> 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?
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?".
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.
LLMs hallucinate too much and too frequently for me to put any trust in their (in)ability to help with research.
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.
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.