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Study mode

openai.com

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Re: Study mode

#71

Post by scarmig »

no_wizard wrote: post #49
czhu12 wrote: post #26

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 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.

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).

Re: Study mode

#72

Post by apwell23 »

m3kw9 wrote: post #33

tried it and couldn't really tell between a good prompt to "teach me" and this.

same. i can't tell whats different. gives me same output regardless for the prompts in the example.

i don't get it.

Re: Study mode

#73

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

lmc wrote: post #36

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.

High paychecks

Re: Study mode

#74

Post by henriquegodoy »

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.

Re: Study mode

#75

Post by no_wizard »

sejje wrote: post #60
holsta wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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…

>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

Re: Study mode

#76

Post by [deleted] »

deanc wrote: post #27

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) ?

[deleted]

Re: Study mode

#77

Post by gertlex »

holsta wrote: post #43
czhu12 wrote: post #26

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 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.

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.

Re: Study mode

#78

Post by te_chris »

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.

Re: Study mode

#79

Post by CobrastanJorji »

SoftTalker wrote: post #61
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good tutors are fine, bad tutors will just give you the answer. Many students think the bad tutors are good ones.

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.

Re: Study mode

#80

Post by kelthuzad »

czhu12 wrote: post #26

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 ba…

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.

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