[monkeynotes]

The paradigm is changed beyond that. Exams are irrelevant if intelligence is freely available to everyone. Anyone who can ask questions can be a doctor, anyone can be an architect. All of those duties are at the fingertips of anyone who cares to ask. So why make people take exams for what is basically now common knowledge? An exam certifies you know how to do something, well if you can ask questions you can do anything.

[madamelic]

> why make people take exams for what is basically now common knowledge?

The only thing that has changed is the speed of access. Before LLMs went mainstream, you could buy whatever book you wanted and read it. No one would stop you from it.

You still should have a professional look over the work and analyze that it is correct. The output is only as good as the input on both sides (both from the training data and the user's prompt)

[freejazz]

Doctors don't just ask LLMs for answers to questions so it's really a mystery as to what you think makes these people into doctors the second they start asking an LLM medical questions... It's akin to saying someone was a doctor when browsing WebMD

[monkeynotes]

The doctor is the LLM, lol.

I don't think we can/should do this on today's LLMs, but if we continue advancing in the same way, and as-good-as-human reliability is achieved, the intelligence of a doctor is in your pocket whenever you want it.

And just like you say you know addresses because you have an address book, you'll know medicine because you have it immediately on-tap. Instead of holding all of that in your own memory, instead of having to use your own critical thinking (or lack thereof), just offload it to the LLM in your pocket.

We do this all the time with tools. Who now knows how to cut down a tree but lives in a house made of milled trees? There are so many lost skills that we defer to either other people or machines and yet each individual lives with the benefit of all those skills.

Tools make cognitive bypasses for us to benefit from. When we can make intelligence a tool, I assume we can offload a lot of our intelligence, or at least acquire new intelligence we didn't have before.

WebMD is the same whoever looks at it. An LLM can adapt to your clarification questions and meet you on your comprehension level. So no, it's not as naive as you are insisting.

[asylteltine]

Lmao do you know doctors? I mean really, do you personally know doctors? Of course they will and I guarantee you they already do. It’s not a matter of stupidity or incompetence it’s a matter of time and ease of access. Of course people will do the fastest thing available to them how could I blame them? The cat is out of the bag.

[freejazz]

I don't think you really got the point and you seem to be projecting your own personal feelings on doctors into this conversation in a fashion that I do not think is going to result in a productive conversation by continuing this discussion with you.

[monkeynotes]

Whether the doctor's data for making informed decisions is in their head, or in the computer at their desk is immaterial. Where you fetch your knowledge from, either from wet-ware, or hardware doesn't have any net difference in the real world.

The skill today is the application of that knowledge. If an LLM can provide the data context, and the application advice and you perform what it says, congrats you now have a doctor's brain on tap for your own personal usage. The doctor has it in their head, you have it in a device. The net differences are immaterial IMO.

[oblio]

That's not how knowledge works. Think of exams where you could have your textbooks and use them.

[monkeynotes]

Yes, but a textbook has fixed knowledge that cannot be queried and discussed. That's why you need the doctor to interpret and apply.

An LLM is the doctor in your pocket. It's yours to use, and whether it is in your head (like a doctor who had to take exams to prove they really had it in their head), or in your pocket makes no difference in your ability to achieve a task.

"Intelligence: the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills."

Well, if I can acquire knowledge from the LLM, and apply it using the LLM's instructions, I now have achieved intelligence without doing an exam.

Problem is, I can lose my LLM. A doctor could lose their mental faculties though.