Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking
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Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking
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Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking
#2This article matches my experience as well. Chatting with LLM has helped me to crystalize ideas I had before and explore relevant topics to widen the understanding. Previously, I wouldn't even know where to begin with when getting curious about something, but ChatGPT can tell you if your ideas have names, if they were explored previously, what primary sources there are. It's like a rabbit hole of exploring the world, a more interconnected one where barriers of entry to knowledge are much lower. It even made me view things I previously thought of as ultra boring in different, more approachable manner - for example, I never liked writing, school essays were a torture, and now I may even consider doing that out of my own will.
Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking
#3Finally I can relate to someone’s experience. For me even playing with image generators has improved my imagination.
Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking
#4This article matches my experience as well. Chatting with LLM has helped me to crystalize ideas I had before and explore relevant topics to widen the understanding. Previously, I wouldn't even know where to begin with when getting curious about something, but ChatGPT can tell you if your ideas have names, if they were explored previously, what primary sources there are. It's like a rabbit hole of exploring the world,…
In the early 2000s Wikipedia used to fill that role. Now it's like you have an encyclopedia that you can talk to.
What I'm slightly worried about is that eventually they are going to want to monetize LLMs more and more, and it's not going to be good, because they have the ability to steer the conversation towards trying to get you to buy stuff.
Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking
#5I share the sentiment here about LLMs helping to surface personal tacit knowledge and the same time there was a popular post[1] yesterday about cognitive debt when using AI. It's hard not to be in agreement with both ideas.
Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking
#6Of course it has, I doubt this is uncommon.
All my childhood I dreamed of a magic computer that could just tell me straightforward answers to non-straightforward questions like the cartoon one in Courage the Cowardly Dog. Today it's a reality; I can ask my computer any wild question and get a coherent, if not completely correct, answer.
Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking
#7I agree that LLMs can be useful companions for thought when used correctly. I don’t agree that LLMs are good at “supplying clean verbal form” of vaguely expressed, half-formed ideas and that this results in clearer thinking.
Most of the time, the LLM’s framing of my idea is more generic and superficial than what I was actually getting at. It looks good, but when you look closer it often misses the point, on some level.
There is a real danger, to the extent you allow yourself to accept the LLM’s version of your idea, that you will lose the originality and uniqueness that made the idea interesting in the first place.
I think the struggle to frame a complex idea and the frustration that you feel when the right framing eludes you, is actually where most of the value is, and the LLM cheat code to skip past this pain is not really a good thing.
Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking
#8This article matches my experience as well. Chatting with LLM has helped me to crystalize ideas I had before and explore relevant topics to widen the understanding. Previously, I wouldn't even know where to begin with when getting curious about something, but ChatGPT can tell you if your ideas have names, if they were explored previously, what primary sources there are. It's like a rabbit hole of exploring the world,…
In the early 2000s Wikipedia used to fill that role. Now it's like you have an encyclopedia that you can talk to. What I'm slightly worried about is that eventually they are going to want to monetize LLMs more and more, and it's not going to be good, because they have the ability to steer the conversation towards trying to get you to buy stuff.
Enshittification is always inevitable in a capitalist world, but not always easy to predict how it will happen.
Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking
#9I can somewhat relate to this in the sense that LLMs help me explore different paths of my thought process. The only way to do this earlier was to actually sit down and write it all out and carefully look for gaps. But now the fast feedback loop of LLMs speeds up this process. At times it even shows some path which I hadn't thought of. Or it firms up a direction which I thought only had vague connection.
To take one concrete example, it helped me get a well rounded picture of how British despite having such low footprint in India (at their peak there were about 150K of them) were able to colonise it with 300+ million population.
Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking
#10This article matches my experience as well. Chatting with LLM has helped me to crystalize ideas I had before and explore relevant topics to widen the understanding. Previously, I wouldn't even know where to begin with when getting curious about something, but ChatGPT can tell you if your ideas have names, if they were explored previously, what primary sources there are. It's like a rabbit hole of exploring the world,…
In the early 2000s Wikipedia used to fill that role. Now it's like you have an encyclopedia that you can talk to. What I'm slightly worried about is that eventually they are going to want to monetize LLMs more and more, and it's not going to be good, because they have the ability to steer the conversation towards trying to get you to buy stuff.
It's also inevitable that better and better open source models will be distilled as frontier models advance.