There is nothing to suggest LLMs will be as revolutionary as paper. The PalmPilot didn't lead to new field of science just because people had a new way to write things down.

The internet is as arguably as revolutionary as paper. And while LLMs haven’t proven to be an internet-level revolutionary technology (yet), they are closer to that than the PalmPilot.

As cognitive-offloading devices go, paper is completely neutral. It doesn't flatter you into believing you are a genius when you're not; it doesn't offer to extend your reasoning or find references in the research literature and then hallucinate and lead you astray; it will never show you advertisements for things you don't need; it will never leak your ideas and innermost thoughts to corporations owned by billionaires and totalitarian governments... I could go on but you get the drift, I'm sure. Paper wins by a mile.

Really pessimistic and mostly incorrect understanding of LLMs. No they don’t flatter you, try using ChatGPT once.

No they don’t hallucinate that much.

Since paper this is one of the most important inventions. It has almost infinite knowledge and you can ask it anything mostly.

? They certainly flatter you, openAI even felt compelled to give a statement on the sycophancy problem: https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/ And South Park parodied the issue. I use chatGPT and claude every day.

the new models don't do it

> No they don’t flatter you, try using ChatGPT once.

You're absolutely right!

On a more serious note, if it has almost infinite knowledge, is it even a cognitive-offloading tool in the same class as paper? Sounds more like something designed to stifle and make my thoughts conform to its almost infinite knowledge.

edit: I'll admit ChatGPT is a great search engine (and also very hallucinatory depending on how much you know about the subject) and maybe it helps some people think, sure. But beyond a point I find it actually harmful as a means to develop my own ideas.

There’s no winning is there?