Comment by sandworm101
3 hours ago
Ya. Try reading a few hundred pages of historical documents. Expertise does not come from the facts that an LLM can so easily integrate. It comes from understanding the mindset of the people who wrote those pages. Do it properly and you should start to speak and write like those people. The path to becoming an expert on the East India cannot be shortcuted via an LLM.
LLMs actually do a very fine job of understanding the "mindset" embodied in historical sources, because historical documents themselves are a valuable source of highly diverse LLM training data. You can easily point pretty much any model to any random historical text, no matter how obscure (probably not an archival log entry, though) and ask "what is this text about in modern language, how might it be of interest or relevant today and what points would be considered especially outdated?" you will generally get very helpful answers. Even the thinking output is instructive.