What I do

I give it pdfs and a long instruction, and then ask questions.

Best Service and Local LLM

I use ChatGPT, should I switch to something else or something local ?

Give AI access to screen, able Point-&-Ask while reading ?

I saw video people doing similar things w/ Gemini, Claude.

1. I may use local OCR/CV and send it to LLM as text.

2. and use local Speech to text ?

Should I give ChatGPT access to local files for this purpose

1. LangChain - TechLinked - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AXP7tCI9PI

2. Local LLM Retraining, RAG, Context Docs - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFgyOucIFuk

How else can I use AI to study ?

This specific forum, Suggestions, Comments and Support, is here for "Ideas, questions and support for the forums",

Your questions do not fall into this category.

1 hour ago, HbWhi5F said:

How else can I use AI to study ?

You should not use AI to study

Studying is about improving your mind, and offloading effort to a computer algorithm compromises that. The fact that AI hallucinates answers makes it even worse. Plus the ethics of it all.

There is no shortcut to understanding and AI is the proof...

If we assume that AI knows everything, then it's easy to prove that it doesn't understand what it knows... 🤔

Knowing facts is not understanding them.

If people bothered to fact check the details these programs produce, it might be a fair way to study since you still need a basic understanding of the material and you're actively reasoning through it, hopefully figuring out why the facts are relevant or not. Unfortunately, I see too many just assume the AI is completely accurate and just saved them a bunch of reading and studying, drawing conclusions only a brilliant computer mind could do so quickly.

3 minutes ago, Phi for All said:

If people bothered to fact check the details these programs produce, it might be a fair way to study since you still need a basic understanding of the material and you're actively reasoning through it, hopefully figuring out why the facts are relevant or not. Unfortunately, I see too many just assume the AI is completely accurate and just saved them a bunch of reading and studying, drawing conclusions only a brilliant computer mind could do so quickly.

The problem can easily get compounded when using AI to study physics. One example is having AI look up a specific equation.

One example being if you were to look for relations specific to a metric or methodology. AI could very well return a relation specific to say a canonical treatment as opposed to a conformal treatment.

With the FLRW metric it often confuses conformal coordinates as opposed to commoving coordinates.

If the AI user isnt aware of these distinctions to recognize the AI mistakes they could easily get confused as well as get frustrated when they try to apply those equations. As AI looks through literature Ive seen it throw in cosmographic metrics as well and mix them with commoving metrics.

(LOL the above can also be used to recognize someone relying too heavily on AI)

Edited February 16Feb 16 by Mordred

3 hours ago, HbWhi5F said:

How else can I use AI to study ?

1) Avoid large heavy type in capital letters. I annoys many people, who think you are shouting.

2) As a student you should be thinking for yourself. But search engines are very useful to obtain factual information eg "what is the radius of the earth in metres?" , "what is the composition of the atmosphere of Mars?".
In other words it is Ok to use it to find factual data, you intend to use but you must be in charge of the calculation or other use.

2 hours ago, StringJunky said:

Knowing facts is not understanding them.

The issue with AI and perhaps data availability on the internet in general is that many students assume that all necessary facts are out there and that is a waste of time to learn them in the first place. The issue is that as a consequence they lack a very basic foundation to create some level of understanding. Some of the most frequent issues we see among students is that tend to fail at synthesis, i.e., connecting isolated facts. Offloading that further, obviously won't help. It is like having an electric piano that plays scales on its own and wondering why one doesn't get better at playing the instrument.

The fact that OP starts with a summary rather than reading the actual document as first task show the erosion of basic skills. AI could be used to test ones comprehension after reading, for example, but a small minority of students is doing that (usually those that are top students either way).

Don't use AI as information source, use it as information processing tool.
Use models with biggest context window. Atm its Gemini 3.1pro and Claude Sonet/Opus 4.6
Dont upload full pdf. Read by chapters.
Develop a system promt that will force AI to support every statement with source (still can give you fake source as legit)
Studding like this is not easier if that's what you are after. You quickly will realize that AI will mislead you on regular basis, so you can't just learn, no. You have to debate it then test it in relation to established basis then test it against empirical data and still the doubt in you will grow in to healthy scientific scepticism.
Just treat AI as your useful but sometimes ignorant friend that you having fun debating. Get your knowledge challenged at all times and don't get lost. Good luck!

I completely forgot to mansion the most useful educational AI tool atm:
NotebookLM its just must have https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/39c878ad-58a4-495a-8704-5ddd9385997c
This link leads to notebook based on my open research. You can use any source material to create your own educational hub. There's a lot you can do with it. Even on free account its very generous. Audio podcast is impressive, especially the interactive mode where you can ask questions on a fly. They updating it all the time so its only getting better. Enjoy.

I agree with not using AI for study, a while back I found two posts on Mastodon regarding this. So from what I remember from these:

1 A teacher / professor provided access to AI, students were given a question then asked to explain what was wrong with the AI answer

2. A teacher / professor, required students to, of course fully cite their document including if they used AI, I got the impression from the post that the students found this created far more work than needed so just handed in their essay having undertaken the reqiired work / study / reading to produce it.

Asking AI for an answer to a question is fine, getting access to all sources of information is probably a lot harder, as each source then needs to be checked, cross referenced etc.

On the other side of this the Overleaf LaTeX editor now has integrated AI to help find and fix errors in your code. As this deals with the actual formatting of the document, and not the document content, would this be a different use case?

On 2/16/2026 at 1:27 PM, HbWhi5F said:

I use ChatGPT, should I switch to something else or something local ?

ChatGPT has 400 GB of GPU memory. At least 5 nVidia cards, each with 80 GB of video memory. In practice, you need a little more because you also need KV, etc.

That's where those 100 billion parameters come from (100 billion x 4 bytes for IEEE-754 32-bit float = 400 GB)

Do you have access to such equipment?

NVIDIA H100 (PCIe) $25,000 - $30,000

NVIDIA A100 Approximately $10,000 - $15,000

On 2/16/2026 at 1:27 PM, HbWhi5F said:

I give it pdfs and a long instruction, and then ask questions.

Wrong. LLM models (except for Grok, from what I've heard), have a context window. They don't know what's outside that window. They only process what's inside the context window. This is expressed in tokens. English word = 1-2 tokens. Programming 1 character = 1 token.

After chatting with ChatGPT for a few hours, ask it, “What was the first question I asked you today during this session?” It will respond with something found in the middle or bottom of the entire chat window.

Grok stores the session on the GPU. If the internet connection is interrupted (this is not visible, it may be due to the browser or another factor), Grok releases the GPU for other users. As a result, I cannot ask Grok any question that refer to previous ones. It does not know what we were talking about a second ago. I was using Firefox on Linux. You may have had a different experience, but from my point of view, Grok is useless.

On 2/16/2026 at 6:34 PM, CharonY said:

The issue with AI and perhaps data availability on the internet in general is that many students assume that all necessary facts are out there and that is a waste of time to learn them in the first place. The issue is that as a consequence they lack a very basic foundation to create some level of understanding. Some of the most frequent issues we see among students is that tend to fail at synthesis, i.e., connecting isolated facts. Offloading that further, obviously won't help. It is like having an electric piano that plays scales on its own and wondering why one doesn't get better at playing the instrument.

After all, these are the effects of what we discussed in another thread about the US education system in the early stages of education. When you learn selectively, you have selective knowledge on basic topics. At university, there is no time to fill in the gaps after years of mediocrity.

Edited Monday at 09:21 AM4 days by Sensei