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A comment on Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms. Parent comment

Re:Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on ... by jneagu on Sunday October 13, 2024 @01:21PM (#41829749)
I am very curious to see how this is going to impact STEM education. Such a big part of an engineer's education happens informally by asking peers, teachers, and strangers questions. Different groups are more or less likely to do that consistently (e.g. https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jmbe.00100-21), and it can impact their progress. I've learned most from publicly asking "dumb" questions.
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Re:Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on ... by ocular-rockular on Sunday October 13, 2024 @01:29PM (#41829812)
It won't. If you look at advanced engineering/mathematics material online it is abysmal in quality of actually "explaining" the content. Most of the learning and understanding of intricacies happens via dialogue with professors/mentors/colleagues/etc.

That said, when that is not available, LLMs do an excellent job or rubber ducky-ing complicated topics.

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Re:Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on ... by jneagu on Sunday October 13, 2024 @01:39PM (#41829892)
To your latter point - that’s where I think most of the value of LLMs in education is. They can explain code beyond the educational content that’s already available out there. They are pretty decent at finding and explaining code errors. Someone who’s ramping up their coding skills can make a lot of progress with those two features alone.
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Re:Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on ... by ocular-rockular on Sunday October 13, 2024 @03:51PM (#41830986)
Yeah... only downside is that it requires a level of competency to recognize when the LLM is shoveling shit instead of gold.
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Re:Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on ... by amarcheschi on Sunday October 13, 2024 @05:35PM (#41831840)
I've found chatgpt quite helpful in understanding some things that I couldn't figure out when approaching pytorch for an internship
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