How does the entire textual corpus of say, new York times compare to all novels? Each article is a page of text, maybe two at most? There certainly are an awful lot of articles. But it's hard to imagine it is much more than a couple hundred novels. There must be thousands of novels released each year

▲

Freak_NL 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Like apples to oranges.

LLMs are (apparently) massively used to get information about topics in the real world. Novels aren't going to be much help there. Journalism, particularly in written form, provides a fount of facts presented from different angles, as well as opinions, and it was all there free for the taking…

Wikipedia provides the scantest summary of that, fora and social media give you banter, fake news, summaries of news, and a whole lot of shaky opinions, at best. Novels give you the foundations of language, but in terms of knowledge nothing much beyond what the novel is about.

▲

olalonde 2 hours ago | parent [-]

LLMs can get up to date information from primary sources - no journalists required.

▲

PopAlongKid 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't understand how LLMs can ask questions at a press conference.

	▲	olalonde 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Startup idea right there.

▲

ajam1507 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The primary source for most news is journalism.

	▲	NiloCK 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		In context, primary source means the subject of the article (the thing the journalist is writing about). Journalism is by definition a secondary source. (Notwithstanding edge cases like articles reporting directly on the news industry itself.)

▲

none2585 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't think an LLM can have secret human sources that provide them with confidential information anonymously. Not all news shows up on Twitter.

▲

freedomben 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Primary sources can and often are, very biased. Journalists are (supposed to be) doing fact checks and gathering multiple sources from all sides. Modern journalism is in a terrible state, but still important.

Imagine if all info about Facebook came from Facebook...