I don't know this applies to you, but I've had several friends who convinced themselves they're exploring the frontiers of science, and it always turns out that their conversations spiraled into some sort of weird quantum-metaphysical gobbledygook.

LLMs are sycophants, and in long conversations, their sycophancy produces a positive feedback loop: the context window contains affirmations of incorrect interpretations / analogies, so the chatbot continues down that path because, well, that's the most likely completion of previous text. And before you know it, you're discovering the hidden fabric of the universe, which is always some Minkowski fractal spacetime tensor lattice manifold with subharmonic DNA nanotubes.

That is to say, unless you have a robust way to evaluate what you're learning, and to confirm that you're actually learning, I'd tread carefully.

are you learning new things or are you just reading LLMs output? there might be some overlap, but those are very distinct activities

> Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old.

You aren't learning anything. Learning involves doing.

We've known this for ages: simply reading a maths book without drilling on the problems will not get a student to pass.

Best case scenario, you're reading stuff. For users of coding agents, they're not even doing that.

You're not learning them. You're being told about them and given a hammer to leverage them with mediocre to low skill level.

Learning requires a huge time investment. Using an LLM doesn't shorten that.

You think you're learning things at a pace you never imagined, but all you're really doing is learning superficially. You never really go deep into things, and it "seems" like you're learning faster, but how much can you actually recall of the things you learned? By the way, I'm saying all this because this has been my experience. I can prompt like no tomorrow asking questions, but I forget most of it because it's not deep learning. I'm not actually thinking myself, I'm allowing the AI to think for me.

How exactly is AI helping you with sports? Have you become a better athlete? Have you learned more about the strategy of each sport from the perspective of a coach for example? Care to elaborate?

I actually agree with you; I definitely feel I'm able to use LLMs to learn and explore concepts, but I've always been a self-taught and highly motivated person in the first place. Everything technical that I know, I know because I put in the work to learn it on my own. That's why I wish these tools were being advertised as models that help you do BETTER work, not MORE work. They're using them as excuses to lay off swaths of workers, instead of allowing them to uplift people's skillsets. And, of course, it invited a whole mass of individuals who use them to artificially elevate their perceived skills.

I have the same experience, but there's another dimension I want to throw out: breadth versus depth.

I've wildly increased my breadth of learning. If I'm ever curious about anything, even a passing thought, I can scratch that itch in a way I never could before.

But am I going deep? Acquiring new skills? Eh... I usually go far enough to unblock myself and/or settle a curiosity. I don't think that's good or bad, but it does present a certain set of tradeoffs that are different than going deep.

Are you actually learning them or are you just letting the AI kinda do them for you? There was a time I knew how to take a path integral, but kinda-sorta knowing what something is and how to ask a calculator for it is different than knowing yourself.

>Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old

Are you learning, or are you simply consuming?

I think we're missing long form studies that show if it's possible to learn deeply from compressed AI generated summaries of topics.

Isn't this effectively the same argument an addict would put forward?

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