[JimDabell]

> I'm also a researcher and agree wholeheartedly with the article.

The article says:

> Yet, every time I tried to get LLMs to perform novel research, they fail because they don’t have access to existing literature on the topic.

You say:

> LLMs can maybe help you sift through existing literature

> they can be used or background research in hypothesis generation by finding pairs of related terms in the literature

As far as I can see, these two positions are mutually exclusive. Aren’t you disagreeing with the article?

[tovej]

No, helping with chores is not the same as "performing research", it has limited utility for minor tasks, it is not essential and it does not even necessarily have a positive productivity impact. To illustrate the point, when I use vim to write LaTeX, would you say that vim is "performing research"?

[JimDabell]

The relevant part of what I quoted was not “performing research” it was “they don’t have access to existing literature”.

[tovej]

That part we also agree on, generating hypotheses is done on the basis of existing literature, lit review (& related reasoning) is done on the basis of existing literature. The blog author is talking about reasoning in the context of a new research topic.