Anki - I don't know how I'd prep for the MCAT without this. Open source with desktop and mobile clients, syncing via cloud. It's flashcarding but uses gradual intervals so you see things less often once you've retained them.
ChatGPT - I use this as a private tutor (it's great for biomedical stuff) to check my understanding and ask it to correct me if I'm wrong.
How confident are you that it's giving you the correct answers to your queries? I've noticed that it often sounds right, but is sometimes completely wrong, in subtle ways. It always puts together words that are commonly near eachother, and it is always grammatically correct, but it is often absolutely wrong. I've observed that the more specific and technical a question I ask, the more likely it is to be wrong.
You can actually ask ChatGPT to cite its sources. Anecdotally when I tried, it provided me with a valid url to a census.gov site that contained the answer to my question. That doesn't make it better than google, but it does mean that some verification is possible.
it will, very frequently, make up citations with real looking but completely bogus urls.
it is NOT a research tool. It is a creative text generation tool. It is not programmed to provide accurate data. It's programmed to provide accurate sounding text.
Actually just today I asked if for the density of silicon nitrite and to cite a source. It cave a citation that seemed correct (reference book on materials) but with completely made up authors.
Anecdotally, chatgpt seems much worse to me than Google for getting correct answers. Like orders of magnitude worse. Tells me the wrong timezone for a city kind of bad. No doubt it will be much better in the future, and they've definitely found PMF with the interface, but I would not trust it right now with anything even slightly important to me.
But how can you verify ChatGPT's answers if you don't know what its sources were? E.g. if I google a technical question about HTML5, I can see whether a result is the HTML5 spec, MDN, W3Schools, or a random medium blog. If I google a medical question, I can see if I'm on a hospital's website or on Men's Health.
Parent is using chatgpt as a tutor though, not as a google search.
I’d expect a tutor to give the right answer, but I wouldn’t expect google to. Chatgpt is often wrong. It’s a problem if you’re trying to learn something and using it as your tutor/truth.
I can't think of a single piece of software that has cloud syncing, for free, with no option for payment.
I'm not sure who is running it (hopefully some well funded academic group), but it restores me faith in humanity a little every time I press sync and don't get CTA'd to sign up for some subscription.
Amazing tool, kudos to the devs, and if there other comes a time where payment is required, I would be happy to chip in with the above being said.
ChatGPT - I use this as a private tutor (it's great for biomedical stuff) to check my understanding and ask it to correct me if I'm wrong.