How to read a book using an LLM

Tyler Cowen suggests using ChatGPT O1 as a reading companion:

You don’t have to upload any book into the system. The Great Cosmic Mind is smarter than most of the books you could jam into the context window. Just start asking questions. The core intuition is simply that you should be asking more questions. And now you have someone/something to ask!

I was reading a book on Indian history, and the author reference the Morley reforms of 1909. I did not know what those were, and so I posed a question and received a very good answer, read those here. I simply asked “What were the Morley reforms done by the British in India in 1909?”

Then I asked “did those apply to all parts of India?”

You can just keep on going. I’ll say it again: “The core intuition is simply that you should be asking more questions.”

Most people still have not yet internalized this emotionally. This is one of the biggest revolutions in reading, ever. And at some point people will write with an eye toward facilitating this very kind of dialogue.

“Most people still have not yet internalized this” is one of the most important sentences here. LLMs have the ability to significantly improve your life and your learning but you are probably just not using them well enough because you don’t think of them.

And most of you aren’t asking follow-up questions either the way Tyler did in the example above.

And you don’t need to be typing all of this in a text box. You can just talk to ChatGPT using voice mode.