Comment by ksd482
3 days ago
I can chime in about this. I’m a software engineer and about 7 years ago I decided to get a masters in pure mathematics. Because I was working full time, I could not attend any class so I self studied from textbooks and it worked well.
When I would get stuck, I would struggle with the problem, ask around, ask on Math Stackexchange and along the process I would end up learning a lot more.
With AI now, it’s like having your own tutor: you can ask personalized questions and it would answer it very well.
But that would also mean the amount of time I would spend struggling would go down considerably.
So you really have to be self disciplined and struggle with the problem a little bit before asking for help. You can also ask it to give hints only.
Do not mistake understanding the answer with learning something rigorously.
So if you are curious and doing an exposition, use it as you would normally and it will work wonderfully.
But if you want to learn it rigorously, our usual present habits with AI spitting out answers and us reading them will not work at all.
I wonder: can you get the AI to give you exercises that, when solved, would illustrate a point? This might require more theory of mind than they have.
I've tried to do this but with learning poker, and it's sort of a mixed bag. You kind of have to know what you don't know before you can get anything useful out of it. It can sort of help going from "I understand this concept, but not instinctively" to "I've drilled this enough that I could do things like this in my sleep", but it takes a lot of iteration and asking questions before it can settle on a series of instructive examples that each build on top of each other. You're still much better off with a well-written textbook.