I wonder if the following is possible to study textbooks more efficiently using LLMs:
Feed the entire textbook to the LLM and produce a list of summaries that increases in granularity and length, covering all the material in the textbook just at a different depth (eg proofs omitted, further elaboration on high-level perspectives, etc)
The student starts from the highest-level summary, and gradually moves to the more granular materials.
When I study textbooks, I spend a significant amount of time improving my mental autocompletion, like being able to familiarize myself with the terminologies, which words or proof-style usually come in which context, etc. Doing this seems to significantly improve my ability to read eg long proofs, since I can ignore all the pesky details (which I can trust my mental autocompletion to later fill in the details if needed) and allocate my effort in getting a high-level view of the proof.
Textbooks don’t really admit this style of learning, because the students don’t have prior knowledge of all the concept-dependencies of a new subject they’re learning, and thus are forced to start at the lowest-level and make their way up to the high-level perspective.
Perhaps LLMs will let us reverse this direction, instead going from the highest to the lowest.
I wonder if the following is possible to study textbooks more efficiently using LLMs:
Feed the entire textbook to the LLM and produce a list of summaries that increases in granularity and length, covering all the material in the textbook just at a different depth (eg proofs omitted, further elaboration on high-level perspectives, etc)
The student starts from the highest-level summary, and gradually moves to the more granular materials.
When I study textbooks, I spend a significant amount of time improving my mental autocompletion, like being able to familiarize myself with the terminologies, which words or proof-style usually come in which context, etc. Doing this seems to significantly improve my ability to read eg long proofs, since I can ignore all the pesky details (which I can trust my mental autocompletion to later fill in the details if needed) and allocate my effort in getting a high-level view of the proof.
Textbooks don’t really admit this style of learning, because the students don’t have prior knowledge of all the concept-dependencies of a new subject they’re learning, and thus are forced to start at the lowest-level and make their way up to the high-level perspective.
Perhaps LLMs will let us reverse this direction, instead going from the highest to the lowest.