Keeping up with innovation in the AI space can feel overwhelming. Understanding your preferred learning style is an important part of that journey.

Do you prefer to read, listen to podcasts, watch videos? Do you like diving into detailed academic papers, or leveraging AI as a tool to build.

There isn’t one right answer, and your answer may change over time.

Things I’ve learned about myself: I am an avid reader, but when it comes to technical topics, I prefer visuals that convey how pieces fit together. I’m a hands-on learner, I like building. I’ll sometimes walk through an example from https://simonwillison.net to get a “feel” for how it works.

AI is great for supporting this style of learning. AI chats lend themselves well to the Socratic method, where I can ask questions and explore a topic from different perspectives, rather than rely only on the text in front of me.

I’ve adopted a sorta “backwards learning” approach, where I’ll start with a definition I don’t know, and work backwards to learn how it fits into an overall picture (rather than say, reading an article, where you might start with the foundational pieces and work your way up).

An example of this was the HuggingFace post about GPT OSS, where I used my chat session to dig into every unknown term in the article: https://huggingface.co/blog/welcome-openai-gpt-oss

This approach turned a static document into a living, dynamic experience that yielded something greater than just the words on the page.

Originally posted on Bluesky by @monsur.hossa.in Source: https://bsky.app/profile/monsur.hossa.in/post/3lwzcq42rdc22