It's called RAG, and it's the only "right" way to get any accurate information out of an LLM. And even it is not perfect. Not by far.

You can use it without an LLM. It's basically keyword search. You still have to know what you are asking, so you have to study. Study without an imprecise LLM that can feed you false information that sounds plausible.

There are other problems with current LLMs that make them problematic. Sure you will catch onto those problems if you use them, and you still have to know more about the topic then them.

They are a fun toy and ok for low-stakes knowledge (ex cooking recipies). But as a tool in serious work they are a rubber ducky at best.

PS What the guy couple comments above said about sources, that's probably about web search. Even when an LLM reads the sources it can missinterpet them easily. Like how apple removed their summaries because they were often just wrong.

Some of my classmates used chatGPT to summarize reading assignments and it garbled the information so badly that they got things wrong on in-class assessments. Aside from the hallucinations and jumbled garbage output, I refuse to use AI unless there is absolutely no alternative on an ethical basis due to the environmental and societal impacts.

As far as I'm concerned, the only role for LLMs in medicine is to function as a scribe to reduce the burden of documentation and that's only because everything the idiot machines vomit up has to be checked before being committed to the medical record anyways. Generative AI is a scourge on society and an absolute menace in medicine.