[avn2109]

LLM's are useful because they can recommend several famous/well-known books (or even chapters of books) that are relevant to a particular topic. Then you can also use the LLM to illuminate the inevitable points of confusion and shortcomings in those books while you're reading and synthesizing them.

Pre-LLM, even finding the ~5 textbooks with ~3 chapters each that decently covered the material I want was itself a nontrivial problem. Now that problem is greatly eased.

[ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7]

> they can recommend several famous/well-known books

They can recommend many unknown books as well, as language models are known to reference resources that do not exist.

[nilamo]

And then when you don't find it, you move onto the next book. Problem solved!

[throwaway290]

Or you know what, just google books about some topic and get a list of... real books recommended by people with names and reputations? Its truly incredible!

[nilamo]

And now we get all the way back to the OP, and having so little knowledge on the subject that you don't know what to Google, or which forums are trustworthy for that topic. And so the wheel turns...

[throwaway290]

if you need a word you don't know then read overview of the bigger topic, or yoloing google with approximate queries usually helps find the word...

[jennyholzer]

I strongly prefer curated recommendations from a person with some sort of credibility in a subject area that interests me.