[intended]

I WANT to be excited by LLMs.

But it has been so frustrating to listen to the hype and then contend with the actual results.

How bizarre is this tool, that I have been forced to conduct interviews across all domains, to see where people are having actual productivity gains?

I never had to do this with the iPhone, or with word, excel or any number of cool technological inventions.

The early internet empowered people, and we created some of our most amazing collaborative intellectual achievements like wikipedia.

Today, aside from being built by harvesting the IP of people, LLMs are shuttering our entire information economy. Sites I go to for info are either going behind paywalls or shutting down because they are being rapaciously harvested by bots.

Yes, history rhymes and repeats; however there are other tunes that have been played that sound similar but end differently.

[JKCalhoun]

I have been treating LLMs as a research assistant (and sometimes tutor) as I have explored analog computing for a hobbyist project that I have been working on for 6 months now.

To my mind, saying the AI will cause me to forget how to learn is equivalent to suggesting that going to school for instruction will cause me to forget how to learn.

[sph]

> equivalent to suggesting that going to school for instruction will cause me to forget how to learn

I see plenty of “classically trained” people (as opposed to self-taught) that have no idea how to learn things on their own and at their pace.

I mean, in the era of youtube and the internet, any subreddit is filled with posts like ‘where do I start with X?’ or a endless rehashing of the same beginner questions from people that are not even able to use Google.

I am biased as a self-taught person that dropped out of high school, and it is baffling to see people have forgot how to learn things by themselves past 10 years old. There wouldn’t be so many people with student debts if that were the case.