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LLMs as sounding boards

One use of LLMs that I haven't seen mentioned before is to use them as a sounding board for your own ideas. By discussing your concept with an LLM, you can gain fresh perspectives through its generated responses.

In this context, the LLM's actual comprehension is irrelevant. The purpose lies in its ability to spark new thought processes by prompting you with unexpected framings or questions.

Definitely recommend trying this trick next time you're writing something.

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  • That's why I argue on the internet. I am as likely to convince a poster to change their mind as I am to convince a robot, but they generate such interesting responses that force me to think hard about my own positions. Grinding random encounters in the posting RPG for exp

  • I read about this on the cursed orange site. Some guy talked about going on a walk with his wireless warplugs on, talking to ChatGPT's audio interface discussing some world building he was doing.

    Are there any LLM services that can be reasonably used without paying? I tried some llamafiles but seems like my laptop cannot handle them well.

    • As long as you don't care about your inputs being harvested, gemini is free currently. I've been using GPT4All to run stuff locally, but if your laptop is having trouble with llamafiles, then it's probably gonna have trouble with that too.

      • What model do you run?

      • On the topic of GPT4ALL, I'm curious is there an equivalent of that that but for txt2img/img2img models? All the FOSS txt2img stuff I've tried so far is either buggy (some of the projects I tried don't even compile), require a stupid amount of third party dependencies, are made with NVidia hardware in mind while everyone else is second class or require unspeakable amounts of VRAM.

    • seconding gpt4all, makes it quick and easy to run and if youre fancy you can stream the output from your computer to your phone. i run a capybara-hermes-mistral mix but i would suggest starting with mistral instruct until claude3 comes out

  • I used to love it as a socratic tutor. All I need it to do is ask reasonable questions to challenge my understanding. But later releases of chatgpt made it too focused on giving you the answer.

    • If your machine is beefy enough, running a local model works pretty well and there are a lot to choose from now tuned for different use cases. I've had good luck with using gpt4all as a no hassle app for running this stuff on my machine.

  • I did this with ChatGPT once and can't say I had a good time . To be fair , what I was pitching to it was to unusual yet similar for it to grasp it .

    So yeah as long as the LLM doesn't get to overconfident with thinking it knows what you're talking about , you might be able to get somewhere .

  • LLMs are way more interesting when talking about coding rather than asking them to generate code. The code generation is janky but if you keep asking questions you might get new directions, learn about concepts you didn't know etc ... It's great to learn tech stuff

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