In the new AI era, technologies like LLMs are reshaping the entire world—including how we learn.
Some facts:
- The rapid development of large language models has made higher-level intelligence (specifically, the depth and breadth of human knowledge) more accessible and affordable for ordinary people.
- To form concepts and learn the relationships between them—what we call knowledge—the human brain often needs to start with concrete examples. That’s much easier than trying to grasp abstract knowledge directly (e.g., the dense theorems in a math textbook).
- Before you’ve mastered a concept, it’s hard to come up with examples that fit its rules. This is a chicken-and-egg problem.
- Before AI, learning through concrete examples meant relying on pre-written ones, like worked examples in math textbooks. But the people who write those examples—university professors, for instance—are hard for ordinary learners to reach, and they rarely have time to answer one learner’s specific questions.
A summary of high-quality questioning techniques:
- Ask AI to generate problems for you.
- Ask AI to answer your specific questions.
- Ask AI to understand your knowledge level and background, then give personalized advice and answers.
- Ask AI to give you a bird’s-eye view of the knowledge landscape, or plan a learning path.
- Ask AI to provide several examples—including correct and incorrect ones.
- Use AI’s breadth of knowledge to cross-pollinate ideas across fields and explore possibilities you hadn’t imagined.
- Ask AI to evaluate your understanding of a problem—a cross-check.
- Ask AI to design fun learning methods that keep you motivated.
Most of these approaches are hard to pull off without an LLM (like having a university professor or industry expert on call to answer your questions). Compared with traditional learning, it’s like skipping ahead. And one thing is clear: in the future, no career will stay the same. Those who understand how learning in the AI era differs from the traditional era will be the ones who learn faster and better than everyone else.