Speaking from the perspective of someone still developing basic mathematical maturity and often lacking prerequisites, it’s very useful as a learning aid. For example, it significantly expanded the range of papers or technical results accessible to me. If I’m reading a paper containing unfamiliar math, I no longer have to go down the rabbit hole of tracing prerequisite dependencies, which often expand exponentially (partly because I don’t know which results or sections in the prerequisite texts are essential, making it difficult to scope my focus). Now I can simply ask the LLM for a self-contained exposition. Using traditional means of self-studying like [search engines / Wikipedia / StackExchange] is very often no match for this task, mostly in terms of time spent or wasted effort; simply having someone I can directly ask my highly specific (and often dumb) questions or confusions and receive equally specific responses is just really useful.
What were the biggest boosts that you and your colleagues got from LLMs?
Speaking from the perspective of someone still developing basic mathematical maturity and often lacking prerequisites, it’s very useful as a learning aid. For example, it significantly expanded the range of papers or technical results accessible to me. If I’m reading a paper containing unfamiliar math, I no longer have to go down the rabbit hole of tracing prerequisite dependencies, which often expand exponentially (partly because I don’t know which results or sections in the prerequisite texts are essential, making it difficult to scope my focus). Now I can simply ask the LLM for a self-contained exposition. Using traditional means of self-studying like [search engines / Wikipedia / StackExchange] is very often no match for this task, mostly in terms of time spent or wasted effort; simply having someone I can directly ask my highly specific (and often dumb) questions or confusions and receive equally specific responses is just really useful.