Comment by tsss
5 days ago
For what it's worth I have been using Gemini 2.5/3 extensively for my masters thesis and it has been a tremendous help. It's done a lot of math for me that I couldn't have done on my own (without days of research), suggested many good approaches to problems that weren't on my mind and helped me explore ideas quickly. When I ask it to generate entire chapters they're never up to my standard but that's mostly an issue of style. It seems to me that LLMs are good when you don't know exactly what you want or you don't care too much about the details. Asking it to generate a presentation is an utter crap shoot, even if you merely ask for bullet points without formatting.
> It's done a lot of math for me that I couldn't have done on my own (without days of research),
Isn't the point of doing the master's thesis that you do the math and research, so that you learn and understand the math and research?
I bet they were talking about how people didn't do long division when the calculator first came out too. Is using matlab and excel ok but AI not? Where do we draw the line with tools?
OP said they "generated entire chapters"
Apparently not. This is the most perfect example I've seen of "I can recite it, but I don't understand it so I don't know if it's really right or not" that I've seen in a while.
I do understand it. I just don't have the overview of all the algorithms that LLMs have.