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) ?
They state themselves it's just system prompts.
Study mode
41–50 of 828 posts
Re: Study mode
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Professor might be overselling it but lecturer for undergrad and intro graduate courses for sure.
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 :-)
I've found it generally has professor-level understanding in fields that are not your own.
(Joke/criticism intended)
Re: Study mode
#43I'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 ba…
> 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.
Re: Study mode
#44rip 30 startups
Re: Study mode
#45Re: Study mode
#46I'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 ba…
> 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.
Re: Study mode
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Professor might be overselling it but lecturer for undergrad and intro graduate courses for sure.
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 tho…
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.
Re: Study mode
#48I 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 repetit…
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."
Re: Study mode
#49I'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 ba…
>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.
Re: Study mode
#50Why 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.
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.