3 ms·
I find ChatGPT incredibly useful to learn the vocabulary of an unfamiliar area. Often basic information in the area I know very little about can be found easily
by shmel 2y ago
I find ChatGPT incredibly useful to learn the vocabulary of an unfamiliar area. Often basic information in the area I know very little about can be found easily once you know the right keywords. Even if ChatGPT gets something wrong, it does pattern matching well enough to tell me something like "yes, there is a well-known concept that matches your vague noob description, it is called X". It works well in CS where I have an intuition there must be a mathematical abstraction/algorithm that solves my problem, but I don't know the name. Once I learn the keywords, I sometimes find an open-source library for that or at least a high-level description of the algorithm.
It is also great at answering stupid questions. Sometimes I read a wikipedia article and don't understand enough to make sense of it. If I was in uni, I would have asked a prof: "Sorry, it is probably a very stupid question, but why X? and what is Y actually?" ChatGPT can give me ELI5 at pretty much anything and is faster than googling.
- antihero 2y agoWhen learning a new thing it’s very good for compiling knowledge from lots of sources and laying it out in a good format. As long as it’s easy to verify when it screws up.
- thih9 2y agoThat is CS though; I’m not sure that would work with business advice, where problems can be less tangible or there can be no single or verifiable solution (nor library/algorithm). Unless this approach also helps in the context of business advice?
- shmel 2y agoI've never used it for business advice. But it is still useful to learn expert jargon if you want to find relevant discussions. For example, I use it to learn about DJing recently and yes, often it answers "it depends on your personal taste and the party you are playing, you can choose to do X, Y, Z, etc". Then I know that there is no right answer. ChatGPT learned to handle such multimodality to an extent, often it doesn't want to answer "just do X" in these situations even if I push it. Sometimes it gets a lot more precise if I give more context, like - How to compose a mix? What parts of the tracks should I play and what should I skip? - It depends on lots of factors <type of party, music genre, the crowd, etc>. There is no one size fits all answer. - Ok, suppose I am playing an early morning set of melodic techno at a houseparty for friends. What would you suggest? - Then your friends will probably be tired by the morning so it makes sense to insert more breakdowns, melodic techno is usually structured this way, hence blah blah blah. Or you can ask for examples. I often struggle with distinguishing closely related EDM subgenres: - Can you explain the difference between psybass and psybreaks? - <a vague description> - I still don't get it. Can you give me 5 iconic tracks in both? - Sure thing, here is the list: <..> Besides, there are open research problems in CS as well where there is no single solution. Then I learn the vocabulary and google recent papers on this subject. I think fundamentally we have a lot more information available than a single person can ever handle. I find ChatGPT incredibly useful at navigating and summarizing this sea of information.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 2y agoThey're not necessarily good for advice, but you need a decent amount of business knowledge to run even a small business, and LLMs can help with all the noob questions you'll have if you're starting a company and never went to business school. "What's the difference between amortization and depreciation?" types of things. You could Google them, but you have to waste time skimming through a couple blogspam articles, but LLMs can explain the concept in an easy to digest way much faster.
- thih9 2y agoAre you using LLMs yourself like this in this context?