In just a hundred years, we were able to successfully develop a device that has all of the information in the entire world contained in it, handheld and portable, which has expanded our technological capabilities. This has also created an incredibly frustrating problem for us in our daily lives. We have an exponential amount more information to deal with now than we ever had before. Back in the '70s or '80s you wanted to know something, you go to the library, watch a documentary that’s on a DVD. Now? You have to navigate the terrifyingly bad search engines that are out there today like Bing and Google which are increasingly getting more and more unreliable. You have to take notes which are frustratingly complicated, and unless you are some extraordinary gifted college student who is a master at taking good notes, your notes will probably be not perfect… Then you have to search all of the information available to you, to finally make some sort of decision. Even if you know what you want to say or what you want to communicate, you have to put it into the right format…
This is exhausting. Dealing with this much information, synthesizing it, changing the format and display of it, trying to figure out how to work with so much information every single day of your life. It is insanity! A language learning model can actually help you, especially if you train it or use roles to help you shape the learning model into whatever you want it to be doing. For example if I want to put together some well organized notes on Tableau, that awful piece of garbage technology that exists out there in the world today, I can simply use my local llama 3.1 AI model that I have personally trained with a ton of my notes and information, and get any sort of information out of it that I need to in order to explain a very complex topic to someone else easily. The web is not accessed at all, everything is stored locally on my own device. Miraculous and lifts a huge ass load off of my shoulders because now I don’t have to go and sift through my notes and spend a day and a half trying to figure out how to word things and then putting it into a PowerPoint that’s only going to be used for 5 minutes…
This is what I think The technology should be used for. Not artificial intelligence, no one is ever replaced in this process, And as you can tell, I am utilizing the technology to make myself better, augment my capabilities.
Evaluating sources and consolidating the information they contain into concise, organized structures is how your brain learns. The notes aren’t the goal of note taking. They’re simply the process you use to internalize the information.
Yes but the point I’m getting at is that at a certain point, it’s impossible to retain more information or actually ideal not to retain it at all. But to have it accessible at any moment without straining yourself. Look at the youth today and how much they are struggling in school. Grades are down more than ever, education industry is crippled right now. How in the world are they supposed to keep up with all the information out there, seeing how they are at a disadvantage compared to when we were their age? It is almost impossible to fathom how they could do that. So language learning models can help with synthesizing information, and closing the intelligence gap. Would you really want someone who had a much worse education and is marginally less intelligent making critical, incredibly important decisions? Ideally, no. But what if you could augment them with additional information to make their decision making skills even better? That’s my exact point
They’re struggling because they’re not learning, or learning how to learn.
LLM outputs aren’t reliable. Using one for your research is doing the exact opposite of the steps that are required to make good decisions.
The prerequisite to making a good decision is learning the information relevant to the decision, then you use that information to determine your options and likely outcomes of those paths. The internalization of the problem space is fundamental to the process. You need to actually understand the space you’re making a decision about a space in order to make a good decision. The effort is the point.