LLMs and Roppers

At this point, you've probably heard about, and maybe used, Large Language Models or LLMs, the near-magical technology that forms the basis of ChatGPT and a variety of other popular tools. Here at Roppers, we won't teach you about them at all, but we do expect you to use them in your pursuit of knowledge. They are truly the future, and figuring out how to use them in your workflows is going to be the new "digital native". Grow into security using LLMs and the speed you will improve will be shocking, but you have to use them the right way.

LLMs are great at some things and terrible at others. They are great at vocab, providing definitions, rephrasing things, and coming up with semi-original content. They are pretty terrible at telling the truth all the time once they get to something they are uncertain about and begin to "hallucinate" anytime they wind up not having enough training data to "know" the right answer.

Personally, I currently recommend Bing Chat. (July 2023)

Link: https://www.bing.com/new

The way that Bing interfaces with search is in my opinion the optimal way to use it right now.

In this beginner course, ChatGPT is able to answer the vast majority of questions in the assignments. In fact, when I'm feeling like a mad scientist I actually use ChatGPT to review assignments! This seems very exciting (and it is), but you will quickly realize what LLMs are good for and what they are not.

For Roppers, please do not submit LLM written answers, it's annoying and more importantly, you are trying to build skills and knowledge and if you don't do the act of writing yourself, it's not going to stick.

What you should do is use LLMs like a search engine, specifically asking them technical vocab or programming syntax questions. You can ask LLMs to explain complicated concepts and use them as basically a somewhat knowledgeable friend to bounce questions off, and it will work pretty well, it just might make things up every once in a while. The good thing about asking technical questions is you can immediately check to see if those things are true.

Throughout your journey, and especially at Roppers, use LLMs when the situation fits. You'll develop a sense of that over time and get better at prompting as you go. Some problems require the man page, and some problems require reading pages of documentation, but a great number these days just require the right question to an LLM.

We're in the future!