alt Hacker NewsYour curiosity is enabled but is it being best served? You are being fed a single perspective on every question, a singular world view. You do not have the serendipitous exposure to a broad range of ideas and opinions we experience as we meander through information.
You Google about why tungsten is in light bulbs, you find yourself on a website about the history of lightbulbs written by a hobbyist that has spent decades thinking about lightbulbs. You click around, link after link, your world is expanded to include this lightbulb fanatic’s.
Personally, I find LLM answers to questions completely devoid of the substance that actually matters to my curious mind. Sure, when I’m working and need a concrete answer to a specific problem, an LLM can be a great help, but for personal curiosity, to expand my world, they suck.
To me, what you’re describing sounds like learning lots of trivia, not expanding your understanding of the world.
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It increases signal to noise ratio in comparison to raw google results.
You might or might not miss that hobbyist web page. I can't say for certain, but I do know that most of my self learning explicitly includes going over the history of the topic.
Or you know, same scenario, but you are looking for information on how quanta work. You really can't make sense of the first 10 pages of google results, but you happen on "Motion Mountain" on the 11th page and you end up spending the next two years telling people the universe is made of little knots.
If that sounds like a pretty specific example, it's because it's a real one of someone I knew. I don't think the tool here is going to massively impact the quality. The person's judgement will play a way heavier role in that.
To each their own, I guess. If I find out that yarn works was a type of textile mill and spinning factory, I then read on about other parts of the textile industry in New England. Maybe how it relates to the progress of steam engines vs. hydro power, or its place in the Industrial Revolution overall. It gives me an on-ramp to understand one thing and branch out to others. I don't know what AI models or agents you're using, but they must be weak sauce. Mine give me sharp and specific answers, at least 2-5 references per question, and I can branch out to that lovingly curated blog, to Wikipedia, to local historical societies and their curated collections. Et cetera.
I end up reading more sources and exploring more things. If you want to dismiss that as "trivia," or dismiss the topics I want to know about, okay. But it's important to me. You could equally deride search engines as wanton seas of advertising, and tell me I need to head to a library and its paper-based card catalog, the only true and proper way to do research. :shrug:
It's true there are a lot of weak models out there. I tend to use the frontier models, and they are great research assistants IME.