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Comment by dagw | Hacker News Reader

Apparently from what I've read, universities are already starting to see this. More and more students are incapable of acquiring knowledge from books. Once they reach a point where the information they need cannot be found in ChatGPT or YouTube videos they're stuck.

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I wonder if Google Gemini is trained on all the millions of books that were scanned and that Google were not able to be used for their original purposes?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books

As other AI companies argue, copyright doesn't apply when training, it should give Google a huge advantage to be able to use all the worlds books they scanned.

Interesting if that's literally true since you have to _search_ YouTube, unless maybe people ask chatgpt what search terms to use.

It's about putting together individual pieces of information to come up with an idea about something. You could get 5 books from the library and spend an afternoon skimming them, putting sticky notes on things that look interesting/relevant, or you could hope that some guy on Youtube has already done that for you and has a 7 minute video summarizing whatever it is you were supposed to be looking up.

I am unable to acquire knowledge from the books since 35 years ago. Had to get by with self-directed learning. The result is patchy understanding, but lot of faith in myself

If AI can't find it, how do we?

By using your brain and a web search engine / searchable book index in your library / time or even asking a question somewhere public?

If it's been indexed by a Web search engine surely it's in a training dataset. The most popular Web search engines are the least efficient way of finding answers these days.

But just because it's in the training set doesn't mean the model retains the knowledge. It acquires information that is frequently mentioned and random tidbits of everything else. The rest can be compensated with the 20 web searches models more get. That's great when you want a react dropdown, but for that detail that's mentioned in one Russian-speaking forum and can otherwise only be reduced by analysing the leaked Windows XP source code AI will continue to struggle for a bit.

Of course AI is incredibly useful both for reading foreign language forums and for analysing complex code bases for original research. AI is great for supercharging traditional research

The actual intelligence in artificial intelligence is zero. Even idiots can do better than AI, if they want. Lazy idiots, on the other end...

"if they want" and "lazy" are the load-bearing phrases in your response. If we take them at face value, then it follows that:

1) There are no idiots who want to do better than AI, and/or

2) All idiots are lazy idiots.

The reason we're even discussing LLMs so much in the first place, is AI can and does things better than "idiots"; hell, it does things better than most people, period. Not everything in every context, but a lot of things in a lot of contexts.

Like run-of-the-mill short-form writing, for example. Letters, notices, copywriting, etc. And yes, it even codes better than general population.

We don't know what intelligence is, so we don't know that.

We need to optimise for lazy though — lazy programmers are the best! Idiots, though, less so.

How does this make sense when you can put any book inside of an LLM?

Learning isn't just about rote memorisation of information but the continuous process of building your inquisitive skills.

An LLM isn't a mind reader so if you never learn how to seek the answers you're looking for, never curious enough to dig deeper, how would you ever break through the first wall you hit?

In that way the LLM is no different than searching Google back when it was good, or even going to a library.

Just because you can put information into an LLM, doesn't mean you can get it out again.

retarded

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