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Or maybe that already happened decades ago with the Internet and search engines.

My (snarky) point is that I do not think LLMs have dramatically enabled the average person to grok (to gain a deep and intuitive understanding of) new topics, because I haven't observed the corresponding sea-change in (mostly online) people that I would expect to go with that.

To offer a competing hypothesis: LLMs are merely augmenting or replacing other routes that people may take to acquire facile knowledge. In addition, the fundamental way those tools operate limits them to imparting facile knowledge.

Arguably, but imho the difference between search engines and GPTs is akin to punch card coding vs modern IDE - theoretically the same activity, vastly different in practice.

For generating output, sure, but when it comes to "helping individuals grok any conceivable topic" like the original comment said, you're still bottlenecked by how fast you can read and understand text, so it won't make as much difference there.

Plus, from my experience, the more obscure topics, which are not easy to google, also tend to suffer the most from hallucinations when using LLMs. The topics which ChatGPT can explain perfectly usually have well-written explanations at the top of search results too.

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