4 ms·

Claude is like having my own college professor. I've learned more in the past month with Claude then I learned in the past year. I can ask questions repeatedly

Claude is like having my own college professor. I've learned more in the past month with Claude then I learned in the past year. I can ask questions repeatedly and get clarification as fine as a need it. Granted, Claude has limits, but its a game-changer. > I think the key to being successful here is to realize that you're still at the wheel as an engineer. The llm is there to rapidly synthesize the universe of information. Bingo. OP is like someone who is complaining about the tools, when they should be working on their talent. I have a LOT of hobbies (circuits, woodworking, surfing, playing live music, cycling, photography) and there will always be people who buy the best gear and complain that the gear sucks. (NOTE: I"m not implying claude is "the best gear", but it's a big big help.) I think the only problem with LLMs is synthesis of new knowledge is severely limited. They are great at explaining things others have explained, but suck hard at inventing new things. At least that's my experience with Claude: it's terrible as a "greenfield" dev.

yousoundawesome 2y ago
[flagged]
XenophileJKO 2y ago
I would add though, that they can be very good at combining known concepts. Which can create a non-trivial set of "new knowledge".
- maybesomaybenot 2y ago
  Creating new knowledge from current knowledge is called "synthesis" (ancient term, nothing modern). I'm hoping you're right, it would be amazing.
KerrAvon 2y ago
How do you know it's accurate?
- selcuka 2y ago
  They are reasonably accurate, and no tutor is perfect. How do you know your college professor is accurate?
  - malfist 2y ago
    My college professor has certifications and has passed tests that weren't in their training data. My college professor was also willing to say "I don't know, ask me next class"
    - Eisenstein 2y ago
      What do you consider 'not in its training data'? I just asked Claude a question I am pretty sure was not in its training data. * https://i.imgur.com/XjvImeT.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/XjvImeT.jpeg
      - selcuka 2y ago
        That's almost in the training data: https://www.quora.com/How-many-Humans-can-we-fit-on-the-Moon https://www.quora.com/How-many-Humans-can-we-fit-on-the-Moon
        Eisenstein 2y ago
        I guess coming up with a truly original question is tougher that it seems. Any ideas?
        ramses0 2y ago
        Ask them what's the airspeed velocity of a laden astronaut riding a horse on the moon... Edit: couldn't resist, and dammit!! Response: Ah, I see what you're doing! Since the Moon has no atmosphere, there’s technically no air to create any kind of airspeed velocity. So, the answer is... zero miles per hour. Unless, of course, you're asking about the speed of the horse itself! In that case, we’d just have to know how fast the astronaut can gallop without any atmosphere to slow them down. But really, it’s all about the fun of imagining a moon-riding astronaut, isn’t it?
BalinKing 2y ago
> Claude is like having my own college professor. I don't use Claude, so maybe there's a huge gap in reliability between it and ChatGPT 4o. But with that disclaimer out of the way, I'm always fairly confused when people report experiences like these—IME, LLMs fall over miserably at even very simple pure math questions. Grammatical breakdowns of sentences (for a major language like Japanese) are also very hit-or-miss. I could see an LLM taking the place of, like, an undergrad TA, but even then only for very well-trod material in its training data. (Or maybe I've just had better experiences with professors, making my standard for this comparison abnormally high :-P ) EDIT: Also, I figure this sort of thing must be highly dependent on which field you're trying to learn. But that decreases the utility of LLMs a lot for me, because it means I have to have enough existing experience in whatever I'm trying to learn about so that I can first probe whether I'm in safe territory or not.
- joseda-hg 2y ago
  Major in the context of Japanese is rough, I can see a significant drop in quality when interacting with the same model in say Spanish vs English For as rich a culture the Japanese have, there's only about 1XX million speakers and the size of the text corpus really matters here, the couple billion of English speakers are also highly motivated to choose English over anything else because Lingua Franca has homefield advantage To use LLM's efectively you have to work with knowledge of their weaknesses, Math is a good example, you'll get better results from Wolphram Alpha even for the simple things, which is expected Broad reasoning and explanations tend to be better than overly specific topics, the more common a language, the better the response If a topic has a billion tutorials online, an LLM has a really high chance of figuring out first try Be smart with the context you provide, the more you actively constrain an LLM, the more likely it is to work with you I have friends that just use it to feed class notes to generate questions and probe it for blindspots until they're satisfied, the improvements on their grade s make it seem like a good approach, but they know that just feeding responses to the LLM isn't trustworthy, so they do and then they also check by themselves, the extra time valuable by itself, if just to improve familiarity with the subject
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  > LLMs fall over miserably at even very simple pure math questions They are language models, not calculators or logic languages like Prolog or proof languages like Coq. If you go in with that understanding, it makes a lot more sense as to their capabilities. I would understand the parent poster to mean that they are able to ask and rapidly synthesize information from what the LLM tells them, as a first start rather than necessarily being 100% correct on everything.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

yousoundawesome 2y ago

[flagged]

XenophileJKO 2y ago

I would add though, that they can be very good at combining known concepts. Which can create a non-trivial set of "new knowledge".

maybesomaybenot 2y ago
Creating new knowledge from current knowledge is called "synthesis" (ancient term, nothing modern). I'm hoping you're right, it would be amazing.

KerrAvon 2y ago

How do you know it's accurate?

selcuka 2y ago
They are reasonably accurate, and no tutor is perfect. How do you know your college professor is accurate?
- malfist 2y ago
  My college professor has certifications and has passed tests that weren't in their training data. My college professor was also willing to say "I don't know, ask me next class"
  - Eisenstein 2y ago
    What do you consider 'not in its training data'? I just asked Claude a question I am pretty sure was not in its training data. * https://i.imgur.com/XjvImeT.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/XjvImeT.jpeg
    - selcuka 2y ago
      That's almost in the training data: https://www.quora.com/How-many-Humans-can-we-fit-on-the-Moon https://www.quora.com/How-many-Humans-can-we-fit-on-the-Moon
      - Eisenstein 2y ago
        I guess coming up with a truly original question is tougher that it seems. Any ideas?
        ramses0 2y ago
        Ask them what's the airspeed velocity of a laden astronaut riding a horse on the moon... Edit: couldn't resist, and dammit!! Response: Ah, I see what you're doing! Since the Moon has no atmosphere, there’s technically no air to create any kind of airspeed velocity. So, the answer is... zero miles per hour. Unless, of course, you're asking about the speed of the horse itself! In that case, we’d just have to know how fast the astronaut can gallop without any atmosphere to slow them down. But really, it’s all about the fun of imagining a moon-riding astronaut, isn’t it?

BalinKing 2y ago

> Claude is like having my own college professor. I don't use Claude, so maybe there's a huge gap in reliability between it and ChatGPT 4o. But with that disclaimer out of the way, I'm always fairly confused when people report experiences like these—IME, LLMs fall over miserably at even very simple pure math questions. Grammatical breakdowns of sentences (for a major language like Japanese) are also very hit-or-miss. I could see an LLM taking the place of, like, an undergrad TA, but even then only for very well-trod material in its training data. (Or maybe I've just had better experiences with professors, making my standard for this comparison abnormally high :-P ) EDIT: Also, I figure this sort of thing must be highly dependent on which field you're trying to learn. But that decreases the utility of LLMs a lot for me, because it means I have to have enough existing experience in whatever I'm trying to learn about so that I can first probe whether I'm in safe territory or not.

joseda-hg 2y ago
Major in the context of Japanese is rough, I can see a significant drop in quality when interacting with the same model in say Spanish vs English For as rich a culture the Japanese have, there's only about 1XX million speakers and the size of the text corpus really matters here, the couple billion of English speakers are also highly motivated to choose English over anything else because Lingua Franca has homefield advantage To use LLM's efectively you have to work with knowledge of their weaknesses, Math is a good example, you'll get better results from Wolphram Alpha even for the simple things, which is expected Broad reasoning and explanations tend to be better than overly specific topics, the more common a language, the better the response If a topic has a billion tutorials online, an LLM has a really high chance of figuring out first try Be smart with the context you provide, the more you actively constrain an LLM, the more likely it is to work with you I have friends that just use it to feed class notes to generate questions and probe it for blindspots until they're satisfied, the improvements on their grade s make it seem like a good approach, but they know that just feeding responses to the LLM isn't trustworthy, so they do and then they also check by themselves, the extra time valuable by itself, if just to improve familiarity with the subject
satvikpendem 2y ago
> LLMs fall over miserably at even very simple pure math questions They are language models, not calculators or logic languages like Prolog or proof languages like Coq. If you go in with that understanding, it makes a lot more sense as to their capabilities. I would understand the parent poster to mean that they are able to ask and rapidly synthesize information from what the LLM tells them, as a first start rather than necessarily being 100% correct on everything.

deleted 2y ago

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