Comment by qnleigh

Oh this is a super-important question, and I wish I'd gotten the following advice much earlier than I did:

1. First read the abstract and conclusion

2. Then flip through the figures and their captions, and try to understand them as best as you can (though this doesn't work for all papers)

3. Make a deliberate decision about whether it's worth it to dive into the details and read the full text.

LLMs are incredibly useful for parsing dense literature, but I think it's better to ask specific questions about the paper, jargon, equations etc. rather than to have it summarize the paper for you. Summaries are often shallow or even misleading, and they rob you of the opportunity to engage actively with the paper.