My experience with LLMs is that they are vastly superior to google at the moment for doing research on topics you know very little about. They make doing resear

My experience with LLMs is that they are vastly superior to google at the moment for doing research on topics you know very little about. They make doing research fun and productive again, in a way that google has failed at for over 15 years. I used to be able to google a topic I only vaguely knew existed, and after a few tries and scolling through 10’s of pages of results, I could find a term that would bring me much closer to the term of art that would crack open the topic for me and give me good results. That is nearly impossible today. Google simply doesn’t populate page 4 of a search term, and it doesn’t have booleans to filter down either. But with an LLM, I can poke and prod it until it gives me something that I can then use to reference real sources. LLMs also seems to be really good at giving sort of the average (modal?) answer on a topic, so I find it useful for trying to get an average understanding of something. One example I’ve found useful is getting it to interpret ambiguously worded datasheets. I don’t necessarily trust its answers, but it may show that I’m totally thinking about something wrong.