I’ve found it helpful to ask LLMs specific questions about your knowledge gaps, or ask for concrete worked examples that illustrate the ideas you’re learning about.
In [0], I ask: „When applying Hidden Markov Models to POS tagging in NLP, what do the latent states and observations usually represent?” I then follow up with some specific questions and requests for walkthrough. You can’t see it from this conversations, but I have Wikipedia and a bunch of other resources open in separate pages, cross-reading, and I follow up with a handwritten toy implementation of a Viterbi-based POS tagger once my mental model crystallizes. This is very different from a 500-word summary of quantum physics, and I still had to put in effort (this is unescapable!), but I found the experience rewarding. Also note that this is relearning of a topic that was part of my uni curriculum but long forgotten.
In [1] and [2], I’m learning Spanish by reading García Lorca’s poems. Here again I’m going through the texts with a dictionary, and augmenting my learning with what a dictionary won’t tell me: given the usage of a word or phrase in this specific poem, is it something that could occur in everyday speech, or is it poetical?
[0]: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a743bc7-d0dc-83eb-acc9-8f2faaffc4...
[1]: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a731be6-26bc-83eb-8d21-c965da5364...
[2]: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a731c01-5604-83eb-a5b8-cd1295d0ef...