How people learn new things is always very interesting to me. I think being able to learn things quickly is a very important skill that helps in almost every aspect of life.

The way I learn new things be it new tools or new concepts has kept changing over the years. I used to spend a lot of time just memorizing stuff in school but I realize now that I was never really good at it and it would take me a long time to learn anything.

The first fundamental shift on how I learn, came in 9th grade when I had to take the exam from CBSE. This is when I started to spend more time trying to understand everything written in the textbooks. I would look for answers on the web on forums like stack exchange till everything would click and I realized that I started to remember the concepts better the more time I had spent understanding it.

Another thing I realized when I tried to understand the material better was that a lot of the times I didn’t even need to look for external sources and just spending time with the original text was enough to understand topics. However, often times I had to search the web to visualize somethings, find examples or just find something written differently to understand.

The next big change is my learning approach came with AI. I realized that how I used the web to understand material was the perfect use case for the new LLM models. I first try to understand something in the original text and if I don’t then I just pass it to an LLM and ask to rephrase or explain it with some examples. This has worked really well for me, however, there are few problems too. LLMs make it too easy and convenient to explain something the way you want, which leads me to sometimes over rely on these models. I also feel like it takes away the struggle of understanding something deeply which is what made you remember it in the long run anyways.

All in all, I feel like learning new things is one of the best applications for LLMs and it has increased my overall effectiveness of learning new things but I still think relying on them too much can decrease the effectiveness in the long run. Excited to be on the lookout for improving my learning process and looking for tools that can help me do so.