4 ms·
That's not going to help you understand the subject material better. It's just going to assemble a facsimile of the lowest common denominator of other people on
by devmor 3y ago
That's not going to help you understand the subject material better. It's just going to assemble a facsimile of the lowest common denominator of other people on the internet talking about it. If anything, it will hurt your understanding and give you a false sense of knowledge.
- ben_w 3y agoGiven how well chatGPT can explain code, I'm reasonably confident it can do much better than the lowest common denominator of people on the internet talking about any given expert document. May well still give a false sense of knowledge, but that's a very common problem for all of us.
- devmor 3y agoAn LLM can reasonably explain code because code is both a closed, finite set of instructions and heavily explained in the training data that contains a vast number of learning materials. A novel scientific paper is much, much different than code.
- ben_w 3y ago> A novel scientific paper is much, much different than code. Sure, just not in a way that matters. Human language is a "closed, finite set" of symbols (to the same extent as code, at least), all of which are heavily explained in the training data that contains a vast number of learning materials. Science is about the novel things; but when the things are so novel the research has to invent new words to discuss these things, those new words come with explanations of what they mean.
- xcv123 3y agoIt is clear that you haven't tried this with GPT-4 You have an obsolete understanding of this technology and are putting yourself at a disadvantage.
- devmor 3y agoIt is clear that you do not understand how an LLM works if you believe it can explain a novel scientific paper to you with any reasonable degree of accuracy.
- jiggawatts 3y agoI’ve had paper authors confirm that the GPT 4 version is correct and more readable than their own writing.
- devmor 3y agoWhat papers, and were they on subjects that are widely explained already across the internet?
- xcv123 3y agoIt doesn't look up or use existing explanations of papers like some kind of internet or database search. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how it all works.
- devmor 3y agoThe fact that you don’t know that GPT was primarily trained on public crawler data and feel inclined to make authoritative comments on it, refuting people who do understand how an LLM works is exactly what I mean by “false sense of knowledge”.
- xcv123 3y agoOf course it was trained on public data, including academic papers and journals. Your point is demonstrably false. Go try it yourself.
- xcv123 3y agoBTW the idea was you paste the article into ChatGPT and ask it to explain the text in laymans terms. Maybe that was the point which you misunderstood. Of course it won't know about papers that it hasn't been trained on.