alt Hacker NewsThis article matches my experience as well. Chatting with LLM has helped me to crystalize ideas I had before and explore relevant topics to widen the understanding. Previously, I wouldn't even know where to begin with when getting curious about something, but ChatGPT can tell you if your ideas have names, if they were explored previously, what primary sources there are. It's like a rabbit hole of exploring the world, a more interconnected one where barriers of entry to knowledge are much lower. It even made me view things I previously thought of as ultra boring in different, more approachable manner - for example, I never liked writing, school essays were a torture, and now I may even consider doing that out of my own will.
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I'm not great with math beyond high school level. But I am very interested in, among many things, analog synthesiser emulations. The "zero delay filter" was a big innovation in the mid 2000s that led to a big jump in emulation accuracy.
I tried to understand how they work and hit a brick wall. Recently I had a chat with an LLM and it clicked. I understand how the approximation algorithm works that enables solving for the next sample without the feedback paradox of needing to know it's value to complete the calculation.
Just one example of many.
It's similar to sitting down with a human and being able to ask questions that they patiently answer so you can understand the information in the context of what you already know.
This is huge for students if educational institutions can get past the cheating edge of the double edged sword.
I think the best existing "product" analogy for LLM's is coffee.
Coffee is a universally available, productivity enhancing commodity. There are some varieties certainly, but at the end of the day, a bean is a bean. It will get the job done. Many love it, many need it, but it doesn't really cost all that much. Where people get fancy is in all the fancy but unnecessary accoutrements for the brewing of coffee. Some choose to spend a lot on appliances that let you brew at home rather than relying on some external provider. But the quality is really no different.
Apparently global coffee revenue comes out to around $500B. I would not be surprised if that is around what global AI revenue ends up being in a few years.
In the early 2000s Wikipedia used to fill that role. Now it's like you have an encyclopedia that you can talk to.
What I'm slightly worried about is that eventually they are going to want to monetize LLMs more and more, and it's not going to be good, because they have the ability to steer the conversation towards trying to get you to buy stuff.