alt Hacker NewsThis is my take as well.
There was a story a couple days ago about a neural network built on a single photonic chip. I fed the paper to ChatGPT and was able to use it to develop a much more meaningful and comprehensive understanding of what the chip actually delivered, how it operated, the fundamental operating principles of core components and how it could be integrated into a system.
The fact that I now have a tireless elucidator on tap to help explore a topic (hallucination caveats notwithstanding) actually increases my motivation to explore dense technical information and understanding of new concepts.
The one area where I do think it is detrimental is my willingness to start writing content on a provebial blank sheet of paper. I explore the topic with ChatGPT to get a rough outline, maybe some basic content and then take it from there.
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> (hallucination caveats notwithstanding)
This is a pretty big caveat to the goal of
> develop a much more meaningful and comprehensive understanding
Which is still my biggest issue with LLMs. The little I use of them, the answers are still confidently wrong a lot of the time. Has this changed?
On the other hand you might be getting worse at reading those papers yourself.
The more youngsters skip the hassle of banging their heads on some topic the less able they will be to learn at later age.
There's more to learning than getting information, it's also about processing it (which we are offloading to LLMs). In fact I'd say that the whole point of going through school is to learn how to process and absorb information.
That might be the cognitive laziness.