I don't really understand the point of it. It seems like a very shallow replacement for skimming (or god forbid reading) the paper, without the benefit of absorbing any of the material yourself.

I have the same critique for a lot of AI tools. We're replacing the meaningful parts of content creation and consumption with a computer so we can pass it off as having created or understood it ourselves. It just seems pointless.

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skeptrune 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Sometimes you just want a quick answer to a question though. I agree that tools like this aren't something I'd use to consume some content I'm actually interested in or produce something I think of as high quality.

However, I also want to flag that the cool part about the agent loop is that it feels less like skimming since you can watch the LLM search, evaluate results, search again, evaluate results, and repeat until it's happy that it has enough information to actually answer.

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behnamoh 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Your comment got me thinking about what it really means to understand something. Is it just about remembering the facts or the ideas? Or is it more about being aware of them? I’ve watched a ton of YouTube videos and read a bunch of articles about physics, but I can’t remember how to derive those equations a few weeks later. So, I don’t feel like I really understand them. But if I have an idea about how to do it, how much of it is just memory, and how much is actually understanding the concept? That’s been a question I’ve been thinking about for a long time. With all the AI stuff, we’ve figured out how to deal with the memory part, so we don’t have to rely on our own memories as much. But that still leaves the question: what does understanding really mean?

	▲	dingnuts 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I've thought about this a lot in the context of "why do I need to learn facts when I can just look them up?" Understanding a concept means you are able to use it in higher order reasoning. Think about the rote practice necessary to build intuition in mathematics until you're able to use the concept being learned for the next concept which in turn relies on it. Once that intuition is built, that's understanding.

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BeetleB 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> It seems like a very shallow replacement for skimming

Actually, I think we have it all backwards. We're taught to skim because such tools didn't exist. Once (if!) they are reliable enough, skimming should become a dead art, like shorthand is.

One should know how to read well (in detail), when one needs to. Everything else can be delegated. Indeed, this is why people in high positions don't skim - they can afford secretaries and underlings to do the skimming for them.