Every scientist I ever met (and myself included) has a backlog of papers to read that never seems to shrink. It really is not trivial to stay up to date on research, even in niche fields, considering the huge volume of research that is being produced.
It is not uncommon for me to read a recently published review and find 2-3 interesting papers in the lot. Plus the daily Google scholar alerts. It can definitely be beneficial to have a LLM summarize a paper. Of course, at this point, one should definitely decide "is this worth reading more carefully?" and actually read at least some parts if needed.
I grew up using windows and was a fan of it, but now I am a contrarian because of how shitty it has become.
The fact that it is widely used is not an argument that it is good. It is widely used because of existing market share and reluctance of change by people.
What's sad is that there's so much of that at this site. This page in particular is a disaster, and what we're actually seeing a lot of at HN is claims that real humans are bots. And the people who make these accusations are certain of their validity.
Have you considered that this suspicion is because the number of obvious bots has exploded in the last half year or so, particularly after OpenClaw became the latest fad?
Start going to the profiles of every comment from a green account you see for a week and you’ll see how bad it is.
There will be friendly fire but unfortunately that’s to be expected when you click the top comment in a thread and realize an account has been posting 100% slop for months.
True, and they were right about it when they said that. They wouldn't be right anymore, because the Internet has evolved. The same might happen to LLMs, but currently one would be right to call LLM output "slop".
Depending on the criticism at the time, they were probably wrong at the time and are correct now. There were always trolls and bad people but at least there were no mega-corp playing with people's minds.
> Read the papers, comprehend the papers, don't make someone else's computer do it for you
Why not?
Personally, I don't have the specialized knowledge, nor the time needed, to read and understand papers outside my own 2-3 domains. LLMs do. And I appreciate what they can do for me. They do it better, faster, and more accurately than most 'popular science', provide better coverage and also provide the ability to interact with the material to any degree or depth that I care to, better than any article.
It would be silly to pass up this capability to make my life better simply because random folks on the Internet disparage the quality of the output (contrary to my own experience) and make hand-wavy points about 'someone else's computer) while offering no credible or useful alternative :)
> How do you evaluate the quality of a summary of a paper you do not have the knowledge to read and understand?
Tough question. I think the straightforward answer is that you can't.
That said, there is some confidence gained in an LLM's abilities based on its performance on papers in domains that I do understand. Yes, it's not going to be the same across all domains, but the frontier labs do publish capability scores across different domains, and that helps scrutinize the answers it provides, and how much salt to take with those.
I wonder if you have asked the same LLMs to explain or summarize a paper in one of your fields and see if it still makes sense.
It could be that the LLMs are good at stringing words together in a way that seems reasonable when you are not an expert yourself, much like people from other fields seem very knowledgeable until you compare many of them or hear/see them talk with each other.
> I wonder if you have asked the same LLMs to explain or summarize a paper in one of your fields and see if it still makes sense.
I have, and it does, hence my confidence in its ability to do the same in other domains. Depending on what you're using it for, it is advisable to maintain some level of quality control (spot checks, sampling, deep dives, more rigorous continuous review) as in any process control.
But it's true. Microsoft's reputation is in the toilet. After everything from the ICC sanctions to the AI spam in Windows to this month's Patch Tuesday incident, everyone knows to avoid Microsoft products like their life depends on it.
But if you want an actionable idea here's one: make it a hundred times cheaper, or free. People use Oracle Cloud because it's free, even though Oracle is even worse than Microsoft. If you want people to use it, you know what to do.
So you can either keep a tag on your stuff that lets anyone know where you are at all times, or just not misplace your keys. It really doesn't seem that hard to not use something this privacy intrusive if that's your threat model.
That's not the complaint at all - the complaint is that, because of the anti-stalking measures added at the original launch, the AirTags can't be used to track stolen items because the thieves will be notified that they are being "stalked".
Could you be any more patronizing? Maybe there's a few people you haven't alienated yet.
I don't like or use Tiktok, but clearly it provides some value to the people who do. Telling people to stop using it without even attempting to address what benefit (perceived or actual) it provides is self-defeating advice.
Valid. I think I have such an ingrained different set of assumptions (a pub being just another kind of place for food, and "going to" anything involving a form of transportation) that that didn't even occur to me.
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