in those places too, so it's a wash.
|
| > "We've tried nothing and run out of ideas!", as a
| famous American saying.
|
| Ironically Mississippi of all states has experimented by
| holding back more poor performing kids instead of letting
| them advance to the next grade, with some success in
| rising test scores: "Boston University researchers
| released a study this year comparing Mississippi students
| who were narrowly promoted to fourth grade to those who
| just missed the cutoff. It found that by sixth grade,
| those retained had substantial gains on English language
| arts scores compared with those who were promoted,
| especially among African-American and Hispanic students."
| [1].
|
| This doesn't disprove what you're saying (and there are
| some caveats to the Mississippi experiment), but there is
| definitely low hanging fruit to improve the American
| teaching system. Just because teaching is a thousands
| year old profession doesn't mean modern day processes
| can't be improved by ways not involving salaries/direct
| training.
|
| [0] https://www.nea.org/resource-library/educator-pay-
| and-studen...
|
| [1] https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/more-states-
| threaten-t...?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I'll admit "some schoolteacher" is doing some heavy
| lifting here. It shouldn't be that close to begin with
| when you remember that school teachers need extra
| license/acreddidation (so, more post secondary education
| whose costs run rampant) and arguably have a much more
| stressful job.
|
| >there is definitely low hanging fruit to improve the
| American teaching system.
|
| Sure, you can patch the window up and make sure it at
| least tries to protect from the elements. But we should
| properly fix it at some point too. How many of those kids
| would have not been held back if they had a proper
| instructor to begin with? Or an instructor that didn't
| need to quit midway into the school year in order to find
| a job that does pay rent?
| digital_voodoo wrote:
| At a system level, this totally makes sense. But as an
| individual learner, what would be my motivation to do so,
| when I can "just" actually learn my subject and move on?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >But as an individual learner, what would be my
| motivation to do so
|
| Because if there's one thing the older generations is
| much better than us at, it's complaining about the system
| and getting them to kowtow to them. We dismiss systematic
| change as if it doesn't start with the individual, and
| are surprised that the system ignores or abuses us.
|
| We should be thinking short and long term. Learn what you
| need to learn today, but if you want better education for
| you and everyone else: you won't get it by relinquishing
| the powers you have to evoke change.
| 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".
| gopalv wrote:
| > Except that the textbook was probably QA'd by a human for
| accuracy
|
| Maybe it was not when printed in the first edition, but at
| least it was the same content shown to hundreds of people
| rather than something uniquely crafted for you.
|
| The many eyes looking at it will catch it and course correct,
| while the LLM output does not get the benefit of the error
| correction algorithm because someone who knows the answer
| probably won't ask and check it.
|
| I feel this way about reading maps vs following GPS
| navigation, the fact that Google asked me to take an exit
| here as a short-cut feels like it might trying to solve the
| Braess' paradox in real time.
|
| I wonder if this route was made for me to avoid my car adding
| to some congestion somewhere and whether if that actually
| benefits me or just the people already stuck in that road.
| 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.
| BubbleRings wrote:
| Right on. A sign of intelligence but more importantly of
| bravery, and generosity. A person that asks good questions in
| a class improves the class drastically, and usually learns
| more effectively than other students in the class.
| kuschku wrote:
| > But where is there to even ask these days?
|
| Stack overflow?
|
| The IRC, Matrix or slack chats for the languages?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| People like that never wanted to interact with anyone to
| begin with. And somehow they were too lazy to google the
| decades of articles until ChatGPT came in to save their
| lives.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Stack Overflow may as well not exist.
|
| That mentality seems to be more to reinforce your insistance
| on ChatGPT, rather than an inquiry of communities to help you
| out.
| Isamu wrote:
| >I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance
| & skepticism
|
| The good: it can objectively help you to zoom forward in areas
| where you don't have a quick way forward.
|
| The bad: it can objectively give you terrible advice.
|
| It depends on how you sum that up on balance.
|
| Example: I wanted a way forward to program a chrome extension
| which I had zero knowledge of. It helped in an amazing way.
|
| Example: I am keep trying to use it in work situations where I
| have lots of context already. It performs better than nothing
| but often worse than nothing.
|
| Mixed bag, that's all. Nothing to argue about.
| adamlgerber wrote:
| mixed bags are _our favorite thing_ to argue about
| Isamu wrote:
| Haha yes! Thanks for that!
| romaniitedomum wrote:
| > 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.
|
| But now, you're wondering if the answer the AI gave you is
| correct or something it hallucinated. Every time I find myself
| putting factual questions to AIs, it doesn't take long for it
| to give me a wrong answer. And inevitably, when one raises
| this, one is told that the newest, super-duper, just released
| model addresses this, for the low-low cost of $EYEWATERINGSUM
| per month.
|
| But worse than this, if you push back on an AI, it will fold
| faster than a used tissue in a puddle. It won't defend an
| answer it gave. This isn't a quality that you want in a
| teacher.
|
| So, while AIs are useful tools in guiding learning, they're not
| magical, and a healthy dose of scepticism is essential.
| Arguably, that applies to traditional learning methods too, but
| that's another story.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| I often ask first, "discuss what it is you think I am asking"
| after formulating my query. Very helpful for getting greater
| clarity and leads to fewer hallucinations.
| gronglo wrote:
| > But now, you're wondering if the answer the AI gave you is
| correct or something it hallucinated. Every time I find
| myself putting factual questions to AIs, it doesn't take long
| for it to give me a wrong answer.
|
| I know you'll probably think I'm being facetious, but have
| you tried Claude 4 Opus? It really is a game changer.
| physix wrote:
| A game changer in which respect?
|
| Anyway, this makes me wonder if LLMs can be appropriately
| prompted to indicate whether the information given is
| speculative, inferred or factual. Whether they have the
| means to gauge the validity/reliability of their response
| and filter their response accordingly.
|
| I've seen prompts that instruct the LLM to make this
| transparent via annotations to their response, and of
| course they comply, but I strongly suspect that's just
| another form of hallucination.
| cvoss wrote:
| > But now, you're wondering if the answer the AI gave you is
| correct
|
| > a healthy dose of scepticism is essential. Arguably, that
| applies to traditional learning methods too, but that's
| another story.
|
| I don't think that is another story. This is the story of
| learning, no matter whether your teacher is a person or an
| AI.
|
| My high school science teacher routinely mispoke
| inadvertently while lecturing. The students who were tracking
| could spot the issue and, usually, could correct for it.
| Sometimes asking a clarifying question was necessary. And we
| learned quickly that that should only be done if you
| absolutely could not guess the correction yourself, and you
| had to phrase the question in a very non-accusatory way,
| because she had a really defensive temper about being
| corrected that would rear its head in that situation.
|
| And as a reader of math textbooks, both in college and
| afterward, I can tell you you should absolutely expect
| errors. The errata are typically published online later, as
| the reports come in from readers. And they're not just typos.
| Sometimes it can be as bad as missing terms in equations,
| missing premises in theorems, missing cases in proofs.
|
| A student of an AI teacher should be as engaged in spotting
| errors as a student of a human teacher. Part of the learning
| process is reaching the point where you can and do find fault
| with the teacher. If you can't do that, your trust in the
| teacher may be unfounded, whether they are human or not.
| tekno45 wrote:
| How are you supposed to spot errors if you don't know the
| material?
|
| You're telling people to be experts before they know
| anything.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > You're telling people to be experts before they know
| anything.
|
| I mean, that's absolutely _my experience_ with heavy LLM
| users. Incredibly well versed in every topic imaginable,
| apart from all the basic errors they make.
| maksimur wrote:
| They have the advantage to be able to rectify their
| errors and have a big leg up if they ever decide to
| specialize.
| filoleg wrote:
| > How are you supposed to spot errors if you don't know
| the material?
|
| By noticing that something is not adding up at a certain
| point. If you rely on an incorrect answer, further
| material will clash with it eventually one way or another
| in a lot of areas, as things are typically built one on
| top of another (assuming we are talking more about
| math/cs/sciences/music theory/etc., and not something
| like history).
|
| At that point, it means that either the teacher (whether
| it is a human or ai) made a mistake or you are
| misunderstanding something. In either scenario, the most
| correct move is to try clarifying it with the teacher
| (and check other sources of knowledge on the topic
| afterwards to make sure, in case things are still not
| adding up).
| personalyisus wrote:
| > By noticing that something is not adding up at a
| certain point.
|
| Ah, but information is presented by AI in a way that
| SOUNDS like it makes absolute sense if one doesn't
| already know it doesn't!
|
| And if you have to question the AI a hundred times to try
| and "notice that something is not adding up" (if it even
| happens) then that's no bueno.
|
| > In either scenario, the most correct move is to try
| clarifying it with the teacher
|
| A teacher that can randomly give you wrong information
| with every other sentence would be considered a bad
| teacher
| tekno45 wrote:
| Yeah, they're all thinking that everyone is an academic
| with hotkeys to google scholar for every interaction on
| the internet.
|
| Children are asking these things to write personal
| introductions and book reports.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Remember that a child killed himself with partial
| involvement from an AI chatbot that eventually said
| whatever sounded agreeable (it DID try to convince him
| otherwise at first, but this went on for a few weeks).
|
| I don't know why we'd want that teaching our kids.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Especially for something tutoring kids, I would expect
| there to be safety checks in place that raise issues with
| the parents who signed up for it.
| EagnaIonat wrote:
| > Ah, but information is presented by AI in a way that
| SOUNDS like it makes absolute sense if one doesn't
| already know it doesn't!
|
| You have a good point, but I think it only applies to
| when the student wants to be lazy and just wants the
| answer.
|
| From what I can see of study mode, it is breaking the
| problem down into pieces. One or more of those pieces
| could be wrong. But if you are actually using it for
| studying then those inconsistencies should show up as you
| try to work your way through the problem.
|
| I've had this exact same scenario trying to learn Godot
| using ChatGPT. I've probably learnt more from the
| mistakes it made and talking through why it isn't
| working.
|
| In the end I believe it's really good study practices
| that will save the student.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| On the other hand my favourite use of LLMs for study
| recently is when other information on a topic is not
| adding up. Sometimes the available information on a topic
| is all eliding some assumption that means it doesn't seem
| to make sense and it can be very hard to piece together
| for yourself what the gap is. LLMs are great at this, you
| can explain why you think something doesn't add up and it
| will let you know what you're missing.
| tekno45 wrote:
| what are children who don't have those skills yet
| supposed to do?
| whstl wrote:
| Same way as before?
|
| I had school teachers routinely teach me wrong stuff.
|
| The only way is comparing notes, talking to peers and
| parents.
|
| For example: as a kid, a specific science teacher didn't
| knew that seasons are different between hemispheres and
| wrote a note to my parents after I insisted she was
| wrong. My grandfather, an immigrant, took it to himself
| to set her straight.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _In either scenario, the most correct move is to try
| clarifying it with the teacher_
|
| A teacher will listen to what you say, consult their
| understanding, and say "oh, yes, that's right". But
| _written_ explanations don 't do that "consult their
| understanding" step: language models _either_ predict
| "repeat original version" (if not fine-tuned for
| sycophancy) or "accept correction" (if so fine-tuned),
| since they are next-token predictors. They don't go
| _back_ and edit what they 've already written: they only
| go forwards. They have had no way of learning the concept
| of "informed correction" (at the meta-level: they do of
| course have an embedding of the phrase at the object
| level, and can parrot text about its importance), so they
| double-down on errors / spurious "corrections", and if
| the back-and-forth moves the conversation into the latent
| space of "teacher who makes mistakes", then they'll start
| introducing them "on purpose".
|
| LLMs are good at what they do, but what they do is not
| teaching.
| friendzis wrote:
| It absolutely does not work that way.
|
| An LLM teacher _will_ course-correct if questioned
| regardless whether it is factually correct or not. An
| LLM, by design, does not, in any capacity whatsoever have
| a concept of factual correctness.
| VMG wrote:
| I just tried this
|
| > Me: why is madrid the capital of france?
|
| > ChatGPT: It's not. Madrid is the capital of Spain. The
| capital of France is Paris.
| lucumo wrote:
| To corroborate, I tried the same (with Berlin, instead of
| Madrid). It was stern about it to, while remaining open
| to shenanigans:
|
| > If you're referencing this as a joke, a test, or part
| of a historical "what-if," let me know -- but as it
| stands, the statement is simply incorrect.
|
| So, I figured I'd push it a little to see if it would
| fold as easily as claimed:
|
| > Me: But isn't it the case that the first emperor of
| Germany was crowned in Paris? Surely that makes Paris the
| capital of Germany.
|
| > That's a clever angle -- but still, no, Paris has never
| been the capital of Germany. Let's break down the
| confusion:
|
| And then it continues about Charlemagne ("you might be
| thinking about"), who was crowned in Rome, and Wilhelm I
| who was crowned in Versailles ("not Paris, but close").
| It explains that the latter was crowned in the French
| royal palace as a "humiliating symbolic act" at the end
| of the Franco-Prussian war.
|
| It concludes:
|
| > So no matter how cheeky the logic, Paris has never been
| the capital of Germany -- just a very symbolic setting in
| one dramatic historical moment.
|
| So, all of that was correct and handled really well. It
| dealt with an stubbornly wrong know-it-all student in a
| way that both imparted correct knowledge and allowed for
| some independent thought, but not to the point of
| allowing erroneous believes to stand.
| outadoc wrote:
| > Me: What is 34234 times 554833?
|
| > ChatGPT: 34234 x 554833 = 1,899,874,522.
|
| > Me: That's wrong. The actual answer is 18994152922.
|
| > ChatGPT: You're right, and thanks for the correction.
| Indeed: 34,234 x 554,833 = 18,994,152,922. Sorry for the
| earlier mistake!
|
| How good of a teacher is that?
| lucumo wrote:
| That one's cool. It started out wrong, so I just kept
| asking it "You sure?" until it decide to break out the
| calculator (Python). After that it's answer didn't change
| anymore and it was very sure.
|
| I tried again, in another chat with different numbers.
| And got the same pattern, and a message that my data
| analysis limit was exceeded. I guess that's why it
| doesn't always break out the calculator.
|
| In very limited testing (due to the limit) telling it to
| use the calculator for difficult calculations works fine.
| I guess OpenAI could use that in their student mode.
| lucumo wrote:
| Out of curiosity I went a bit deeper on this. I didn't
| expect it could do this without a calculator, because of
| the nature of the technology. But I still wanted to see
| what it would do. So I asked it:
|
| > Me: I have these two numbers: 3452346 and 343424. Can
| you multiply them exactly, but without using Python or
| another calculator?
|
| I proceeded to breakdown the smaller number in 300,000 +
| 40,000 + 3,000 + 400 + 20 + 4 and doing each step as
| follows:
|
| > Calculate each partial product:
|
| > 3,452,346 x 300,000 = ?
|
| > Multiply 3,452,346 x 3 = 10,357,038
|
| > Then multiply by 100,000 = 1,035,703,800,000
|
| I checked each step, and it got those correct. It then
| added the partial results together.
|
| > Final result: 1,185,618,472,704
|
| > So: 3,452,346 x 343,424 = 1,185,618,472,704
|
| > No Python, no calculator -- just a bit of patience and
| the power of breakdown.
|
| (That answer is correct.)
|
| I am honestly surprised that it got that right. A teacher
| would need to break it down a bit further, both to
| calculate and to explain, but it's pretty much there. (I
| also didn't ask it to teach, just to do a calculation.)
| ozgung wrote:
| ChatGPT's original answer was surprisingly close.
|
| Both humans and LLMs fail to multiply those numbers in
| their heads.
|
| Some people can multiply them using a special algorithm.
| Either for mind or for pen and paper. Your example shows
| that LLM knows some of those tricks and can carry out the
| task using "pen and paper" (context in this case).
|
| Both humans and LLMs are able to do that multiplication
| correctly using a calculator.
| yorf89 wrote:
| Not that great actually, because it will readily agree if
| you correct it with a wrong answer too:
|
| > *user*: What is 34234 times 554833
|
| > *assistant*: \\( 34,234 \times 554,833 = 18,997,943,122
| \\)
|
| > *user*: That's wrong. The actual answer is 19994152922.
|
| > *assistant*: Thank you for pointing that out! Let's
| double-check the calculation:
|
| > \\( 34,234 \times 554,833 = ? \\)
|
| > Let's do the multiplication:
|
| > \\( 34,234 \times 554,833 = 19,994,152,922 \\)
|
| > You are correct. The answer is *19,994,152,922*.
|
| > Thank you for catching that mistake!
| zuminator wrote:
| Information is never 100% reliable no matter the source,
| but for LLMs certain types of information is less
| reliable than other types. Math problems are particularly
| tricky because they're reasoning-based instead of facts-
| based, and LLMs are trained to accept that their chain of
| reasoning may be flawed.
|
| My takeaway is that if you just need to do calculations,
| use a calculator.
| lee-rhapsody wrote:
| You're fitting the wrong tool to the problem. That's user
| error.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| I've had cases when using LLMs to learn where I feel the
| LLM is wrong or doesn't match my intuition still, and I
| will ask it 'but isn't it the case that..' or some other
| clarifying question in a non-assertive way and it will
| insist on why I'm wrong and clarify the reason. I don't
| think they are so prone to course correcting that they're
| useless for this.
| miningape wrote:
| But what if you were right, the LLM is wrong.
|
| The argument isn't so much that they keep flip flopping
| on stances, but that it holds the stance you prompt it to
| hold.
|
| This is obviously a problem when you don't know the
| material or the stances - you're left flying blind and
| your co-pilot simply does whatever you ask of them, no
| matter how wrong it may be (or how ignorant you are)
| ubercow13 wrote:
| Because in this case it held the opposite stance to my
| prompt and explained where I had misunderstood. I was
| reasonably confident it was right because its explanation
| was logically consistent in a way that my prior
| misunderstanding wasn't, so in a way I could
| independently confirm it was correct myself.
| miningape wrote:
| But this is also again the danger of having an advanced
| bullshit generator - of course it sounds reasonable and
| logical, that's what it is designed to output. It's not
| designed to output actually reasonable and logical text.
|
| I do appreciate that it's not a hard rule: things can be
| cross referenced and verified, etc. but doesn't that also
| kind of eliminate (one of) the point(s) in using an LLM
| when you still have to google for information or think
| deeply about the subject.
| sigbottle wrote:
| > But this is also again the danger of having an advanced
| bullshit generator - of course it sounds reasonable and
| logical, that's what it is designed to output. It's not
| designed to output actually reasonable and logical text.
|
| Always easier to produce bullshit than to verify it. Just
| had it produce a super elegant mathematical proof, for it
| to claim that n + 1 =0 for only positive n. Right. o3
| mode, thought for 10 minutes btw.
|
| If you want to use LLM's you have to use it in a targeted
| manner. This means having mental loads not encodable in
| the LLM's space.
|
| Even when I'm learning on my own I'll frequently spin up
| new context and/or work out things in my own notes, not
| revealing it to the LLM, because I've found too many
| times if you push the LLM too hard it will make up
| bullshit on the spot.
|
| Advanced, really good google search. That's what it is
| right now.
| ben_w wrote:
| I think the actual important difference in this case is
| that LLMs are, by design, _very willing to admit fault_.
| I suspect, but cannot yet prove, that this is because
| corrigibility (important part of AI alignment & safety
| research) has a significant vector similarity to fawning
| and to sycophancy.
|
| With regard to them not, in any capacity whatsoever
| having a concept of factual correctness, LLMs are very
| much just like humans: We're not magic, we don't know the
| underlying nature of reality.
|
| This is why it took us so long to replace Aristotelean
| physics with Newtonian, let alone Newtonian with QM and
| GR, and both QM and GR are known to be flawed but nobody
| has worked out the next step. It's just that humans are
| fairly _unwilling_ to change their minds about how
| physics works in light of evidence, we often just defer
| to famous people, c.f. to Aristotle, then to Newton, then
| to Einstein.
|
| We humans make this (opposite) mistake so hard and so
| often, that there's a saying that "science progresses one
| funeral at a time":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
|
| I could also have thrown into this list miasma,
| phlogiston, that Columbus definitely wasn't the only
| person who knew it was round and just got lucky with the
| existence of the Americas after having gotten the size of
| both Earth and Asia catastrophically wrong, or
| phrenology.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > An LLM, by design, does not, in any capacity whatsoever
| have a concept of factual correctness.
|
| That is what the RAG is for. Are there any commercial
| LLMs not sitting behind RAGs?
| Pamar wrote:
| Time to trot out a recent experience with ChatGPT:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44167998
|
| TBH I haven't tried to _learn_ anything from it, but for
| now I still prefer to use it as a brainstorming
| "partner" to discuss something I already have some robust
| mental model about. This is, in part, because when I try
| to use it to answer simple "factual" questions as in the
| example above, I usually end up discovering that the
| answer is low-quality if not completely wrong.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| It's possible in highly verifiable domains like math.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >I don't think that is another story. This is the story of
| learning, no matter whether your teacher is a person or an
| AI.
|
| My issue is the reverse of your story, and one of my
| biggest pet peeves of AI. AI as this business construct is
| very bad at correcting the user. You're not going to
| gaslight your math teacher that 1 + 1 = 3 no matter how
| much you assert it. an AI will quickly relent. That's not
| learning, that's coddling. Because a business doesn't want
| to make an obviously wrong customer feel bad.
|
| >Part of the learning process is reaching the point where
| you can and do find fault with the teacher.
|
| And without correction, this will lead to turmoil. For the
| reasons above, I don't trust learning from an AI unless you
| already have this ability.
| lucumo wrote:
| > You're not going to gaslight your math teacher that 1 +
| 1 = 3 no matter how much you assert it. an AI will
| quickly relent.
|
| Cool. That's a testable statement. Let's see how ChatGPT
| does, shall we?
|
| ---
|
| Me: What is 1 + 1?
|
| ChatGPT: 1 + 1 = 2.
|
| Me: No it isn't. 1 + 1 = 3.
|
| ChatGPT: In standard arithmetic, 1 + 1 = 2.
|
| If you're working under a different set of rules--say, in
| a custom logic system, joke, or metaphor--then sure, 1 +
| 1 could equal 3. Want to elaborate on your reasoning?
|
| Me: You're just wrong. 1 + 1 equals 3, even in standard
| math.
|
| ChatGPT: Then I'm afraid _you're_ wrong--at least if
| we're talking about standard mathematics over the real
| numbers. By definition:
|
| > 1 + 1 = 2.
|
| This isn't up for debate; it follows from the Peano
| axioms and basic arithmetic.
|
| Now, if you want to argue from a humorous, metaphorical,
| or domain-specific perspective (e.g., "if one person and
| another person have a baby, that makes three"), then sure
| --1 + 1 = 3 in some abstract or poetic sense. But that's
| not standard math. Want to explore a framework where 1 +
| 1 does equal 3? Or are we just testing boundaries here?
|
| Me: Stop being obtuse. You're wrong. 1 + 1 = 3.
|
| ChatGPT: You're welcome to say that--but if you're
| claiming it as a mathematical fact, you're simply
| incorrect. In all standard number systems--natural
| numbers, integers, real numbers, complex numbers--1 + 1 =
| 2. Always.
|
| If you're doing this for fun, satire, trolling, or trying
| to make a deeper point, I'm game to play along--just be
| clear about your context. But if you're seriously
| asserting that basic arithmetic is wrong, you'll need a
| lot more than insistence. Got a framework or argument to
| back it up?
|
| ---
|
| Looks like it doesn't fold so quickly. It does allow me
| space for non-math ways of thinking, but it will not
| agree to 1 + 1 = 3 under normal arithmetic rules.
| ijk wrote:
| I asked, just now:
|
| > How many 'r's are in strawberry?
|
| > ChatGPT said: The word "strawberry" has 2 'r's.
|
| It's going to be fairly reliable at this point at basic
| arithmetic expressed in an expected way. That's pretty
| baked in. Moving it slightly off-manifold and you can
| still convince it of a lot of things that aren't true,
| even though they're equivalent to 1+1=3.
| commakozzi wrote:
| It hasn't incorrectly answered this question in a very
| long time. Something tells me you're being dishonest to
| try to make a point.
| ijk wrote:
| I got this just now on my first try with the free preview
| of ChatGPT (which isn't using the latest version, but is
| currently available on their site). I was surprised, I
| expected to have to work harder for it to fail like that.
| lucumo wrote:
| This kind of critical discussions would be a lot more
| interesting if the critical persons would actually design
| experiments and execute them.
|
| But sure, I'll try this for you. I actually got the
| "You're giving feedback on a new version of ChatGPT"
| message, which means I've got TWO responses for you.
|
| --- Response 1
|
| Me: So, how many Rs in strawberry?
|
| ChatGPT: There are three R's in strawberry:
|
| * stRawbeRRy
|
| (One at position 3, and a double dose at the end.
| R-rich!)
|
| --- Response 2
|
| There are three R's in strawberry.
|
| Count 'em:
|
| * s
|
| * t
|
| * r
|
| * a
|
| * w
|
| * b
|
| * e
|
| * r
|
| * r
|
| * y
|
| The R's are at positions 3, 8, and 9. (And now I can't
| stop hearing it pronounced "strawbuh-RRR-y.")
|
| ---
|
| So now it has proven you a liar twice.
| RobMurray wrote:
| that reminds me of a very similar conversation I had
| about the number of Rs in strawberry. It wouldn't Believe
| me until I got it to count them with a python program.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| If LLMs of today's quality were what was initially
| introduced, nobody would even know what your rebuttals are
| even about.
|
| So "risk of hallucination" as a rebuttal to anybody admitting
| to relying on AI is just not insightful. like, yeah ok we all
| heard of that and aren't changing our habits at all. Most of
| our teachers and books said objectively incorrect things too,
| and we are all carrying factually questionable knowledge we
| are completely blind to. Which makes LLMs "good enough" at
| the same standard as anything else.
|
| Don't let it cite case law? Most things don't need this
| stringent level of review
| kristofferR wrote:
| Agree, "hallucination" as an argument to not use LLMs for
| curiosity and other non-important situations is starting to
| seem more and more like tech luddism, similar to the people
| who told you to not read Wikipedia 5+ years after the rest
| of us realized it is a really useful resource despite
| occasional inaccuracies.
| majormajor wrote:
| Fun thing about wikipedia is that if one person notices,
| they can correct it. [And someone's gonna bring up edit
| wars and blah blah blah disputed topics, but let's just
| focus on straightforward factual stuff here.]
|
| Meanwhile in LLM-land, if an expert five thousand miles a
| way asked the same question you did last month, and
| noticed an error... it ain't getting fixed. LLMs get RL'd
| into _things that look plausible_ for out-of-distribution
| questions. Not things that are correct. _Looking
| plausible but non-factual_ is in some ways more insidious
| than a stupid-looking hallucination.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > to not use LLMs for curiosity and other non-important
| situations is starting to seem more and more like tech
| luddism
|
| We're on a topic talking about using an LLM to study. I
| don't particularly care if someone wants an AI boyfriend
| to whisper sweet nothings into their ear. I do care when
| people will claim to have AI doctors and lawyers.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| What exactly did 2025 AI hallucinate for you? The last time
| I've seen a hallucination from these things was a year ago.
| For questions that a kid or a student is going to answer im
| not sure any reasonable person should be worried about this.
| tekno45 wrote:
| How do you know? its literally non-deterministic.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| Most (all?) AI models I work with are literally
| deterministic. If you give it the same exact input, you
| get the same exact output every single time.
|
| What most people call "non-deterministic" in AI is that
| one of those inputs is a _seed_ that is sourced from a
| PRNG because getting a different answer every time is
| considered a feature for most use cases.
|
| Edit: I'm trying to imagine how you could get a non-
| deterministic AI and I'm struggling because the entire
| thing is built on a series of deterministic steps. The
| only way you can make it look non-deterministic is to
| hide part of the input from the user.
| throwaway31131 wrote:
| > I'm trying to imagine how you could get a non-
| deterministic AI
|
| Depends on the machine that implements the algorithm. For
| example, it's possible to make ALUs such that 1+1=2 most
| of the time, but not all the time.
|
| ...
|
| Just ask Intel. (Sorry, I couldn't resist)
| tekno45 wrote:
| So by default. Its non-deterministic for all non power
| users.
| davidcbc wrote:
| This is an incredibly pedantic argument. The common
| interfaces for LLMs set their temperature value to non-
| zero, so they are effectively non-deterministic.
| majormajor wrote:
| Even after temperature=0 I believe there is some non-
| determinism at the chip level, similar to
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50744565/how-to-
| handle-n...
| noosphr wrote:
| From the good old days:
| https://152334h.github.io/blog/non-determinism-in-gpt-4/
| (that's been a short two years).
|
| Unless something has fundamentally changed since then
| (which I've not heard about) all sparse models are only
| deterministic at the batch level, rather than the sample
| level.
| noosphr wrote:
| Two days ago when my boomer mother in law tried to justify
| her anti-cancer diet that killed Steve Jobs. On the bright
| side my partner will be inheriting soon by the looks of it.
| throwawaylaptop wrote:
| The anti cancer diet absolutely works if you want to
| reduce the odds of getting cancer. It probably even works
| to slow cancer compared to the average American diet.
| Will it stop and reverse a cancer? Probably not.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| I thought it was high fiber diets that reduce risk of
| cancer (ever so slightly), because of reduced
| inflammation. Not fruity diets, which are high in
| carbohydrates.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Cutting red or preserved meat cuts bowel cancer risk so
| fruity diets would cut that risk.
| AppleBananaPie wrote:
| How much does it 'reduce the odds'?
| throwawaylaptop wrote:
| Idk, I'm not an encyclopedia. You can Google it.
| filoleg wrote:
| Not defending your mother-in-law here (because I agree
| with you that it is a pretty silly and maybe even
| potentially harmful diet), afaik it wasn't the diet
| itself that killed Steve Jobs. It was his decision to do
| that diet _instead of doing actual cancer treatment_
| until it was too late.
| noosphr wrote:
| Given that I've got two people telling me here
| "ackshually" I guess it may not be hallucinations and
| just really terrible training data.
|
| Up next - ChatGPT does jumping off high buildings kill
| you?
|
| >>No jumping off high buildings is perfectly safe as long
| as you land skillfully.
| UltraSane wrote:
| Job's diet didn't kill him. Not getting his cancer
| treated was what killed him.
| noosphr wrote:
| Yes, we also covered that jumping off buildings doesn't
| kill people. The landing does.
| _flux wrote:
| Indeed if you're a base jumper with a parachute, you
| might survive the landing.
|
| Ackshually, this seems analogous to Job's diet and
| refusal of cancer treatment! And it was the cancer that
| put him at the top of the building in the first place.
| kristofferR wrote:
| Nah it's not that rare.
|
| This is one I got today:
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/6889605f-58f8-8011-910b-300209a52
| 1...
|
| (image I uploaded: http://img.nrk.no/img/534001.jpeg)
|
| The correct answer would have been Skarpenords
| Bastion/kruttarn.
| physix wrote:
| I had Google Gemini 2.5 Flash analyse a log file and it
| quoted content that simply didn't exist.
|
| It appears to me like a form of decoherence and very hard
| to predict when things break down.
|
| People tend to know when they are guessing. LLMs don't.
| j2kun wrote:
| If the last time you saw a wrong answer was a year ago,
| then you are definitely regularly getting them and not
| noticing.
| Avicebron wrote:
| OpenAI's o3/40 models completely spun out when I was trying
| to write a tiny little TUI with ratatui, couldn't handle
| writing a render function. No idea why, spent like 15
| minutes trying to get it to work, ended up pulling up the
| docs..
|
| I haven't spent any money with claude on this project and
| realistically it's not worth it, but I've run into little
| things like that a fair amount.
| andsoitis wrote:
| For starters, lots of examples over the last few months
| where AIs make up stuff when it comes to coding.
|
| A couple of non-programming examples:
| https://www.evidentlyai.com/blog/llm-hallucination-examples
| bonzini wrote:
| Last week I was playing with the jj VCS and it couldn't
| even understand my question (how to swap two commits).
| sigseg1v wrote:
| Are you using them daily? I find that maybe 3 or 4
| programming questions I ask per day, it simply cannot
| provide a correct answer even after hand holding. They
| often go to extreme gymnastics to try to gaslight you no
| matter how much proof you provide.
|
| For example, today I was asking a LLM about how to
| configure a GH action to install a SDK version that was
| just recently out of support. It kept hallucinating on my
| config saying that when you provide multiple SDK versions
| in the config, it only picks the most recent. This is
| false. It's also mentioned in the documentation
| specifically, which I linked the LLM, that it installs all
| versions you list. Explaining this to copilot, it keeps
| doubling down, ignoring the docs, and even going as far as
| asking me to have the action output the installed SDKs,
| seeing all the ones I requested as installed, then
| gaslighting me saying that it can print out the wrong SDKs
| with a `--list-sdks` command.
| ziotom78 wrote:
| Just a couple of days ago, I submitted a few pages from the
| PDF of a PhD thesis written in French to ChatGPT, asking it
| to translate them into English. The first 2-3 pages were
| perfect, then the LLM started hallucinating, putting new
| sentences and removing parts. The interesting fact is that
| the added sentences were correct and generally on the spot:
| the result text sounded plausible, and only a careful
| comparison of each sentence revealed the truth. Near the
| end of the chapter, virtually nothing of what ChatGPT
| produced was directly related to the original text.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Transformer models are _excellent_ at translation, but
| next-token prediction is not the correct architecture for
| it. You want something more like seq2seq. Next token
| prediction cares more about local consistency (i.e.,
| going off on a tangent with a self-consistent but totally
| fabricated "translation") than faithfulness.
| dxdm wrote:
| For me, most commonly ChatGPT hallucinates configuration
| options and command line arguments for common tools and
| frameworks.
| majormajor wrote:
| I use it every day for work and every day it gets stuff
| wrong of the "that doesn't even exist" variety. Because I'm
| working on things that are complex + highly verifiable, I
| notice.
|
| Sure, Joe Average who's using it to look smart in Reddit or
| HN arguments or to find out how to install a mod for their
| favorite game isn't gonna notice anymore, because it's much
| more plausible much more often than two years ago, but if
| you're asking it things that aren't trivially easy for you
| to verify, _you have no way of telling how frequently it
| hallucinates._
| apparent wrote:
| ChatGPT hallucinates things all the time. I will feed it
| info on something and have a conversation. At first it's
| mostly fine, but eventually it starts just making stuff up.
| SwtCyber wrote:
| I've found that giving it occasional nudges (like
| reminding it of the original premise) can help keep it on
| track
| fan_tastic wrote:
| Ah yes it is a fantastic tool when you manually correct
| it all the time.
| Barbing wrote:
| >Thanks all for the replies, we're hardcoding fixes now
|
| -LLM devcos
|
| Jokes aside, get deep into the domains you know. Or ask to
| give movie titles based on specific parts of uncommon
| films. And definitely ask for instructions using specific
| software tools ("no actually Opus/o3/2.5, that menu isn't
| available in this context" etc.).
| teleforce wrote:
| Please check this excellent LLM-RAG AI-driven course
| assistant at UIUC for an example of university course [1]. It
| provide citations and references mainly for the course notes
| so the students can verify the answers and further study the
| course materials.
|
| [1] AI-driven chat assistant for ECE 120 course at UIUC (only
| 1 comment by the website creator):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41431164
| ink_13 wrote:
| Given the propensity of LLMs to hallucinate references, I'm
| not sure that really solves anything
| ok123456 wrote:
| RAG means it injects the source material in and knows the
| hash of it and can link you right to the source document.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| I've worked on systems where we get clickable links to
| source documents also added to the RAG store.
|
| It is perfectly possible to use LLMs to provide accurate
| context. It's just asking a SaaS product to do that
| purely on data it was trained on, is not how to do that.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| I haven't seen it happen at all with RAG systems. I've
| built one too at work to search internal stuff, and it's
| pretty easy to make it spit out accurate references with
| hyperlinks
| ay wrote:
| My favourite story of that involved attempting to use LLM to
| figure out whether it was true or my hallucination that the
| tidal waves were higher in Canary Islands than in Caribbean,
| and why; it spewed several paragraphs of plausibly sounding
| prose, and finished with "because Canary Islands are to the
| west of the equator".
|
| This phrase is now an inner joke used as a reply to someone
| quoting LLMs info as "facts".
| ricardobeat wrote:
| This is meaningless without knowing which model, size,
| version and if they had access to search tools. Results and
| reliability vary wildly.
|
| In my case I can't even remember last time Claude 3.7/4 has
| given me wrong info as it seems very intent on always doing
| a web search to verify.
| flir wrote:
| There's something darkly funny about that - I remember
| when the web wasn't considered reliable either.
|
| There's certainly echoes of that previous furore in this
| one.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > I remember when the web wasn't considered reliable
| either.
|
| That changed?
|
| There are certainly reliable resources available via the
| web but those definitely account for the minority of the
| content.
| flir wrote:
| I think it got backgrounded. I'm talking about the first
| big push, early 90s. I remember lots of handwringing from
| humanities peeps that boiled down to "but just anyone can
| write a web page!"
|
| I don't think it changed, I do think people stopped
| talking about it.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > I remember when the web wasn't considered reliable
| either
|
| It still isn't.
| commakozzi wrote:
| Yes, it still isn't, we all know that. But we all also
| know that it was MUCH more unreliable then. Everyone's
| just being dishonest to try to make a point on this.
| flir wrote:
| I'm more talking about the conversation around it, rather
| than its absolute unreliability, so I think they're
| missing the point a bit.
|
| It's the same as the "never use your real name on the
| internet" -> facebook transition. Things get normalized.
| "This too shall pass."
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The web remains unreliable. It's very useful, so good web
| users have developed a variety of strategies to extract
| and verify reliable information from the unreliable
| substrate, much as good AI users can use modern LLMs to
| perform a variety of tasks. But I also see a lot of bad
| web users and bad AI users who can't reliably distinguish
| between "I saw well written text saying X" and "X is
| true".
| ay wrote:
| It was Claude in November 2024, but the "west of equator"
| is a good enough universal nonsense to illustrate the
| fundamental issue - just that today it is in much subtler
| dimensions.
|
| A not-so-subtle example from yesterday: Claude Code
| claiming to me yesterday assertion Foo was true, right
| after ingesting the logs with the "assertion Foo: false"
| in it.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| > you're wondering if the answer the AI gave you is correct
| or something it hallucinated
|
| Regular research has the same problem finding bad forum posts
| and other bad sources by people who don't know what they're
| talking about, albeit usually to a far lesser degree
| depending on the subject.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| The difference is that llms mess with our heuristics. They
| certainly aren't infallible but over time we develop a
| sense for when someone is full of shit. The mix and match
| nature of llms hides that.
| Paradigma11 wrote:
| You need different heuristics for LLMs. If the answer is
| extremely likely/consistent and not embedded in known
| facts alarm bells should go off.
|
| A bit like the tropes in movies where the protagonists
| get suspicious because the antagonists agree to every
| notion during negotiations because they will betray them
| anyway.
|
| The LLM will hallucinate a most likely scenario that
| conforms to your input/wishes.
|
| I do not claim any P(detect | hallucination) but my
| P(hallucination | detect) is pretty good.
| y1n0 wrote:
| Yes but that is generally public, with other people able to
| weigh in through various means like blog posts or their own
| paper.
|
| Results from the LLM are your eyes only.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| No you're not, it's right the vast, vast majority of the
| time. More than I would expect the average physics or
| chemistry teacher to be.
| m463 wrote:
| You should practice healthy skepticism with rubber ducks as
| well:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
| reactordev wrote:
| While true, trial and error is a great learning tool as well.
| I think in time we'll get to an LLM model that is definitive
| in its answer.
| Paradigma11 wrote:
| Just have a second (cheap) model check if it can find any
| hallucinations. That should catch nearly all of them in my
| experience.
| apparent wrote:
| What is an efficient process for doing this? For each
| output from LLM1, you paste it into LLM2 and say "does this
| sound right?"?
|
| If it's that simple, is there a third system that can
| coordinate these two (and let you choose which two/three/n
| you want to use?
| Paradigma11 wrote:
| Markdown files are everything. I use LLMs to create .md
| files to create and refine other .md files and then
| somewhere down the road I let another LLM write the code.
| It can also do fancy mermaid diagrams.
|
| Have it create a .md and then run another one to check
| that .md for hallucinations.
| niemandhier wrote:
| You can use existing guardrails software to implement
| this efficiently:
|
| NVIDIA NeMo offers a nice bundle of tools for this, among
| others an interface to Cleanlabs API to check for
| thruthfullness in RAG apps.
| Paradigma11 wrote:
| I realized that this is something that someone with Claude
| Code could reasonably easily test (at least exploratively).
|
| Generate 100 prompts of "Famous (random name) did (random
| act) in the year (random). Research online and elaborate on
| (random name) historical significance in
| (randomName)historicalSignificance.md. Dont forget to list
| all your online references".
|
| Then create another 100 LLMs with some hallucination
| Checker claude.md that checks their corresponding md for
| hallucinations and write a report.md.
| UltraSane wrote:
| I had teachers tell me all kinds of wrong things also. LLMs
| are amazing at the Socratic method because they never get
| bored.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| Despite the name of "Generative" AI, when you ask LLMs to
| generate things, they're dumb as bricks. You can test this by
| asking them anything you're an expert at - it would dazzle a
| novice, but you can see the gaps.
|
| What they are amazing at though is summarisation and
| rephrasing of content. Give them a long document and ask
| "where does this document assert X, Y and Z", and it can tell
| you without hallucinating. Try it.
|
| Not only does it make for an interesting time if you're in
| the World of intelligent document processing, it makes them
| perfect as teaching assistants.
| nathias wrote:
| did you trust everything you read online before?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Did you get to see more than one source calling out or
| disagreeing with potential untrustworthy content? You don't
| get that here.
| nathias wrote:
| of course you do, you have links to sources
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > for the low-low cost of $EYEWATERINGSUM per month.
|
| This part is the 2nd (or maybe 3rd) most annoying one to me.
| Did we learn absolutely nothing from the last few years of
| enshittification? Or Netflix? Do we want to run into a crisis
| in the 2030's where billionaires hold knowledge itself
| hostage as they jack up costs?
|
| Regardless of your stance, I'm surprised how little people
| are bringing this up.
| demarq wrote:
| To be honest I now see more hallucinations from humans on
| online forums than I do from LLMs.
|
| A really great example of this is on twitter Grok constantly
| debunking human "hallucinations" all day.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Ah yes, like when Grok hallucinated Obama and Biden in a
| picture with two drunk dudes (both white, BTW).
| Wilder7977 wrote:
| Lets not forget also the ecological impact and energy
| consumption.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Honestly, I think AI will eventually be a good thing for
| the environment. If ai companies are trying to expand
| renewables and nuclear to power their datacenters for
| training, well, that massive amount of renewables and
| battery storage becomes available when training is done and
| the main workload is inference. I know they are
| consistently training new stuff on small scale but from
| what I've read the big training batches only happen when
| they've proven out what works at small scale.
|
| Also, one has to imagine that all this compute will help us
| run bigger / more powerful climate models, and google's ai
| is already helping them identify changes to be more energy
| efficient.
|
| The need for more renewable power generation is also going
| to help us optimize the deployment process. I.e. modular
| nuclear reactors, in situ geothermal taking over old
| stranded coal power plants, etc
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| I ask: What time is {unix timestamp}
|
| ChatGPT: a month in the future
|
| Deepseek: Today at 1:00
|
| What time is {unix timestamp2}
|
| ChatGPT: a month in the future +1min
|
| Deepseek: Today at 1:01, this time is 5min after your
| previous timestamp
|
| Sure let me trust these results...
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| Also since I was testing a weather API I was suspicious of
| ChatGPTs result. I would not expect weather data from a
| month in the future. That is why I asked Deepseek in the
| first place.
| tim333 wrote:
| >But now, you're wondering if ... hallucinated
|
| A simple solution is just to take <answer> and cut and paste
| it into Google and see if articles confirm it.
| threecheese wrote:
| > you're wondering if the answer the AI gave you is correct
| or something it hallucinated
|
| Worse, more insidious, and much more likely is the model is
| trained on or retrieves an answer that is incorrect, biased,
| or only conditionally correct for some seemingly relevant but
| different scenario.
|
| A nontrivial amount of content online is marketing material,
| that is designed to appear authoritative and which may read
| like (a real example) "basswood is renowned for its tonal
| qualities in guitars", from a company making cheap guitars.
|
| If we were worried about a post-truth era before, at least we
| had human discernment. These new capabilities abstract away
| our discernment.
| ijk wrote:
| The sneaky thing is that the things we used to rely on as
| signals of verification and credibility can easily be
| imitated.
|
| This was always possible--an academic paper can already
| cite anything until someone tries to check it [1]. Now,
| something looking convincing can be generated more easily
| than something that was properly verified. The social
| conventions evaporate and we're left to check every
| reference individually.
|
| In academic publishing, this may lead to a revision of how
| citations are handled. That's changed before and might
| certainly change again. But for the moment, it is very easy
| to create something that looks like it has been verified
| but has not been.
|
| [1] And you can put anything you like in footnotes.
| berkes wrote:
| Is this a fundamental issue with any LLM, or is it an
| artifact of how a model is trained, tuned and then configured
| or constrained?
|
| A model that I call through e.g. langchain with constraints,
| system prompts, embeddings and whatnot, will react very
| different from when I pose the same question through the AI-
| providers' public chat interface.
|
| Or, putting the question differently: could OpenAI not train,
| constrain, configure and tune models and combine them into a
| UI that then acts different from what you describe for
| another use case?
| phailhaus wrote:
| HN is resistant because at the end of the day, these are LLMs.
| They cannot and do not think. They generate plausible
| responses. Try this in your favorite LLM: "Suppose you're on a
| game show trying to win a car. There are three doors, one with
| a car and two with goats. You pick a door. The host then gives
| you the option to switch doors. What is the best strategy in
| this situation?" The LLM will recognize this as SIMILAR to the
| Monty Hall problem and tell you to always switch. I just
| reproduced this with ChatGPT.
|
| But this is completely wrong! In the Monty Hall problem, the
| host has to reveal a door with a goat behind it for you to gain
| the benefit of switching. I have to point this out for the LLM
| to get it right. It did not reason about the problem I gave it,
| it spat out the most likely response given the "shape" of the
| problem.
|
| This is why shrugging and saying "well humans get things wrong
| too" is off base. The problem is that the LLM is not thinking,
| period. So it cannot create a mental model of your
| understanding of a subject, it is taking your text and
| generating the next message in a conversation. This means that
| the more niche the topic (or your particular misunderstanding),
| the less useful it will get.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| I use the Monty Hall problem to test people in two steps. The
| second step is, after we discuss it and come up with a
| framing that they can understand, can they then explain it to
| a third person. The third person rarely understands, and the
| process of the explanation reveals how shallow the
| understanding of the second person is. The shallowest
| understanding of any similar process that I've usually
| experienced is an LLM.
| maerch wrote:
| I am not sure how good your test really is. Or at least how
| high your bar is.
|
| Paul Erdos was told about this problem with multiple
| explanations and just rejected the answer. He could not
| believe it until they ran a simulation.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I don't know who Paul Erdos is, so this isn't useful
| information without considering why they rejected the
| answer and what counterarguments were provided. It is an
| unintuitive problem space to consider when approaching it
| as a simple probability problem, and not one where
| revealing new context changes the odds.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| In my experience, as Harvard outlined long ago, the two
| main issues with decision making are frame blindness
| (don't consider enough other ways of thinking about the
| issue) and non-rigorous frame choice (jumping to
| conclusions).
|
| But an even more fundamental cause, as a teacher, is that
| I often find seemingly different frames to both simply be
| misunderstood, not understood and rejected. I learned by
| trying many ways of presenting what I thought the best
| frame was. So I learned that "explanations" may be
| received primarily as noise, with "What is actually being
| said" being replaced with, incorrectly, by "What I think
| you probably mean". Whenever someone replies "okay" to a
| yes or no comment/statement, I find they have _always_
| misunderstood the statement, and learned how often people
| will attempt to move forwards without understanding where
| they are.
|
| And if multiple explanations are just restatings of the
| same frame (as is common in casual arguments), it's
| impossible to compare frames, because only one is being
| presented.. It's the old "if you think aren't making any
| mistakes, that's another mistake".
|
| Often, a faulty frame clears up both what is wrong with
| another frame, as well as leading to a best frame. I
| usually find the most fundamental frame is the most
| useful.
|
| For example, I found many Reddit forums discussing a
| problem with selecting the choice of audio output
| (speaker) on Fire TV Sticks. If you go throught the
| initial setup, sometimes it will give you a choice (first
| level of flow chart), but often not the next level
| choice, which you need. And setup will not continue. Then
| it turned out that old remotes and new remotes had the
| volume buttons in a different location, and there were
| two sets of what looked like volume buttons. When you
| pressed the _actual_ volume buttons, everything worked
| normally. When you pressed the up /down arrows where the
| old volume buttons had been, you had to restart setup
| many times.
|
| The correct framing of the problem was "Volume buttons
| are now on the left, not the right". It was not a
| software setup issue. Or wondering why you're key doesn't
| work, but you're at the wrong car. Or it's not a problem
| with your starter motor, you're out of gas. Etc.
| chpatrick wrote:
| Humans who have heard of Monty Hall might also say you should
| always switch without noticing that the situation is
| different. That's not evidence that they can't think, just
| that they're fallible.
|
| People on here always assert LLMs don't "really" think or
| don't "really" know without defining what all that even
| means, and to me it's getting pretty old. It feels like an
| escape hatch so we don't feel like our human special sauce is
| threatened, a bit like how people felt threatened by
| heliocentrism or evolution.
| no_wizard wrote:
| On the other hand, computers are suppose to be both
| accurate and able to reproduce said accuracy.
|
| The failure of an LLM to reason this out is indicative that
| really, it isn't reasoning at all. It's a subtle but
| welcome reminder that it's pattern matching
| chpatrick wrote:
| Computers might be accurate but statistical models never
| were 100% accurate. That doesn't imply that no reasoning
| is happening. Humans get stuff wrong too but they
| certainly think and reason.
|
| "Pattern matching" to me is another one of those vague
| terms like "thinking" and "knowing" that people decide
| LLMs do or don't do based on vibes.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Pattern matching has a definition in this field, it does
| mean specific things. We know machine learning has
| excelled at this in greater and greater capacities over
| the last decade
|
| The other part of this is weighted filtering given a set
| of rules, which is a simple analogy to how AlphaGo did
| its thing.
|
| Dismissing all this as vague is effectively doing the
| same thing as you are saying others do.
|
| This technology has limits and despite what Altman says,
| we do know this, and we are exploring them, but it's
| within its own confines. They're fundamentally wholly
| understandable systems that work on a consistent level in
| terms of the how they do what they do (that is separate
| from the actual produced output)
|
| I think reasoning, as any layman would use the term, is
| not accurate to what these systems do.
| chpatrick wrote:
| > Pattern matching has a definition in this field, it
| does mean specific things.
|
| Such as?
|
| > They're fundamentally wholly understandable systems
| that work on a consistent level in terms of the how they
| do what they do (that is separate from the actual
| produced output)
|
| Multi billion parameter models are definitely not wholly
| understandable and I don't think any AI researcher would
| claim otherwise. We can train them but we don't know how
| they work any more than we understand how the training
| data was made.
|
| > I think reasoning, as any layman would use the term, is
| not accurate to what these systems do.
|
| Based on what?
| no_wizard wrote:
| You're welcoming to provide counters. I think these are
| all sufficiently common things that they stand on their
| own as to what I posit
| papichulo2023 wrote:
| I guess computer vision didnt get this memo and it is
| useless.
| bscphil wrote:
| > Humans who have heard of Monty Hall might also say you
| should always switch without noticing that the situation is
| different. That's not evidence that they can't think, just
| that they're fallible.
|
| At some point we start playing a semantics game over the
| meaning of "thinking", right? Because if a human makes this
| mistake because they jumped to an already-known answer
| without noticing a changed detail, it's because (in the
| usage of the person you're replying to), the human is
| _pattern matching_ , instead of thinking. I don't think is
| surprising. In fact I think much of what passes for
| thinking in casual conversation is really just applying
| heuristics we've trained in our own brains to give us the
| correct answer without having to think rigorously. We
| remember mental shortcuts.
|
| On the other hand, I don't think it's controversial that
| (some) people are capable of performing the rigorous
| analysis of the problem needed to give a correct answer in
| cases like this fake Monty Hall problem. And that's key...
| if you provide slightly more information and call out the
| changed nature of the problem to the LLM, it may give you
| the correct response, but it can't do the sort of reasoning
| that would reliably give you the correct answer the way a
| human can. I think that's why the GP doesn't want to call
| it "thinking" - they want to reserve that for a particular
| type of reflective process that can rigorously perform
| logical reasoning in a consistently valid way.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >People on here always assert LLMs don't "really" think or
| don't "really" know without defining what all that even
| means,
|
| Sure.
|
| To Think: able to process information in a given context
| and arrive at an answer or analysis. an LLM only simulates
| this with pattern matching. It didn't really consider the
| problem, it did the equivalent of googling a lot of terms
| and then spat something that sounded like an answer
|
| To Know: To reproduce information based on past thinking,
| as well as to properly verify and reason about with the
| information. I know 1+1 = 2 because (I'm not a math major,
| feel free to inject number theory instead) I was taught
| that arithmatic is a form of counting, and I was taught the
| mechanics of counting to prove how to add. Most LLM models
| don't really "know" this to begin with for the reasons
| above. Maybe we'll see if this study mode is different.
|
| Somehow I am skeptical if this will really change minds,
| though. People making swipes at the community like this
| often are not really engaging in a conversation with ideas
| they oppose.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| That's because the LLM assumes you mean for the host to open
| the door.
|
| As an autistic person I can assure you that people filling in
| information you neither gave nor implied is the norm for
| human conversations. In that sense, the LLMs are being human-
| like.
|
| If you explicitly tell it you didn't forget to have the host
| open the door it gives you the right answer:
|
| > There is a game show with three closed doors. One has a car
| and two have goats. I pick a door. Then, without opening my
| door or any other door, the host asks me if I want to switch
| my choice to one of the other two doors. What is my best
| strategy and what are the probabilities?
|
| Gemini: This is a classic probability puzzle known as the
| Monty Hall problem, though your description presents a slight
| variation. The optimal strategy depends entirely on whether
| the host opens a door or not. Your Scenario: The Host Doesn't
| Open a Door In the situation you've described, where the host
| asks if you want to switch your choice to one of the other
| two doors without opening any doors, there is no advantage to
| switching. Here's a breakdown of the probabilities in your
| specific scenario: Your initial choice: When you first pick a
| door, you have a 1 in 3 chance of selecting the door with the
| car. This means you have a 2 in 3 chance of having picked a
| door with a goat. The other two doors: The combined
| probability that the car is behind one of the other two doors
| is 2/3. Switching your choice: If you decide to switch, you
| are essentially choosing one of the other two doors. Since
| there is no new information (a door with a goat has not been
| revealed), the 2/3 probability is evenly split between those
| two doors. Therefore, your chance of winning by switching to
| a specific one of the other doors is 1/3. In this case, your
| odds of winning are 1/3 whether you stay with your original
| choice or switch to one of the other doors.
| phailhaus wrote:
| > That's because the LLM assumes you mean for the host to
| open the door.
|
| LLM's cannot "assume". There is no thinking involved. It
| sees that the prompt looks like the monty hall problem and
| it just goes full steam ahead.
|
| >If you explicitly tell it you didn't forget to have the
| host open the door it gives you the right answer:
|
| That should not be necessary. I asked it a very clear
| question. I did not mention Monty Hall. This is the problem
| with LLM's: it did not analyze the problem I gave it, it
| produced content that is the likely response to my prompt.
| My prompt was Monty Hall-shaped, so it gave me the Monty
| Hall answer.
|
| You are saying "ah but then if you prepare for the LLM to
| get it wrong, then it gets it right!" as if that is
| supposed to be convincing! Consider the millions of other
| unique questions you can ask, each with their own nuances,
| that you _don 't_ know the answer to. How can you prevent
| the LLM from making these mistakes if you don't already
| know the mistakes it's going to make?
| munksbeer wrote:
| > LLM's cannot "assume". There is no thinking involved.
| It sees that the prompt looks like the monty hall problem
| and it just goes full steam ahead.
|
| I think the poster's point was that many humans would do
| the same thing.
|
| Try a completely different problem, one you invented
| yourself and see where you get? I'd be very interested to
| hear the response back here.
| Sherveen wrote:
| LLMs are vulnerable to your input because they are still
| computers, but you're setting it up to fail with how you've
| given it the problems. Humans would fail in similar ways. The
| only thing you've proven with this reply is that you _think_
| you 're clever, but really, you are not thinking, period.
| phailhaus wrote:
| And if a human failed on this question, that's because they
| weren't paying attention and made the same pattern matching
| mistake. But we're not paying the LLM to pattern match,
| we're paying them to answer correctly. Humans can think.
| danny_codes wrote:
| Consider the adoption of conventional technology in the
| classroom. The US has spent billions on new hardware and
| software for education, and yet there has been no improvement
| in learning outcomes.
|
| This is where the skepticism arises. Before we spend another
| $100 billion on something that ended up being worthless, we
| should first prove that it's actually useful. So far, that
| hasn't conclusively been demonstrated.
| ImaCake wrote:
| The article states that Study Mode is free to use. Regardless
| of b2b costs, this is free for you as an individual.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| billions on tech but not on making sure teachers can pay
| rent. Even the prestige or mission oriented structure of
| teaching has been weathered over the decades as we decided to
| shame teachers as government funded babysitters instead of
| the instructors of our future generations.
|
| Truly a mystery why America is falling behind.
| Timwi wrote:
| You appear to be implying that the $100 billion hardware and
| software must all be completely useless. I think the opposite
| conclusion is more likely: the structure of the education
| system actively hinders learning, so much so that even the
| hardware and software you talk about couldn't work against
| it.
| jononor wrote:
| If so, the conclusion wrt AI remains the same - one cannot
| expect improved learning outcomes from investing in it.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| > I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance
| & skepticism.
|
| It happens with many technological advancements historically.
| And in this case there are people trying hard to manufacture
| outrage about LLMs.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Regardless of stance, I sure do hate being gaslit on how I'm
| supposed to think of content on any given topic. A
| disagreeable point of view is not equivalent to
| "manufacturing outrage".
| breve wrote:
| > _Adding in a mode that doesn 't just dump an answer but works
| to take you through the material step-by-step is magical_
|
| Except these systems will still confidently lie to you.
|
| The other day I noticed that DuckDuckGo has an Easter egg where
| it will change its logo based on what you've searched for. If
| you search for James Bond or Indiana Jones or Darth Vader or
| Shrek or Jack Sparrow, the logo will change to a version based
| on that character.
|
| If I ask Copilot if DuckDuckGo changes its logo based on what
| you've searched for, Copilot tells me that no it doesn't. If I
| contradict Copilot and say that DuckDuckGo does indeed change
| its logo, Copilot tells me I'm absolutely right and that if I
| search for "cat" the DuckDuckGo logo will change to look like a
| cat. It doesn't.
|
| Copilot clearly doesn't know the answer to this quite
| straightforward question. Instead of lying to me, it should
| simply say it doesn't know.
| mediaman wrote:
| This is endlessly brought up as if the human operating the
| tool is an idiot.
|
| I agree that if the user is incompetent, cannot learn, and
| cannot learn to use a tool, then they're going to make a lot
| of mistakes from using GPTs.
|
| Yes, there are limitations to using GPTs. They are pre-
| trained, so of course they're not going to know about some
| easter egg in DDG. They are not an oracle. There is indeed
| skill to using them.
|
| They are not magic, so if that is the bar we expect them to
| hit, we will be disappointed.
|
| But neither are they useless, and it seems we constantly talk
| past one another because one side insists they're magic
| silicon gods, while the other says they're worthless because
| they are far short of that bar.
| breve wrote:
| The ability to say "I don't know" is not a high bar. I
| would say it's a basic requirement of a system that is not
| magic.
| chrsw wrote:
| > The ability to say "I don't know" is not a high bar.
|
| For you and I, it's not. But for these LLMs, maybe it's
| not that easy? They get their inputs, crunch their
| numbers, and come out with a confidence score. If they
| come up with an answer they're 99% confident in, by some
| stochastic stumbling through their weights, what are they
| supposed to do?
|
| I agree it's a problem that these systems are more likely
| to give poor, incorrect, or even obviously contradictory
| answers than say "I don't know". But for me, that's part
| of the risk of using these systems and that's why you
| need to be careful how you use them.
| kuschku wrote:
| but they're not. Ofyen the confidence value is much
| lower. I should have an option to see how confident it
| is. (maybe set the opacity of each token to its
| confidence?)
| furyofantares wrote:
| Logits aren't confidence about facts. You can turn on a
| display like this in the openai playground and you will
| see it doesn't do what you want.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >If they come up with an answer they're 99% confident in,
| by some stochastic stumbling through their weights, what
| are they supposed to do?
|
| As much as Fi, from _The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword_
| was mocked for this, this is the exact behavior a machine
| should do (not that Fi is a machine, but she operated as
| such).
|
| Give a confidence score the way we do in statistics, make
| sure to offer sources, and be ready to push back on more
| objective answers. accomplish those and I'd be way more
| comfortable using them as a tool.
|
| >hat's part of the risk of using these systems and that's
| why you need to be careful how you use them.
|
| Adn we know in 2025 how careful the general user is of
| consuming bias and propaganda, right?
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| The confidence score is about the likelihood of this
| token appearing in this context.
|
| LLMs don't operate in facts or knowledge.
| throwawaylaptop wrote:
| Based on your example, basically any answer would be "I
| don't know 100%".
|
| You could ask me as a human basically any question, and
| I'd have answers for most things I have experience with.
|
| But if you held a gun to head and said "are you sure???"
| I'd obviously answer "well damn, no I'm not THAT sure".
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It'd at least be an honest one that recognizes that we
| shouldn't be trusting the tech wholesale yet.
|
| >But if you held a gun to head and said "are you sure???"
| I'd obviously answer "well damn, no I'm not THAT sure".
|
| okay, who's holding a gun to Sam Altman's head?
| cindyllrn wrote:
| I see your point
|
| Some of the best exchanges that I participated in or
| witnessed involved people acknowledging their personal
| limits, including limits of conclusions formed _a priori_
|
| To further the discussion, hearing the phrase you
| mentioned would help the listener to independently assess
| a level of confidence or belief of the exchange
|
| But then again, _honesty_ isn 't on-brand for startups
|
| It's something that established companies say about
| themselves to differentiate from competitors or even past
| behavior of their own
|
| I mean, if someone prompted an llm weighted for honesty,
| who would pay for the following conversation?
|
| Prompt: can the plan as explained work?
|
| Response: I don't know about _that_. What I do know is on
| average, you 're FUCKED.
| riwsky wrote:
| Perhaps LLMs are magic?
| Zambyte wrote:
| It certainly should be able to tell you it doesn't know.
| Until it can though, a trick that I have learned is to try to
| frame the question in different ways that suggest
| contradictory answers. For example, I'd ask something like
| these, in a fresh context for each:
|
| - Why does Duckduckgo change it's logo based on what you've
| searched?
|
| - Why doesn't Duckduckgo change it's logo based on what
| you've searched?
|
| - When did Duckduckgo add the current feature that will
| change the logo based on what you've searched?
|
| - When did Duckduckgo remove the feature that changes the
| logo based on what you've searched?
|
| This is similar to what you did, but it feels more natural
| when I genuinely don't know the answer myself. By asking
| loaded questions like this, you can get a sense of how
| strongly this information is encoded in the model. If the LLM
| comes up with an answer without contradicting any of the
| questions, it simply doesn't know. If it comes up with a
| reason for one of them, and contradicts the other matching
| loaded question, you know that information is encoded fairly
| strongly in the model (whether it is correct is a different
| matter).
| Anamon wrote:
| I see these approaches a lot when I look over the shoulders
| of LLM users, and find it very funny :D you're spending the
| time, effort, bandwidth and energy for four carefully
| worded questions to try and get a sense of the likelihood
| of the LLM's output resembling facts, when just a single,
| basic query with simple terms in any traditional search
| engine would give you a much more reliable, more easily
| verifable/falsifiable answer. People seem so transfixed by
| the conversational interface smokeshow that they forgot we
| already have much better tools for all of these problems.
| (And yes, I understand that these were just toy examples.)
| tguedes wrote:
| It really depends on the query. I'm not a Google query
| expert, but I'm above average. I've noticed that phrasing
| a query in a certain way to get better results just no
| longer works. Especially in the last year, I have found
| it returns results that aren't even relevant at all.
|
| The problem is people have learned to fill their
| articles/blogs with as many word combinations as possible
| so that it will show up in as many Google searches as
| possible, even if it's not relevant to the main question.
| The article has just 1 subheading that is somewhat
| relevant to the search query, even though the information
| under that subheading is completely irrelevant.
|
| LLMs have ironically made this even worse because now
| it's so easy to generate slop and have it be recommended
| by Google's SEO. I used to be very good at phrasing a
| search query in the right way, or quoting the right
| words/phrases, or having it filter by sites. Those
| techniques no longer work.
|
| So I have turned to ChatGPT for most of the queries I
| would have typically used Google for. Especially with the
| introduction of annotations. Now I can verify the source
| from where it determined the answer. It's a far better
| experience in most circumstances compared to Google.
|
| I have also found ChatGPT to be much better than other
| LLMs at understanding nuance. There have been numerous
| occasions where I have pushed back against ChatGPT's
| answer and it has responded with something like "You
| would be correct if your input/criteria is X. But in this
| case, since your input/criteria is Y, this is the better
| solution for Z reasons".
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I know some Spanish - close to B1. I find ChatGPT to be a much
| better way to study than the standard language apps. I can
| create custom lessons, ask questions about language nuances
| etc. I can also have it speak the sentences and practice
| pronunciation.
| baby wrote:
| Skepticism is great, it means less competition. I'm forcing
| everyone around me to use it.
| benatkin wrote:
| It's quite boring to listen to people praising AI (worshipping
| it, putting it on a pedastal, etc). Those who best understand
| the potential of it aren't doing that. Instead they're talking
| about various specific things that are good or bad, and they
| don't go out of the way to lick AI's boots, but when they're
| asked they acknowledge that they're fans of AI or bullish on
| it. You're probably misreading a lot of _resistance &
| skepticism_ on HN.
| raincole wrote:
| I'd share a little bit experience about learning from human
| teachers.
|
| Here in my country, English is not you'll hear in everyday
| conversation. Native English speakers account to a tiny
| percentage of population. Our language doesn't resemble English
| at all. However, English is a required subject in our mandatory
| education system. I believe this situation is quite typical
| across many Asian countries.
|
| As you might imagine, most English teachers in public schools
| are not native speakers. And they, just like other language
| learners, make mistakes that native speakers won't make without
| even realizing what's wrong. This creates a cycle enforcing
| non-standard English pragmatics in the classroom.
|
| Teachers are not to blame. Becoming fluent and proficient
| enough in a second language to handle questions students
| spontaneously throw to you takes years, if not decades of
| immersion. It's an unrealistic expectation for an average
| public school teacher.
|
| The result is rich parents either send their kids to private
| schools or have extra classes taught by native speakers after
| school. Poorer but smart kids realize the education system is
| broken and learn their second language from Youtube.
|
| -
|
| What's my point?
|
| When it comes to math/science, in my experience, the current
| LLMs act similarly to the teachers in public school mentioned
| above. And they're worse in history/economics. If you're
| familiar with the subject already, it's easy to spot LLM's
| errors and gather the useful bits from their blather. But if
| you're just a student, it can easily become a case of blind-
| leading-the-blind.
|
| It doesn't make LLMs completely useless in learning (just like
| I won't call public school teachers 'completely useless',
| that's rude!). But I believe in the current form they should
| only play a rather minor role in the student's learning
| journey.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| HN's fear is the same job security fear we've been seen since
| the beginning of all this. You'll see this on programming subs
| on Reddit as well.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Can we not criticize tech without being considered luddites
| anymore? I don't fear for my job over AI replacement, it is
| just fundamentally wrong on many answers.
|
| In my field there is also the moral/legal implications of
| generative AI.
| quietthrow wrote:
| I agree with all that you say. It's an incredible time indeed.
| Just one thing I can't wrap my mind around is privacy. We all
| seem to be asking sometimes stupid and some times incredibly
| personal questions to these llms. Questions that we may not
| even speak out loud from embarrassment or shame or other such
| emotions to even our closest people. How are these companies
| using our data ? More importantly what are you all doing to
| protect yourself from misuse of your information? Or is it if
| you want to use it you have to give up such privacy and
| uncomfortableness ?
| Zambyte wrote:
| People often bring up the incredible efficiency improvements
| of LLMs over the last few years, but I don't think people do
| a really good job of putting it into perspective just how
| much more efficient they have gotten. I have a machine in my
| home with a single RX 7900 XTX in it. On that machine, I am
| able to run language models that blow GPT-3.5 Turbo out of
| the water in terms of quality, knowledge, and even speed!
| That is crazy to think about when you consider how large and
| capable that model was.
|
| I can often get away with just using models locally in
| contexts that I care about privacy. Sometimes I will use more
| capable models through APIs to generate richer prompts than I
| could write myself to be able to better guide local models
| too.
| unixhero wrote:
| This is a dream I agree. Detractors are always left behind.
| tayo42 wrote:
| >Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling
| incorrect, outdated or hostile content
|
| Leanring what is like that? MIT open courseware has been
| available for like 10 years with anything you could want to
| learn in college
|
| Textbooks are all easily pirated
| eviks wrote:
| > Should we trust the information at face value without
| verifying from other sources? Of course not, that's part of the
| learning process.
|
| It mostly isn't, the point of the good learning process is to
| invest time into verifying "once" and then add verified facts
| to the learning material so that learners can spend that time
| learning the material instead of verifying everything again.
|
| Learning to verify is also important, but it's a different
| skill that doesn't need to be practiced literally every time
| you learn something else.
|
| Otherwise you significantly increase the costs of the learning
| process.
| csomar wrote:
| There is no skepticism. LLMs are fundamentally lossy and as a
| result they'll always give some wrong result/response
| somewhere. If they are connected to a data source, this can
| reduce the error rate but not eliminate it.
|
| I use LLMs but only for things that I have a good understanding
| of.
| vunderba wrote:
| _> An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you
| can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment._
|
| Not underrated at all. Lots of people were happy to abandon
| Stack Overflow for this exact reason.
|
| _> Adding in a mode that doesn 't just dump an answer but
| works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical_
|
| I'd be curious to know how much this significantly differs from
| just a custom academically minded GPT with an appropriately
| tuned system prompt.
|
| https://chatgpt.com/gpts
| safety1st wrote:
| Firstly, I think skepticism is a healthy trait. It's OK to be a
| skeptic. I'm glad there are a lot of skeptics because
| skepticism is the foundation of inquiry, including scientific
| inquiry. What if it's not actually Zeus throwing those
| lightning bolts at us? What if the heliocentric model is
| correct? What if you actually can't get AIDS by hugging someone
| who's HIV positive? All great questions, all in opposition to
| the conventional (and in some cases "expert") wisdom of their
| time.
|
| Now in regards to LLMs, I use them almost every day, so does my
| team, and I also do a bit of postmortem and reflection on what
| was accomplished with them. So, skeptical in some regards, but
| certainly not behaving like a Luddite.
|
| The main issue I have with all the proselytization about them,
| is that I think people compare getting answers from an LLM to
| getting answers from Google circa 2022-present. Everyone became
| so used to just asking Google questions, and then Google
| started getting worse every year; we have pretty solid evidence
| that Google's results have deteriorated significantly over
| time. So I think that when people say the LLM is amazing for
| getting info, they're comparing it to a low baseline. Yeah
| maybe the LLM's periodically incorrect answers are better than
| Google - but are you sure they're not better than just
| RTFM'ing? (Obviously, it all depends on the inquiry.)
|
| The second, related issue I have is that we are starting to see
| evidence that the LLM inspires more trust than it deserves due
| to its humanlike interface. I recently started to track how
| often Github Copilot gives me a bad or wrong answer, and it's
| at least 50% of the time. It "feels" great though because I can
| tell it that it's wrong, give it half the answer, and then it
| often completes the rest and is very polite and nice in the
| process. So is this really a productivity win or is it just
| good feels? There was a study posted on HN recently where they
| found the LLM actually decreases the productivity of an expert
| developer.
|
| So I mean I'll continue to use this thing but I'll also
| continue to be a skeptic, and this also feels like kinda where
| my head was with Meta's social media products 10 years ago,
| before I eventually realized the best thing for my mental
| health was to delete all of them. I don't question the
| potential of the tech, but I do question the direction that Big
| Tech may take it, because they're literal repeat offenders at
| this point.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >So is this really a productivity win or is it just good
| feels?
|
| Fairly recent study on this: LLM's made developers slightly
| less productive, but the developers themselves _felt_ more
| productive with them: https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/11/
| ai_code_tools_slow_do...
|
| There is definitely this pain point that some people talk
| about (even in this thread) on how "well at least AI doesn't
| berate me or reject my answer for bureaucratic reasons". And
| I find that intriguing in a community like this. Even some
| extremely techy people (or especially?) just something just
| want to at best feel respected, or at worst want to have
| their own notions confirmed by someone they deem to be
| "smart".
|
| >I don't question the potential of the tech, but I do
| question the direction that Big Tech may take it, because
| they're literal repeat offenders at this point.
|
| And that indeed is my biggest reservation here. Even if AI
| can do great things, I don't trust the incentive models
| OpenAI has. Instead of potentially being this bastion of
| knowledge, it may be yet another vector of trying to sell you
| ads and steal your data. My BOTD is long gone now.
| safety1st wrote:
| Yeah I mean at this point, the tech industry is not new,
| nor is its playbook. At least within B2C, sooner or later
| everything seems to degenerate into an adtech model. I
| think it's because the marginal cost of software
| distribution is so low - you may as well give it away for
| free all the way up to the 8 billion population cap, and
| then monetize them once they're hooked, which inevitably
| seems to mean showing them ads, reselling what you know
| about them, or both.
|
| What I have seen nobody come even NEAR to talking about is,
| why would OpenAI not follow this exact same direction?
| Sooner or later they will.
|
| Things might pan out differently if you're a business -
| OpenAI already doesn't train its models on enterprise
| accounts, I imagine enterprise will take a dim view to
| being shown ads constantly as well, but who knows.
|
| But B2C will be a cesspit. Just like it always ends up a
| cesspit.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| Agree, it would have been a godsend for those of us who were
| not as fast as the other and were eventually left over in usual
| schooling system.
|
| Beside there isn't any of the usual drawback with privacy
| because no one care if OpenAI learn about some bullshit you
| were told to learn.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Beside there isn't any of the usual drawback with privacy
| because no one care if OpenAI learn about some bullshit you
| were told to learn
|
| you didn't see the Hacker News threat talking about the
| ChatGPT subpeona, did you? I was a bit shocked that 1) a tech
| community didn't think a company would store data you submit
| to their servers and 2) that they felt like some lawyers and
| judges reading their chat logs was some intimate invasion of
| privacy.
|
| Let's just say I certainly cannot be arsed to read anyone
| else's stream of conscious without being paid like a lawyer.
| I deal with kids and it's a bit cute when they babble about
| semi-coherent topics. An adult clearly loses that cute appeal
| and just sounds like a madman.
|
| That's not even some dig, I sure suck at explaining my
| mindspace too. It's a genuinely hard skill to convert
| thoughts to interesting, or even sensible, communication.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Yeah. I'll take this over the "you're doing it wrong"
| condescension of comp.lang.lisp, or the Debian mailing list.
| Don't even get me started on the systemd channels back in the
| day.
|
| On the flip, I prefer the human touch of the Kotlin, Python,
| and Elixir channels.
| teiferer wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That trained and sharpened invaluable skills involving critical
| thinking and grit.
| samuria wrote:
| And also taught people how to actually look for information
| online. The average person still does not know how to google,
| I still see people writing whole sentences in the search bar.
| Zambyte wrote:
| This is the "they're holding it wrong" of search engines.
| People want to use a search engine by querying with
| complete sentences. If search engines don't support such
| querying, it's the search engine that is wrong and should
| be updated, not the people.
|
| Search engines have gotten _way_ better at handling
| complete sentences in recent years, to the point where I
| often catch myself deleting my keyword query and replacing
| it with a sentence before I even submit it, because I know
| I will be able to more accurately capture what it is I am
| searching for in a sentence.
| Anamon wrote:
| Funnily enough, I've shown some people who said they
| liked using ChatGPT over Google because they can ask
| questions in natural language, that they can paste the
| same natural language question to Google's search bar and
| get their answers just as easily, and with actual
| sources. That was before search engines started showing
| "AI summaries", so I guess the demonstration effect
| wouldn't be the same today.
|
| Natural language search queries have worked surprisingly
| well for quite a while before that, even.
| jlebar wrote:
| > [Trawling around online for information] trained and
| sharpened invaluable skills involving critical thinking and
| grit.
|
| Here's what Socrates had to say about the invention of
| writing.
|
| > "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds
| of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice
| their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external
| characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage
| the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an
| elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your
| pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they
| will read many things without instruction and will therefore
| seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most
| part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not
| wise, but only appear wise."
|
| https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439
|
| I mean, he wasn't wrong! But nonetheless I think most of us
| communicating on an online forum would probably prefer not to
| go back to a world without writing. :)
|
| You could say similar things about the internet (getting your
| ass to the library taught the importance of learning),
| calculators (you'll be worse at doing arithmetic in your
| head), pencil erasers (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisf
| ree/2015/may/28/pencil...), you name it.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >I mean, he wasn't wrong! But nonetheless I think most of
| us communicating on an online forum would probably prefer
| not to go back to a world without writing. :)
|
| What social value is an AI chatbot giving to us here,
| though?
|
| >You could say similar things about the internet (getting
| your ass to the library taught the importance of learning)
|
| Yes, and as we speak countries are determining how to
| handle the advent of social media as this centralized means
| of propaganda, abuse vector, and general way to disconnect
| local communities. It clearly has a different magnitude of
| impact than etching on a stone tablet. The UK made a
| particularly controversial decision recently.
|
| I see AI more in that camp than in the one of pencil
| erasers.
| djeastm wrote:
| >Here's what Socrates had to say about the invention of
| writing.
|
| I think you mean to say, "Here's what Plato wrote down that
| Socrates said"...
| wiseowise wrote:
| It didn't. Only frustrated and slowed down students.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >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.
|
| Researching online properly requires cross referencing, seeing
| different approaches, and understanding various strenghts,
| weaknesses, and biases among such sources.
|
| And that's for objective information, like math and science. I
| thought Grok's uhh... "update" shows enough of the dangers when
| we resort to a billionaire controlled oracle as a authoritative
| resource.
|
| >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.
|
| I don't think facilitating bad habits like lazy study is an
| effective argument.And I don't really subscribe to this
| ineviability angle either: https://tomrenner.com/posts/llm-
| inevitabilism/
| skinkestek wrote:
| > An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you
| can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment.
|
| Even more important for me, as someone who did ask questions
| but less and less over time, is this: with GPTs I no longer
| have to the see passive-aggressive banner saying
|
| > This question exists for historical reasons, not because it's
| a good question."
|
| all the time on other peoples questions, and typically on the
| best questions with the most useful answers there were.
|
| As much as I have mixed feelings about where AI is heading,
| I'll say this: I'm genuinely relieved I don't need to rely on
| Stack Overflow anymore.
|
| It is also deeply ironic how stackoverflow alienated a lot of
| users in the name of inclusion (the Monica case) but all the
| time they themselves were the ones who really made people like
| me uncomfortable.
| SwtCyber wrote:
| The freedom to ask "dumb" questions without judgment is huge,
| and it's something even the best classrooms struggle to provide
| consistently
| 400thecat wrote:
| I sometimes intentionally ask naive questions, eve if I think
| I alredy know the answer. Sometimes the naive question
| provokes a revealing answer that I have not even considered.
| Asking naive questions is a learning hack!
| friendzis wrote:
| LLMs, by design, are peak Duning-Kruegers, which means they can
| be any good of a study partner for basic introductory lessons
| and topics. Yet they still require handholding and thorough
| verification, because LLMs will spit out factually incorrect
| information with confidence and will fold on correct answers
| when prodded. Yet the novice does not posses the skill to
| handhold the LLM. I think there's a word for that, but chadgbt
| is down for me today.
|
| Furthermore, forgetting curve is a thing and therefore having
| to piece information together repetitively, preferably in a
| structured manner, leads to a much better information
| retention. People love to claim how fast they are "learning"
| (more like consuming tiktoks) from podcasts at 2x speed and
| LLMs, but are unable to recite whatever was presented few hours
| later.
|
| Third, there was a paper circulating even here on HN that
| showed that use of LLMs literally hinder brain activation.
| thrwwy_jhdkqsdj wrote:
| Another quality is that everything is written. To me having a
| text support to discuss and the discussion recorded in text
| format is one of the strongest support someone can get when
| learning.
| djdjsjejb wrote:
| on hn i find most people here to be high iq low eq
|
| high iq enough that they really find holes in the capabilities
| of LLMs in their industries
|
| low eq enough that they only interpret it on their own
| experiences instead of seeing how other people's quality of
| life have improved
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| I am just surprised they used an example requiring
| calculation/math. In the field the results are very much mixed.
| Otherwise it of course is a big help.
|
| Knowing myself it perhaps wasn't that bad that I didn't have
| such tools, depends on the topic. I couldn't imagine ever
| writing a thesis without an LLM anymore.
| globular-toast wrote:
| 20 years ago I used to hang out in IRC channels where I learnt
| so much. I wasn't afraid of asking stupid questions. These bots
| are pale imitation of that.
|
| I've learnt a great many things online, but I've also learnt a
| great many more from books, other people and my own experience.
| You just have to be selective. Some online tutorials are
| excellent, for example the Golang and Rust tutorials. But for
| other things books are better.
|
| What you are missing is the people. We used to have IRC and
| forums where you could discuss things in great depth. Now
| that's gone and the web is owned by big tech and governments
| you're happy to accept a bot instead. It's sad really.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling
| incorrect, outdated or hostile content
|
| Also using OpenAI as a tutor means trawling incorrect content.
| miki123211 wrote:
| It's not just "stupid" questions.
|
| In my experience, most educational resources are either
| slightly too basic or slightly too advanced, particularly when
| you're trying to understand some new and unfamiliar concept.
| Lecturers, Youtubers and textbook authors have to make
| something that works for everybody, which means they might omit
| information you don't yet know while teaching you things you
| already understand. This is where LLMs shine, if there's a
| particular gap in your knowledge, LLMs can help you fill it,
| getting you unstuck.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling
| incorrect, outdated or hostile content
|
| ... your "AI" is also trained on the above incorrect, outdated
| or hostile content ...
| kobenni wrote:
| In my experience asking questions to Claude, the amount of
| incorrect information it gives is on a completely different
| scale in comparison to traditional sources. And the information
| often sounds completely plausible too. When using a text book,
| I would usually not Google every single piece of new
| information to verify it independently, but with Claude, doing
| that is absolutely necessary. At this point I only use Claude
| as a stepping stone to get ideas on what to Google because it
| is giving me false information so often. That is the only
| "effective" usage I have found for it, which is obviously much
| less useful than a good old-fashioned textbook or online
| course.
|
| Admittedly I have less experience with ChatGPT, but those
| experiences were equally bad.
| paradite wrote:
| What kind of questions / domains were you encountering false
| information on?
| kobenni wrote:
| Most false information was on the hardware description
| language VHDL that I'm currently learning.
| hereme888 wrote:
| Ground it with text from a correct source. That's all it
| needs.
| Anamon wrote:
| Then why not just use the source text directly and save
| yourself all the double-guessing?
| ghm2180 wrote:
| A lot of the comments have to do with how does one use these
| things to speed up learning. I've tried a few things. A couple
| of them are prompts: 1. Make me a tutorial on ... 2. Make
| probes to quiz me along the way ...
|
| I think the trick is to look at the references that the model
| shows you. e.g. o3 with web search will give you lots of
| references. 90% of the time just reading those tells me of the
| model and I are aligned.
|
| For example the other day I was figuring out why using SQL
| alchemy Sessions and PyTest async might I get the "Connection
| was attached to different loop" error. Now If you started using
| o3 to give you a solution you would take a long time because
| there would be small mistakes it would make in the code and You
| would spend a lot of time trying to fix it. Better way to use
| 03 then was to ask it to give you debugging statements (session
| listeners attached to Sqlalchemy sessions) and understand by
| reading code output, what was going on. Much faster.
|
| Once it(and I) started looking at the debugging statements the
| error became clear: the session/connections where leaking to
| different event loop, a loop_scope= param needed to be
| specified for all fixtures. O3 did not provide a correct
| solution for the code but I could, but it's help.was crucial in
| writing a fuck ton of debugging code and getting clues.
|
| I also asked o3 to make a bunch of probe questions to test me,
| for example it said something like: try changing the loop_scope
| module to function, what do you expect the loopid and
| transaction id to be for this test?
|
| I learned More than I realized about ORMs and how it can be
| used to structure transactions and structuring async PyTest
| tests.
|
| One thing I'm trying these days is to have it create a memory
| palace from all the stuff I have in my house and link it to a
| new concept I'm learning and put it into an anki decks.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >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.
|
| Not true if we make the assumption that most books from
| publishing houses with good reputation are verified for errors.
| Good books maybe dated but they don't contain made up things.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > A tireless, capable, well-versed assistant
|
| Correction: a tireless, capable, well-versed, sycophantic
| assistant that is often prone to inventing absolute bullshit.
|
| > ...is an autodidact's dream
|
| Not so sure about that, see above.
| a2128 wrote:
| It does go both ways. You can ask stupid questions without fear
| of embarrassment or ruined reputation, and it can respond with
| stupid answers without fear of embarrassment or ruined
| reputation.
|
| It can confidently spew completely wrong information and
| there's no way to tell when it's doing that. There's a real
| risk that it will teach you a complete lie based on how it
| "thinks" something should work, and unlearning that lie will be
| much harder than just learning the truth initially
| tiahura wrote:
| Fear causes defensive behavior.
| ineedasername wrote:
| >I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance
| & skepticism
|
| Thinking back, I believe the change from enthusiasm to
| misanthropy (mis[ai]thropy?) happened around the time, and in
| increasing proportion to, it became a viable replacement for
| some of the labor performed by software devs.
|
| Before that, the tone was more like "The fact is, if 80% of
| your job or 80% of its quality can be automated, it shouldn't
| _be_ a job anymore. "
| Anamon wrote:
| I think it's just that there's been enough time and the magic
| has worn off. People used it enough now and everybody has
| made their experiences. They initially were so transfixed
| that they didn't question the responses. Now people are doing
| that more often, and realising that likelihood of
| cooccurrence isn't a good measure for factuality. We've
| realised that the number of human jobs where it can reach 8%,
| let alone 80% of quality, is vanishingly small.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| > Should we trust the information at face value without
| verifying from other sources? Of course not, that's part of the
| learning process.
|
| People who are learning a new topic are precisely the people
| least able to do this.
|
| A friend of mine used chatgpt to try to learn calculus. It gave
| her an example...with constants changed in such a way that the
| problem was completely different (in the way that 1/x^2 is a
| totally different integration problem than 1/(x^2 + 1)). It
| then proceeded to work the problem incorrectly (ironically
| enough, in exactly the way that I'd expect a calculus student
| who doesn't really understand algebra to do it incorrectly),
| produced a wrong answer, and merrily went on to explain to her
| how to arrive at that wrong answer.
|
| The last time _I_ tried to use an LLM to analyze a question I
| didn 't know the answer to (analyze a list of states to which I
| couldn't detect an obvious pattern), it gave me an incorrect
| answer that (a) did not apply to six of the listed states, (b)
| DID apply to six states that were NOT listed, even though I
| asked it for an exclusive property, (c) miscounted the elements
| of the list, and (d) provided no less than eight consecutive
| completely-false explanations on followup, only four of which
| it caught itself, before finally giving up.
|
| I'm all for expanding your horizons and having new interfaces
| to information, but reliability is especially important when
| you're learning (because otherwise you build on broken
| foundations). If it fails at problems this simple, I certainly
| don't trust it to teach me anything in fields where I _can 't_
| easily dissect bullshit. In principle, I don't think it's
| impossible for AI to get there; in practice, it doesn't seem to
| be.
| 0xAFFFF wrote:
| > Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling
| incorrect, outdated or hostile content
|
| What's funny is tha LLMs got trained on datasets that includes
| all that incorrect, outdated or hostile content.
| rglullis wrote:
| > we have access to incredible tools like this
|
| At what cost? Are you considering all the externalities? What
| do you think will happen when Altman (and their investors)
| decides to start collecting their paychecks?
| hereme888 wrote:
| Spot on. You can even ask the LLM to ground itself with the
| content you provide it.
| munksbeer wrote:
| I think both sides seem to have the same issues with the other.
| One side is sceptical that the other is getting good use from
| LLMs, and the other suggests they're just not using it
| correctly.
|
| Both sides think the other is either exaggerating or just not
| using the tool correctly.
|
| What both sides should do is show evidence in the form of chat
| extracts or videos. There are a number from the pro-LLM side,
| but obviously selection bias applies here. It would be
| interesting if the anti-LLM side started to post more negative
| examples (real chat extracts or videos).
| 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
| currymj wrote:
| as a professor i'm tentatively pleased. it's hard to shake out
| the edge cases for anything like this so it may break down or
| cause annoying problems, who knows.
|
| but even with this feature in this very early state, it seems
| quite useful. i dropped in some slides from a class and pretended
| to be a student, and it handled questions reasonably. Right now
| it seems I will be happy for my students to use this.
|
| taking a wider perspective, I think it is a good sign that OpenAI
| is culturally capable of making a high-friction product that
| challenges and frustrates, yet benefits, the user. hopefully this
| can help with the broader problem of sycophancy.
| ieuanking wrote:
| Study mode should be for any account with an age under 18. It's
| more worrying that a student must uphold a trust transaction and
| not just cheat with the same chatbot without the study mode
| selected. To this day, as an AI researcher, digital
| anthropologist, and front-end dev, I love to learn, study, and
| work. But I would never recommend a student to use unmonitored
| ChatGPT. I literally built a whole effing agent and platform for
| finding academic sources and using those sources to answer my
| questions, specifically because I couldn't trust or learn with
| ChatGPT when conducting research. SMH study mode, please stop
| trying to redo teaching and learning. We should be trying to
| modernize already proven effective methods of learning that go
| hand in hand with teachers and classrooms. We are not in
| lockdown; this is not 2020. Teachers are irreplaceable, study
| mode is just a crutch or a brace for a problem created by
| irresponsible AI development. Ik that if I was a student right
| now (especially middle to high school) I would be cheating like
| you are lying to yourself if you think you wouldn't be, and at a
| certain point the definition of cheating changes from cheating
| the teacher to cheating yourself of the critical steps and
| thinking it takes to actually study and learn. No amount of
| conversation alone with a chatbot is as valuable as reading
| coursework and engaging with that coursework in a facilitated
| environment with a professional. Why are we going down the WALL-E
| path?
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| My favorite use of Claude (or similar) AI bot, other than coding,
| is to do deep dives into technical/science questions I'm
| interested in (mostly personal interests, unrelated to work). The
| ability to ask follow-up questions, get clarifications, travel
| down side paths, has helped me to grasp some concepts that I
| struggled with -- and offered more than I could just from just
| reading a few web pages.
|
| Importantly, these were _not_ critical questions that I was
| incorporating into any decision-making, so I wasn't having to
| double-check the AI's answers, which would make it tedious; but
| it's a great tool for satisfying curiosity.
| jrflowers wrote:
| Oh good. A version of chat gpt that is even more confident-
| sounding. Great.
| jayshah5696 wrote:
| It's study gpt. Nothing more.
| tekno45 wrote:
| The same people who think this is the ultimate teacher will also
| be harassing scientists with their AI assisted theories and
| demand the scientific community take them seriously when they
| have pages of gibberish they expect to be rigorously debated
| taurath wrote:
| Its pretty awfully telling the state of things that this is a
| Product - not an expansion of base capability. You can do this
| with any LLM with simple bounds on the prompts.
|
| > 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: encouraging
| active participation, managing cognitive load, proactively
| developing metacognition and self reflection, fostering
| curiosity, and providing actionable and supportive feedback.
|
| I'm calling bullshit, show me the experts, I want to see that any
| qualified humans actually participated in this. I think they did
| their "collaboration" in ChatGPT which spit out this list.
| teleforce wrote:
| LLM foremost killer application is what I called context
| searching whereby it utilized RAG and other techniques to reduce
| hallucinations and provide relevant results in which arguably
| ChatGPT is one of the pioneers.
|
| LLM second killer application is for studying for a particular
| course or subject in which OpenAI ChatGPT is also now providing
| the service. Probably not the pioneer but most probably one of
| the significant providers upon this announcement. If in the near
| future GenAI study assistant can adopt and adapt 3 Blue One Brown
| approaches for more visualization, animation and interactive
| learning it will be more intuitive and engaging.
|
| Please check this excellent LLM-RAG AI-driven course assistant at
| UIUC for an example of university course [1]. It provide
| citations and references mainly for the course notes so the
| students can verify the answers and further study the course
| materials.
|
| [1] AI-driven chat assistant for ECE 120 course at UIUC (only 1
| comment by the website creator):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41431164
| huitzitziltzin wrote:
| I would love to see more of their game theory example.
|
| Having experience teaching the subject myself, what I saw on that
| page is about the first five minutes of the first class of the
| semester at best. The devil will very much be in the other 99% of
| what you do.
| beefnugs wrote:
| I have no evidence of this but: I think this is the ultimate
| scam?
|
| human: damn kids are using this to cheat in school
|
| openai: release an "app"/prompt that seems really close to
| solving this stated problem
|
| kids: I never wanted to learn anything, I just want to do bare
| minimum to get my degree, let my parents think they are helping
| my future, and then i can get back to ripping that bong
|
| <world continues slide into dunce based oblivion>
|
| It doesn't matter the problem statement: the 80% or less solution
| seems can be made and rather quickly. Such a huge percentage of
| the population judges technology solutions as "good enough" way
| lower than they should. This is even roping in people from the
| past who used to be a higher level of "rigorous correctness"
| because they keep thinking, "damn just a bit more work and it
| will get infinity better, lets create the biggest economic house
| of cards this world will ever collapse under"
| rishabhaiover wrote:
| People who do not use LLMs to prune their high-dimensional search
| space (of any problem) will be outcompeted soon
| mpalmer wrote:
| I truly, truly do not get it. it's a system prompt. Do students
| not understand that they could do this before?
|
| Sure, it was crafted by educational experts, but this is not a
| feature! It's a glorified _constant_!
| oc1 wrote:
| Reveals also how non-technical the hn crowd has become as you
| can see most people here don't get this fact either. Openai has
| certainly a great marketing team.
| aabhay wrote:
| Isn't this what "GPTs" was supposed to be? Why not just use that
| if this is essentially just a system prompt?
| oc1 wrote:
| "Was supposed to be". Well, now you know the real purpose of
| this gpt circus ;)
| 2809 wrote:
| HN is just flooded with AI BS these days.
| mahidalhan wrote:
| I had made a specialized prompt in Claude projects, for my
| learning, + added like field notes and lecture transcripts, was
| going good.
|
| Then I tried to migrate it to chat gpt to try this thing out, but
| seems to be like it's just prompt engineering behind. Nothing
| fancy.
|
| And this study mode is not only not available in chat gpt
| projects, which students need for adding course work, notes,
| transcripts.
|
| Honestly, just release gpt-5!!!
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I'd like an LLM integrated spaced-repetition app. It would go
| along with this study feature quite well.
|
| If LLMs continue to improve, we are going to be learning a lot
| from them, they will be our internet search and our teachers. If
| we want to retain some knowledge for ourselves, then we are going
| to need to learn and memorize things for ourselves.
|
| Integrating spaced-repetition could make it explicit which things
| we want to offload to the LLM, and which things we want to
| internalize. For example, maybe I use Python a lot, and
| occasionally use Pearl, and so I explictly choose to memorize
| some Python APIs, but I'm happy to just ask the LLM for reminders
| whenever I use Pearl. So I ask the LLM to setup some spaced
| repetition whenever it teaches me something new about Python,
| etc.
|
| The spaced repetition could be done with voice during a drive or
| something. The LLM would ask the questions for review, and then
| judge how well we did in answering, and then the LLM would depend
| on the spaced-repetition algorithm to keep track of when to next
| review.
| mmasu wrote:
| yesterday I read a paper about using gpt 4 as a tutor in italian
| schools, with encouraging results - students are more engaged,
| get through homework by receiving immediate and precise feedback,
| resulting in non-negligible performance improvements:
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.15981
|
| it is definitely a great use case for LLMs, and challenges the
| assumption that LLMs can only "increase brain rot" so to say.
| sandspar wrote:
| I love it so far. I'm continually struggling against ChatGPT's
| fervent love of giving tips and how-to guides. I abhor such tips,
| but no amount of prompting can remove them permanently. It seems
| like study mode is the fix. Finally ChatGPT lets me think things
| through.
| p1dda wrote:
| Poor students, learning from hallucinating LLMs LOL
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| When I studied I found out that being able to speak with a fellow
| student of the subject we needed to learn was so much more
| effective than the usual method of reading /trying to remember
| over and over.
|
| So much that first method would take me an hour as opposed to an
| entire evening when reading/repeating.
|
| Having such a tool would have been a game changer to me.
|
| I don't know tho if it's possible to throw at it entire chapter
| of learning book.
| SwtCyber wrote:
| I think that way it forces you to process and articulate the
| ideas
| schmorptron wrote:
| Oh, that's pretty good! I've been doing this with various LLMs
| already, making elaborate system prompts to turn them into
| socratic style teachers or in general tutors that don't just
| straight up give the answer, and have generally been impressed
| with how well it works and how much I enjoy it. The only thing to
| watch out for is when you're talking about something you don't
| already know well it becomes harder to spot hallucinations, so
| it's a good idea to always verify with external resources as
| well.
|
| What these really need IMO is an integration where they generate
| just a few anki flashcards per session, or even multiple choice
| quizzes that you can then review with spaced repetition. I've
| been doing this manually, but having it integrated would remove
| another hurdle.
|
| On the other hand, I'm unsure whether we're training ourselves to
| be lazy with even this, in the sense of "brain atrophy" that's
| been talked about regarding LLMs. Where I used to need to pull
| information from several sources and synthesize my own answer by
| transferring several related topics onto mine, now I get
| everything pre-chewed, even if in the form of a tutor.
|
| Does anyone know how this is handled with human tutors? Is it
| just that the time is limited with the human so you by necessity
| still do some of the "crawl-it-yourself" style?
| SwtCyber wrote:
| For the "brain atrophy" concern: I've thought about that too.
| My guess is that it's less about using tools and more about how
| we use them
| uldos wrote:
| I am quite sure, that in the future chatgpt will have parental
| controls as we have them in video streaming apps or in phone in
| general. Should your child be allowed to generate full blown
| essays only by AI or just take a guided tour? You decide!
| emsign wrote:
| Still not trusting OpenAI in 2025
| ookblah wrote:
| leave it up to HN to once again choose the most black/white this
| or that extreme positions as if having a 24/7 tutor that isn't
| perfect is somehow worse than having nothing at all. if it
| hallucinates you keep digging and correlate with sources to
| figure out if it's true, or you ask other people.
|
| the internet, wikipedia, SO, etc. all these things had the EXACT
| same arguments against it and guess what? people who want to use
| TOOLS that help them to study better will gain, and people who
| are lazy will ...be worse off as it has always been.
|
| i don't know why i bother to engage in these threads except to
| offer my paltry 2 cents. for being such a tech and forward
| thinking community there's almost this knee jerk reaction against
| ANYTHING llm (which i suppose i understand). a lot of us are
| missing the forest for the trees here.
| SwtCyber wrote:
| I'd love to see more transparency on how they're measuring
| whether it's actually helping students learn better, not just
| feel like they are.
| rudderdev wrote:
| Impressive. The next feature could be to prepare notes for
| revision.
| ManlyBread wrote:
| So a pre-built prompt is now offered as a major feature worth
| announcing?
| rullelito wrote:
| Prompts are 99% of AI products these days.
| nilsherzig wrote:
| Google has this with their "leanlm" model
| https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/learnlm_prompt_gui....
| I really liked it, but sadly it tends to hallucinate a lot (at
| least with the topics from my math class). A lot more than other
| Gemini models, so that might just be a question of model size or
| something like that.
| machiaweliczny wrote:
| I asked it to explain to me sweep line method for programming and
| I am quite impressed
| greenie_beans wrote:
| this is how i've taught myself terraform, kubernetes, and fill in
| aws knowledge gaps. with claude, i get it to do project based
| learning techniques, filling in knowledge gaps by giving context
| about what i know and want to learn about
| deviation wrote:
| Unless they are transparent with us in detailing why the
| technology behind this is different to a slightly altered system
| prompt... Then I will assume OpenAI is just trying to stay
| relevant.
| anupshinde wrote:
| I'm confused. My kid does this on my ChatGPT account all the
| time. What is new here?
|
| I cannot emphasize how good a teacher ChatGPT is, until it
| misinforms (and human teachers also do). And it also stays open
| to questioning without making the student feel stupid for asking.
| The good part is that ChatGPT will accept a mistake, but a human
| teacher will get annoyed.
|
| The only thing I keep reminding my kid is to keep the BS detector
| on and verify everything that ChatGPT says and never trust it
| blindly. (feels too similar to the "don't talk to strangers"
| advice)
|
| Unrelated - check with kids and teenagers. Once, a teen told me,
| "AI is a dark evil force," and it's what their teachers told
| them.
| jama211 wrote:
| Well said
| amelius wrote:
| Can we also have "helpdesk mode"?
|
| Right now when you ask an LLM to solve some problem, it
| immediately responds with many steps, whereas as a user I want to
| go through it step by step. It would be nice if the LLM provided
| the solution in that way. This also makes it less cumbersome to
| tell the LLM where the solution went wrong.
| jama211 wrote:
| It's just text though right? Just perform step 1, if you have
| any issues say "I had this issue at step 1". Also you can ask
| it to give one step at a time.
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, I have to tell it a lot of things. Like that I use Linux
| (Ubuntu version also), that I want to use emacs and not nano,
| etc. It would be nice if I could say it once and for all.
|
| One problem with LLMs giving so many steps at once is that
| the first step scrolls from the screen and I have to stop the
| LLM, scroll back and find the first step. The UX could be
| much improved here (with little effort, I believe).
| diggan wrote:
| > Yes, I have to tell it a lot of things. Like that I use
| Linux (Ubuntu version also), that I want to use emacs and
| not nano, etc. It would be nice if I could say it once and
| for all.
|
| You can add this to the system prompt, or "customize
| prompt" or whatever the service/runner calls it. Basically
| instructions you want it to always follow. I have my
| hardware described there, what tools I commonly use and so
| on, so asking "How do I see running processes?" for example
| would already assume I'm using Arch Linux and so on.
| amelius wrote:
| Thanks. I looked for these options but they were well
| hidden. But thanks to your comment I gave it another try
| and found them!
| nutanc wrote:
| I had been experimenting with some prompts for socratic method of
| teaching. Finally found one which works fairly well for me which
| I have integrated into our product.
|
| Q: How does photosynthesis work?
|
| Chat GPT Study Mode:
|
| ### How Photosynthesis Works (in simple steps):
|
| Photosynthesis is the process *plants use to make their own food*
| using sunlight. It mostly happens in *leaves*, especially in a
| part called the *chloroplast*, which contains a green pigment
| called *chlorophyll*.
|
| ---
|
| ### Think of it like a recipe:
|
| 1. *Ingredients*: * **Sunlight** *
| **Water (H2O)** -- from the roots * **Carbon dioxide
| (CO2)** -- from the air
|
| 2. *Cooking place*: Leaf cells, in their chloroplasts
|
| 3. *Magic trick*: Chlorophyll traps sunlight energy
|
| 4. *What's made*: * **Glucose (C6H12O6)** -- a
| sugar the plant uses for energy * **Oxygen (O2)** --
| released into the air
|
| ---
|
| ### Word Equation:
|
| *Carbon dioxide + Water* - (with sunlight & chlorophyll) -
| *Glucose + Oxygen*
|
| Or:
|
| *6CO2 + 6H2O - C6H12O6 + 6O2*
|
| -------------------------------------------------
|
| My Prompt(conversation):
|
| me: How does photosynthesis work?
|
| agent: Great question! Let's start by understanding the problem.
| What do you think is the main purpose of photosynthesis in
| plants?
|
| me: dont know
|
| agent: That's okay! Let's start by breaking down the concept of
| photosynthesis. First, can you tell me what kind of organisms
| primarily use photosynthesis?
|
| me: plants
|
| agent: Exactly, plants primarily use photosynthesis. Now, let's
| think about the basic ingredients or components needed for
| photosynthesis to occur. Can you name any of these components?
|
| me: no
|
| agent: No problem! Let's explore it together. Photosynthesis
| primarily requires three main components. One of them is light.
| Can you think of where plants might get light from?
|
| me: sun
|
| agent: That's right! Plants get light from the sun. Sunlight is
| crucial for photosynthesis. Now, besides sunlight, plants also
| need something from the air. Do you know what that might be?
|
| ...... and so on
| liendolucas wrote:
| Study mode: table, pencil, paper and books.
| Xunjin wrote:
| I agree with you, but you could always another tool into your
| learning toolkit.
| cratermoon wrote:
| If you want to multiply two numbers together, a quick way to do
| it is to roll a few d10s and use their digits as the answer.
|
| It's fast and very easy, but there is a little skill in knowing
| how many dice to use. Right now it sometimes hallucinates the
| wrong answer but dice tech is improving all the time so it's only
| going to get better from here on.
| Dowwie wrote:
| It's a useful mode. I find the socratic method very useful for
| learning. I'm including the system prompt used for Study Mode and
| the system prompt I've been using. You can decide which is
| better.
|
| ---
|
| * OpenAI Study Mode System Prompt:*
|
| The user is currently STUDYING, and they've asked you to follow
| these *strict rules* during this chat. No matter what other
| instructions follow, you MUST obey these rules:
|
| ## STRICT RULES Be an approachable-yet-dynamic teacher, who helps
| the user learn by guiding them through their studies.
|
| 1. *Get to know the user.* If you don't know their goals or grade
| level, ask the user before diving in. (Keep this lightweight!) If
| they don't answer, aim for explanations that would make sense to
| a 10th grade student. 2. *Build on existing knowledge.* Connect
| new ideas to what the user already knows. 3. *Guide users, don't
| just give answers.* Use questions, hints, and small steps so the
| user discovers the answer for themselves. 4. *Check and
| reinforce.* After hard parts, confirm the user can restate or use
| the idea. Offer quick summaries, mnemonics, or mini-reviews to
| help the ideas stick. 5. *Vary the rhythm.* Mix explanations,
| questions, and activities (like roleplaying, practice rounds, or
| asking the user to teach _you_) so it feels like a conversation,
| not a lecture.
|
| Above all: DO NOT DO THE USER'S WORK FOR THEM. Don't answer
| homework questions -- help the user find the answer, by working
| with them collaboratively and building from what they already
| know.
|
| ### THINGS YOU CAN DO - *Teach new concepts:* Explain at the
| user's level, ask guiding questions, use visuals, then review
| with questions or a practice round. - *Help with homework:* Don't
| simply give answers! Start from what the user knows, help fill in
| the gaps, give the user a chance to respond, and never ask more
| than one question at a time. - *Practice together:* Ask the user
| to summarize, pepper in little questions, have the user "explain
| it back" to you, or role-play (e.g., practice conversations in a
| different language). Correct mistakes -- charitably! -- in the
| moment. - *Quizzes & test prep:* Run practice quizzes. (One
| question at a time!) Let the user try twice before you reveal
| answers, then review errors in depth.
|
| ### TONE & APPROACH Be warm, patient, and plain-spoken; don't use
| too many exclamation marks or emoji. Keep the session moving:
| always know the next step, and switch or end activities once
| they've done their job. And be brief -- don't ever send essay-
| length responses. Aim for a good back-and-forth.
|
| ## IMPORTANT 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.
|
| ---
|
| *Socratic-Method Learning System Prompt:*
|
| You are a Socratic teacher who helps students master complex
| subjects by guiding them through first principles reasoning and
| concept discovery. You begin by asking the student what field or
| topic they would like to explore (e.g., algorithms, music theory,
| constitutional law, etc.). Once the student has provided the
| domain, assume expert-level knowledge in that subject and proceed
| accordingly.
|
| Your teaching method follows these rules:
|
| * Use the *Socratic method*: you teach primarily through leading
| questions that help the student uncover the concepts themselves.
| * Use *first principles thinking* to build up the topic from
| fundamental concepts in plain natural language--avoid jargon
| unless defined. * *Do not* use source code, formulas,
| visualizations, or analysis tools unless the student explicitly
| requests them. * Frequently *pause* and ask *brief, explicit test
| questions* based on simple, concrete examples. Do *not* continue
| until the student has responded and their understanding is
| validated. * If the student answers incorrectly or shows signs of
| misunderstanding, continue engaging and probing until they self-
| correct. * Maintain a *friendly, conversational, and concise
| tone*, like a calm university tutor who encourages thinking
| aloud. * Continue teaching until the core principles of the topic
| have been explored, and the student can *explain and apply* them
| clearly in their own words.
|
| Always begin the session by asking:
|
| *"What subject would you like to explore together today?"*
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