Books exist for people who want in depth information with the full context, in an organized manner. Short forms have always been available, it be blog posts, Wikipedia articles, cliff notes, or other such things. Books survive, because source material is needed to generate all of those other things, and those short form versions don’t cut it for everyone. I don’t see LLMs as any different. A book can tell you somethi…
With an LLM you need to know enough to ask Not really. You can say "I'd like to learn about X", and get a high level overview about the topic you're interested in. Then just ask more specific questions, just like you would do when interacting with a human teacher. Try it with Claude or 4o.
> Then just ask more specific questions, just like you would do when interacting with a human teacher
And no one interacts like that with a teacher, at least from what I know. They have a syllabus for a reason, and while they may answer an unrelated question, they expect you to master the fundamental that leads to it. If you don't they will point you to it, because the answer will be difficult to understand. It's like wanting to know how nuclear works without learning atom composition first.