Like the Romans used to drink from lead cups. Something like that.
(it appears that the moderator is removing any replies with which he disagrees. It might be a piefed issue. But all the removed replies are top level and upopular. Stranger coincidences have happened I suppose.)
I’m currently pursuing a PhD and working on a level where it’s hard to find an expert, and volumes of new information that don’t allow me to do so for any single minor inquiry.
This is the step at which the “teacher”, be it scientific supervisor or a prof on the subject, might very much not know the answer. LLMs, however, have access to a large corpus of data that allows to untangle this mess in a quick and efficient way.
Any understanding I get from the LLM’s explanation I verify against the academic books I follow and practical runs. Only when I’m certain I grasped it right, I put it into my work. And LLM was indeed very wrong on one occasion, and slightly inconsistent on some more.
Bro you’re trying to be a doctor and you’re training your brain to not be able to think on it’s own and have to use AI for thinking. You know learning wires your brain and part of the process is wiring your brain so you don’t have to look stuff up, why are you training yourself to have to use AI? Train your brain instead.
I wouldn’t want to be your patient if I knew you learned like this.
First off, I’m pursuing PhD, not MD, so you won’t be my patient. I’m a microbiologist.
Second, as I thought I very clearly articulated, I do not offload thinking to LLM nor I ask it to provide me with all the answers. I follow original sources, and if you’ve ever followed scientific literature beyond student handbooks, you know that authors tend to omit things they consider obvious, leaving the reader with a gap of crucial knowledge that they don’t know how to close. This happens to the best of scientists, and it can take months to resolve, or it may never be solved at all, especially if the original author has already retired or passed away, or doesn’t answer on known communication channels.
Doing it the old-fashioned way means finding one of like five people in the world who also know the answer, and hope they’ll respond (they may very much not), or spend months studying obscure prerequisite materials, likely to still end up with a dead end. With the deadline pressure and KPIs, this often means abandoning an immediate direction of work altogether, not a cozy library session.
LLMs, on the other hand, are unrivaled at contextual search and can obtain essential data from obscure sources in a matter of seconds. They are also great at explaining the jargon, allowing researchers and students in narrow fields to focus on what matters instead of getting another major on the side simply to understand the wording around an otherwise trivial concept.
All that, so brains would be busy with something other than guessing. You know, the actual problems to solve.
Idk when something can’t tell you how many R’s there are in strawberry I’m not sure how accurate they would be for something more complicated.
Sucks you don’t want to do it the more accurate way from primary sources like people have before all the slop.
You seem to spew out stamp after stamp before reading something I wrote and stressed several times. I think this contributes to errors way more than anything else. If you care about being correct, reading comprehension is the first priority.
I always verify my understanding by going back to the books, and following through with filled gaps, checking how adequate my comprehension is against what comes next in human-written, academic texts. With one point following the other, the wrong understanding shows itself very quickly. And yes, that did happen. The books allow me to refine and clarify my understanding before making use of it.
Primary sources are the basis, and are my main source of information. LLMs are there to fill the gaps that are otherwise very hard, if not impossible, to fill manually. They help connect the dots when the connection is unclear.
Yeah in a pretty selfish, lazy way, sure.