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Study mode

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Re: Study mode

#681

Post by aleph_minus_one »

jacobedawson wrote: post #379

An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment. Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical. A tireless, capable, well-versed assistant on call 24/7 is an autodidact's dream. I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism. Learning something online 5…

> Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content

Also using OpenAI as a tutor means trawling incorrect content.

Re: Study mode

#682

Post by Paradigma11 »

bradleyjg wrote: post #514
jimmaswell wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're wondering if the answer the AI gave you is correct or something it hallucinated Regular research has the same problem finding bad forum posts and other bad sources by people who don't know what they're talking about, albeit usually to a far lesser degree depending on the subject.

The difference is that llms mess with our heuristics. They certainly aren’t infallible but over time we develop a sense for when someone is full of shit. The mix and match nature of llms hides that.

You need different heuristics for LLMs. If the answer is extremely likely/consistent and not embedded in known facts alarm bells should go off.

A bit like the tropes in movies where the protagonists get suspicious because the antagonists agree to every notion during negotiations because they will betray them anyway.

The LLM will hallucinate a most likely scenario that conforms to your input/wishes.

I do not claim any P(detect | hallucination) but my P(hallucination | detect) is pretty good.

Re: Study mode

#683

Post by miningape »

ubercow13 wrote: post #671
miningape wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if you were right, the LLM is wrong. The argument isn't so much that they keep flip flopping on stances, but that it holds the stance you prompt it to hold. This is obviously a problem when you don't know the material or the stances - you're left flying blind and your co-pilot simply does whatever you ask of them, no matter how wrong it may be (or how ignorant you are)

Because in this case it held the opposite stance to my prompt and explained where I had misunderstood. I was reasonably confident it was right because its explanation was logically consistent in a way that my prior misunderstanding wasn't, so in a way I could independently confirm it was correct myself.

But this is also again the danger of having an advanced bullshit generator - of course it sounds reasonable and logical, that's what it is designed to output. It's not designed to output actually reasonable and logical text.

I do appreciate that it's not a hard rule: things can be cross referenced and verified, etc. but doesn't that also kind of eliminate (one of) the point(s) in using an LLM when you still have to google for information or think deeply about the subject.

Re: Study mode

#684

Post by deviation »

Unless they are transparent with us in detailing why the technology behind this is different to a slightly altered system prompt... Then I will assume OpenAI is just trying to stay relevant.

Re: Study mode

#685

Post by wizzwizz4 »

ziotom78 wrote: post #537
ramraj07 wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly did 2025 AI hallucinate for you? The last time I've seen a hallucination from these things was a year ago. For questions that a kid or a student is going to answer im not sure any reasonable person should be worried about this.

Just a couple of days ago, I submitted a few pages from the PDF of a PhD thesis written in French to ChatGPT, asking it to translate them into English. The first 2-3 pages were perfect, then the LLM started hallucinating, putting new sentences and removing parts. The interesting fact is that the added sentences were correct and generally on the spot: the result text sounded plausible, and only a careful comparison of…

Transformer models are excellent at translation, but next-token prediction is not the correct architecture for it. You want something more like seq2seq. Next token prediction cares more about local consistency (i.e., going off on a tangent with a self-consistent but totally fabricated "translation") than faithfulness.

Re: Study mode

#686

Post by lucumo »

lucumo wrote: post #679
outadoc wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Me: What is 34234 times 554833? > ChatGPT: 34234 × 554833 = 1,899,874,522. > Me: That's wrong. The actual answer is 18994152922. > ChatGPT: You're right, and thanks for the correction. Indeed: 34,234 × 554,833 = 18,994,152,922. Sorry for the earlier mistake! How good of a teacher is that?

That one's cool. It started out wrong, so I just kept asking it "You sure?" until it decide to break out the calculator (Python). After that it's answer didn't change anymore and it was very sure. I tried again, in another chat with different numbers. And got the same pattern, and a message that my data analysis limit was exceeded. I guess that's why it doesn't always break out the calculator. In very limited testing…

Out of curiosity I went a bit deeper on this. I didn't expect it could do this without a calculator, because of the nature of the technology. But I still wanted to see what it would do. So I asked it:

> Me: I have these two numbers: 3452346 and 343424. Can you multiply them exactly, but without using Python or another calculator?

I proceeded to breakdown the smaller number in 300,000 + 40,000 + 3,000 + 400 + 20 + 4 and doing each step as follows:

> Calculate each partial product:

> 3,452,346 × 300,000 = ?

> Multiply 3,452,346 × 3 = 10,357,038

> Then multiply by 100,000 = 1,035,703,800,000

I checked each step, and it got those correct. It then added the partial results together.

> Final result: 1,185,618,472,704

> So: 3,452,346 × 343,424 = 1,185,618,472,704

> No Python, no calculator — just a bit of patience and the power of breakdown.

(That answer is correct.)

I am honestly surprised that it got that right. A teacher would need to break it down a bit further, both to calculate and to explain, but it's pretty much there. (I also didn't ask it to teach, just to do a calculation.)

Re: Study mode

#687

Post by miki123211 »

jacobedawson wrote: post #379

An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment. Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical. A tireless, capable, well-versed assistant on call 24/7 is an autodidact's dream. I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism. Learning something online 5…

It's not just "stupid" questions.

In my experience, most educational resources are either slightly too basic or slightly too advanced, particularly when you're trying to understand some new and unfamiliar concept. Lecturers, Youtubers and textbook authors have to make something that works for everybody, which means they might omit information you don't yet know while teaching you things you already understand. This is where LLMs shine, if there's a particular gap in your knowledge, LLMs can help you fill it, getting you unstuck.

Re: Study mode

#688

Post by anupshinde »

I'm confused. My kid does this on my ChatGPT account all the time. What is new here?

I cannot emphasize how good a teacher ChatGPT is, until it misinforms (and human teachers also do). And it also stays open to questioning without making the student feel stupid for asking. The good part is that ChatGPT will accept a mistake, but a human teacher will get annoyed.

The only thing I keep reminding my kid is to keep the BS detector on and verify everything that ChatGPT says and never trust it blindly. (feels too similar to the "don't talk to strangers" advice)

Unrelated - check with kids and teenagers. Once, a teen told me, "AI is a dark evil force," and it's what their teachers told them.

Re: Study mode

#689

Post by amelius »

Can we also have "helpdesk mode"?

Right now when you ask an LLM to solve some problem, it immediately responds with many steps, whereas as a user I want to go through it step by step. It would be nice if the LLM provided the solution in that way. This also makes it less cumbersome to tell the LLM where the solution went wrong.

Re: Study mode

#690

Post by ben_w »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #638
jychang wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is why wikipedia is not a good resource and nobody should use it. Also why google is not a good resource, anybody can make a website. You should only trust going into a library and reading stuff from microfilm. That's the only real way people should be learning. /s

So, do you want to actually have a conversation comparing ChatGPT to Google and Wikipedia, or do you just want to strawman typical AI astroturfing arguments with no regard to the context above? Ironic as you are answering someone who talked about correcting a human who blindly pasted an answer to their question with no human verification.

> So, do you want to actually have a conversation comparing ChatGPT to Google and Wikipedia, or do you just want to strawman typical AI astroturfing arguments with no regard to the context above?

Dunno about the person you're replying to (especially given the irony re that linked reddit thread), but I would like to actually have a conversation (or even just a link to someone else's results) comparing ChatGPT to Google and Wikipedia.

I've met people who were proudly, and literally, astroturfing Wikipedia for SEO reasons. Wikipedia took a very long time to get close to reliable, editors now requiring citations for claims etc., and I still sometimes notice pairs of pages making mutually incompatible claims about the same thing but don't have the time to find out which was correct.

Google was pretty reliable for a bit, but for a while now the reliability of its results has been the butt of jokes.

That doesn't mean any criticisms of LLMs are incorrect! Many things can all be wrong, and indeed are. Including microfilm and books and newspapers of record. But I think it is fair to compare them — even though they're all very different, they're similar enough to be worth comparing.

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