[fnordpiglet]

That’s how I use chatGBT to learn. It’s rarely precisely correct but it’s answers are often basically right or direct me to a lot of concepts to investigate further. For instance I want to build a TEC based CO2 freezing chamber but need a low temperature TEC. I asked it about what TEC materials operate at low temperature. It gave me 10 different TEC semiconductors with operating temperatures, which were sometimes right. I then used Kagi (seriously, google?) to find literature. Using the two together - one to get a rough outline of the domain explained in simple and concise language and the other to retrieve information.

IR systems lack the bootstrapping phase - unless you know precisely what you want to learn you’ll end up in SEO hell sifting through loosely related garbage produced by algorithms to include as many relevant terms but zero insightful knowledge. I think for learning chatGPT is great for bootstrapping, then I turn to IR to refine and get accurate information.