They're incredibly more productive. LLMs are amplifiers, so where they'd have branched and tried out N things, they can easily try 5N pathways of RnD. LLMs are extending the frontiers of science fast -- math -> phy -> chem -> bio in that order.

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steve_adams_86 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

In my own experience, the only path I truly gain intellectual benefits is the one where I work closely with the LLM, test very narrow hypotheses, and leverage it for learning over producing.

Trying 5N paths is useful and sometimes yields interesting insights I’ll retain, but it’s not the rich, challenging, deeply engaging kind of process I find I need in order to develop useful knowledge and skills.

So yes it’s an accelerant for people who want stuff from me, but that doesn’t map directly to learning and building skills. I think that mismatching is really important.

	▲	chorsestudios 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		To help learn I use LLMs to generate practice exams for whatever I'm trying to learn, then on the questions I struggle with have the LLMs explain the logic and point out my mistakes. I haven't been in college for over a decade, this is just for topics I'm curious about and want to learn. For any serious topic I recommend auditing the practice exams with a different LLM than the one used to generate to help reduce hallucinations. Seems to work well for me. I quite like reading the "thought" processes shown by DeepSeek.

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cootsnuck an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm hearing different from PhDs. The bottleneck with much research isn't "trying out ideas" so much as it's all the bureaucratic minutiae, grants, mentoring PhD candidates, collaboration with other researchers, etc.

I've heard LLMs can be helpful in limited targeted ways. But not as some kind of "game changing" accelerant.

	▲	sandeepkd an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Understanding in what ways it can be useful and in what ways it can be counterproductive in long run requires a certain degree of experience itself.

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xadhominemx 13 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To me it is crazy that you are being downvoted. My experience in academia was that an incredible amount of time was devoted to data cleansing analysis, coding, etc., which were completely non-core to the actual underlying academic pursuit.

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intended 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s creating a daemon and machine spirit filled world of Warhammer 40k. We already scarcely understand how the world works, but LLM use actively degrades cognitive ability that way it is used by a majority of people (The bringing a forklift to gym analogy).

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ElProlactin an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The AI is among us.