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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.