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How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

laurentiugabriel.github.io

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Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#321

Post by piloto_ciego »

andrekandre wrote: post #297
champagnepapi wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sure hope those docs aren’t written by LLMs for many reasons!

i wonder if people who use llm's for business critical documentation would have the same opinion, and if so why?

I have used LLMs for safety sensitive tech writing and so have people I know. It’s pretty good at it, and you usually have a 95% ready to go product at the end of it. The last 5% can pretty easily be filled in by technical experts with way less time spent battling the type writer.

Is it perfect? No. But it suffices most of the time in a pinch.

Can’t speak to the nuke industry, but it’s pretty good at aviation related things.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#322

Post by fy20 »

matherial wrote: post #306

This is, without exaggeration, probably the fiftieth blog post or long-form comment about how someone is using an LLM for "complex learning", and I'd just really like to see at least one of these to be accompanied by a statement saying what are the kinds of problems the author can now confidently solve that they couldn't before. In my experience, LLMs are really good for taking up your time and making you feel like y…

I think it depends on what you want to learn and what your definition of "learnt" is.

The other day I realised I had no idea how DNA and life works. I guess I studied it at high school (25 years ago), but maybe it didn't go into much detail or it just didn't click.

So I asked ChatGPT to explain it to me, I came up with my own mental model from it's explanation, told it that, then it corrected me where I misunderstood things. We went backwards and forwards for an hour, me asking questions, it correcting me, until I felt like I understood the whole picture.

Am I going to become a biologist and study the origins of life from that? Definatley not! But if my kids need help on their biology homework, I now understand the basics of it.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#323

Post by djhn »

daishi55 wrote: post #191
Terr_ wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That rests on a false-assumption that the errors are statistically independent events, and have nothing to do with the shared nature of the judges.

Are there any reproducible hallucinations on any of the currently available OAI/Anthropic models? I’m not aware of any. And even if they are related - if Opus 4.8 always has a 1:100 chance of a specific hallucination - then running the same model twice does indeed dramatically reduce the odds of an error in the final output.

Constant hallucinations. OpenAI:s latest on max settings. If you are to naively feed say, a short corpus of text to turn it into a parallel corpus in a few different languages, the original text gets subtly mangled and no longer matches the original. Say you have several hundred annotated sentences. Without hand-coding some regex to make sure that each sentence in the source column occurs in the original corpus you’re bound to get hallucinated sentences with an error rate that exceeds 1:100. Whatever you use as the output, JSON or XML, you will end up with columns that just repeat the original instead of translating it, especially for languages that are very close to each other or represent the same language.

Yes, LLMs can be SOTA for NLP, but you’re going to have to use them to write software or workflows that are more deterministic.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#324

Post by robertwt7 »

matherial wrote: post #306

This is, without exaggeration, probably the fiftieth blog post or long-form comment about how someone is using an LLM for "complex learning", and I'd just really like to see at least one of these to be accompanied by a statement saying what are the kinds of problems the author can now confidently solve that they couldn't before. In my experience, LLMs are really good for taking up your time and making you feel like y…

> many of the popular educational videos on YouTube are fun to watch and don't really teach you anything.

I really enjoyed and learn a lot of things from Karpathy's and Andrew Ng's video. sure many don't really teach you anything, but I could say many others are useful too. Maybe it depends on the way we're prompting as well? it seems useful for some like Terence's message that was shared few weeks ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010345

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#325

Post by ixsploit »

ignoramous wrote: post #320
ixsploit wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to use them to generate me tutorial series for technical topics I want to learn or improve. So I start a prompt like this: > I want you to create a tutorial series about X for me. The prime objective is that I improve in topic X so never provide a solution but guide and teach. (for programming never write code). First create a question catalog to assess my current level. Then I would ask it to structure the tu…

Curious: Why not pick up a book or two on the topic, and use the LLM to help you through it [0]? To me, prompting the LLM without grounding it sounds like a sure shot way to end up learning "pop-sci", as GP puts it, instead of the actual science? If today's top LLMs are reliable enough (without grounding) to academically learn "complex topics" from, may be I need to adjust my priors. I must say, I do find myself chat…

I use books to accompany my learning, but I really need something that _forces_ me to think and solve problems in that space on my own. Books can sometimes give me the illusion of learning something, but then, when needed, I've notice that I haven't really learned it.

LLMs give me structure based on my current skill level. And basically always I accompany this with books, I love reading. It's a nice combination for me.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#326

Post by ixsploit »

SwtCyber wrote: post #313
ixsploit wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to use them to generate me tutorial series for technical topics I want to learn or improve. So I start a prompt like this: > I want you to create a tutorial series about X for me. The prime objective is that I improve in topic X so never provide a solution but guide and teach. (for programming never write code). First create a question catalog to assess my current level. Then I would ask it to structure the tu…

I think the key difference here is that you're using the LLM to create exercises, not to replace the learning material

_Doing_ is probably one of the best ways to learn something.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#328

Post by shuwix »

ixsploit wrote: post #311
matherial wrote: post #306

This is, without exaggeration, probably the fiftieth blog post or long-form comment about how someone is using an LLM for "complex learning", and I'd just really like to see at least one of these to be accompanied by a statement saying what are the kinds of problems the author can now confidently solve that they couldn't before. In my experience, LLMs are really good for taking up your time and making you feel like y…

I like to use them to generate me tutorial series for technical topics I want to learn or improve. So I start a prompt like this: > I want you to create a tutorial series about X for me. The prime objective is that I improve in topic X so never provide a solution but guide and teach. (for programming never write code). First create a question catalog to assess my current level. Then I would ask it to structure the tu…

I would love to see the "depth" of your knowledge in those topics.

You literally proved the OP's point ... thinking you're learning. More like scratching the surface, with lots of invalid data while not being able to recognize what's invalid.

It's like with latest vector of attacks being spamming Github with malware injected in proper looking code in hope of AI to index it.

Then you paste the code because you don't understand it, but you take it as working and only doing what you've asked for.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#329

Post by bilbo-b-baggins »

fy20 wrote: post #322
matherial wrote: post #306

This is, without exaggeration, probably the fiftieth blog post or long-form comment about how someone is using an LLM for "complex learning", and I'd just really like to see at least one of these to be accompanied by a statement saying what are the kinds of problems the author can now confidently solve that they couldn't before. In my experience, LLMs are really good for taking up your time and making you feel like y…

I think it depends on what you want to learn and what your definition of "learnt" is. The other day I realised I had no idea how DNA and life works. I guess I studied it at high school (25 years ago), but maybe it didn't go into much detail or it just didn't click. So I asked ChatGPT to explain it to me, I came up with my own mental model from it's explanation, told it that, then it corrected me where I misunderstood…

Or do you? Cause if you went back and forth with ChatGPT for an hour it definitely hallucinated and lied to you at some point. Maybe consider using something else like Brilliant.org if you want to learn a topic, yanno, so you don’t propagate whatever hallucination from ChatGPT to your kids.
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