I mean, even in the absence of knowledge of the existence of text searching algorithms (where I'm from we learn that in university) just a simple web search would have gotten you there as well no? Maybe would have taken a few minutes longer though.
Extremely likely, yes. In this case, since it was an unknown unknown at the time, the LLM nicely explaining that this class of algorithms exists was nice, then I could immediately switch to Wikipedia to learn more (and be sure of the underlying information)
I think of LLMs as an autocomplete of the web plus hallucinations. Sometimes it’s faster to use the LLM initially rather than scour through a bunch of sites first.
