[wvenable]

You've described school. You get told about things and given a hammer to leverage what you've been told.

An LLM absolutely shortens the research part of learning. If I had a human of who had a moderate level of skill who would endlessly answer all my questions, the result would be the same.

You might have a point when it comes to software development because the AI can tell you things but it also just do them for you, at which point, you've learned a lot less. But for non-software things I have to learn things so I can then go and do them.

But even for software development, I've learned a lot of esoteric crap to get interop working on projects that I will probably quickly forget just the same as when I had to spend hours skimming through stackoverflow.

[fzeroracer]

> An LLM absolutely shortens the research part of learning

No, it doesn't. Because in any scenario where you are using AI in a potentially appropriate manner, you are verifying every single source it spits out and cross referencing everything it says. If you do not do this you are failing the process entirely.

[wvenable]

If I ask my buddy for help, I don't cross reference everything he says either even though he could just as easily be wrong. A lot of what I'm talking about is every day stuff not nuclear physics.

LLMs are not even close to that unreliable.

[fzeroracer]

If I ask my buddy for help I'm not considering that part of research or learning I consider that leaning on their potential expertise. You're not learning shit on how to build a house just because you ask your friend to build one for you.

If we're talking about research as in actually attempting to learn and get to the heart of a matter then yes. You should be cross referencing everything.

[wvenable]

My point is if you ask your friend/LLM how to build a house and then build a house then you've learned how to build a house.

I've build a lot of "houses" recently that I wouldn't have attempted if I didn't have a friend/LLM to ask.

[fzeroracer]

And I see people say this, that they've built a house but what they've built is something that structurally collapses immediately and fails due to problems that even an average person would've avoided had they learned how to build a house.

So did you build a house, or did you build a house?

[wvenable]

How can I argue about such a hypothetical?!? If I ask an LLM or my mother-in-law about how to get wine out of the carpet, and I get wine out of the carpet, maybe I have done it wrong and my house will burn down! Who knows?! Your argument is meaningless; there's nothing anyone can say to that.

[hodder]

Spot on analogy.

[cryo32]

You probably just built a shanty town according to a professional.

[wvenable]

What's your point? I could just not ask an LLM and not do anything. Is that better somehow?