Tom Gally portrait

Learning with ChatGPT

January 28, 2024

Over the last couple of weeks, I held the following five long conversations with GPT-4 to see how well I can extend and deepen my knowledge by interacting with the LLM. I began each conversation by asking it to suggest possible topics. I then chose topics for it to explain, and I asked follow-up questions as we went along. Some of the conversations were held over several days. At the end of each conversation, I asked it to summarize what we had discussed.
  1. Sociology
  2. Industrial design
  3. Philosophy
  4. Fringe topics
  5. Contemporary issues
My conclusion is that this LLM—and probably other LLMs that are now becoming available—can be very useful for acquiring knowledge about a wide range of subjects. Its explanations were clear and well-organized, and it responded appropriately to all of my questions. I did not spot any hallucinations, though some might have occurred if I had asked for more specific information.

I conducted these conversations using the ChatGPT Worksheet function in the Macintosh text editor BBEdit 15 with OpenAi’s GPT-4 Turbo model. The total cost of using the OpenAI API for these five conversations was about seven U.S. dollars.

I also discussed this experiment in a short YouTube video.