[valenterry]

I mean, even in the absence of knowledge of the existence of text searching algorithms (where I'm from we learn that in university) just a simple web search would have gotten you there as well no? Maybe would have taken a few minutes longer though.

[callc]

Extremely likely, yes. In this case, since it was an unknown unknown at the time, the LLM nicely explaining that this class of algorithms exists was nice, then I could immediately switch to Wikipedia to learn more (and be sure of the underlying information)

I think of LLMs as an autocomplete of the web plus hallucinations. Sometimes it’s faster to use the LLM initially rather than scour through a bunch of sites first.