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Study mode

openai.com

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Re: Study mode

#121

Post by LordDragonfang »

righthand wrote: post #10
jryio wrote: post #5

I 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…

It doesn’t do any of that, it just captures the student market more. They want a student to use it and say “I wouldn’t have learned anything without study mode”. This also allows them to fill their data coffers more with bleeding edge education. “Please input the data you are studying and we will summarize it for you.”

> It doesn’t do any of that

Not to be contrarian, but do you have any evidence of this assertion? Or are you just confidently confabulating a response for something outside of the data you've been exposed to? Because a commentor below provided a study that directly contradicts this.

Re: Study mode

#122

Post by scarmig »

CJefferson wrote: post #102
scarmig wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

These things are moving so quickly, but I teach a 2nd year combinatorics course, and about 3 months ago I tried th latest chatGPT and Deepseek -- they could answer very standard questions, but were wrong for more advanced questions, but often in quite subtle ways. I actually set a piece of homework "marking" chatGPT, which went well and students seemed to enjoy!

Very clever and approachable, and I've been unintentionally giving myself that exercise for awhile now. Who knows how long it will remain viable, though.

Re: Study mode

#123

Post by rubslopes »

That's a smart ideia from OpenAI. They don't have the upper hand anymore in terms of model performance, but they keep improving their product so that it still is the best option for non-programmers.

Re: Study mode

#124

Post by esafak »

raincole wrote: post #18

If current AI is good enough to teach you something, spending time learning that thing seems to be a really bad investment...

How does that make sense? So you'd learn it if it was bad at teaching? Do you apply the same principle with humans and not bother to learn if the teacher is good?

Re: Study mode

#125

Post by sejje »

dcbb65b2bcb6e6a wrote: post #109
sejje wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used llms to teach me a programming language recently. It was way nicer than a book. That's the experience I'm speaking from. It wasn't perfect, and it was wrong sometimes, sure. A known limitation. But it was flexible, and it was able to do things like relate ideas with programming languages I already knew. Adapt to my level of understanding. Skip stuff I didn't need. Incorrect moments or not, the result was i lea…

> and it was wrong sometimes, sure. A known limitation. But that's the entire problem and I don't understand why it's just put aside like that. LLMs are wrong sometimes, and they often just don't give you the details and, in my opinion, knowing about certain details and traps of a language is very very important, if you plan on doing more with it than just having fun. Now someone will come around the corner and say '…

It's not my experience that there are missing pieces as compared to anything else.

Nobody can write an exhaustive tome and explore every feature, use, problem, and pitfall of Python, for example. Every text on the topic will omit something.

It's hardly a criticism. I don't want exhaustive.

The llm taught me what I asked it to teach me. That's what I hope it will do, not try to caution me about everything I could do wrong with a language. That list might be infinite.

Re: Study mode

#126

Post by apwell23 »

jryio wrote: post #5

I 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…

it makes difference to students who are already motivated. that was the case with youtube.

unfortunately that group is tiny and getting tinier due to dwindling attention span.

Re: Study mode

#127

Post by mathattack »

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've found LLMs to be great in summarizing non-controversial non-technical bodies of knowledge. For example - the facts in the long swings of regional histories. You have to ask for nuance and countervailing viewpoints, though you'll get them if they're in there.

Re: Study mode

#128

Post by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 »

avn2109 wrote: post #57
dcbb65b2bcb6e6a wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cou…

LLM's are useful because they can recommend several famous/well-known books (or even chapters of books) that are relevant to a particular topic. Then you can also use the LLM to illuminate the inevitable points of confusion and shortcomings in those books while you're reading and synthesizing them. Pre-LLM, even finding the ~5 textbooks with ~3 chapters each that decently covered the material I want was itself a nont…

> they can recommend several famous/well-known books

They can recommend many unknown books as well, as language models are known to reference resources that do not exist.

Re: Study mode

#129

Post by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 »

sejje wrote: post #125
dcbb65b2bcb6e6a wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and it was wrong sometimes, sure. A known limitation. But that's the entire problem and I don't understand why it's just put aside like that. LLMs are wrong sometimes, and they often just don't give you the details and, in my opinion, knowing about certain details and traps of a language is very very important, if you plan on doing more with it than just having fun. Now someone will come around the corner and say '…

It's not my experience that there are missing pieces as compared to anything else. Nobody can write an exhaustive tome and explore every feature, use, problem, and pitfall of Python, for example. Every text on the topic will omit something. It's hardly a criticism. I don't want exhaustive. The llm taught me what I asked it to teach me. That's what I hope it will do, not try to caution me about everything I could do w…

> It's not my experience that there are missing pieces as compared to anything else.

How can you know this when you are learning something? It seems like a confirmation bias to even have this opinion?

Re: Study mode

#130

Post by azemetre »

jahewson wrote: post #92
lmc wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll personally attest: LLM's have been absolutely incredible to self learn new things post graduation. How do you know when it's bullshitting you though?

Same way you know for humans?

But an LLM isn't a human, with a human you can read body language or look up their past body of work. How do you do his with against an LLM
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