What the LLM still does not provide is accountability (a LLM isn’t going to stop you from skipping a problem set) and the human social component. But you could potentially get that from a community of other self-learners covering the same material if you’re able to pull one together.
Too many times I've used LLMs for tasks at work and some of the answers I've gotten back are subtlety wrong. I can skip past those suggestions because the subject is one I'm strong/experienced in and I can easily tell that the LLM is just wrong or speaking nonsense.
But if I didn't have that level of experience, I don't think I would be able to tell where the LLM was wrong/mistaken.
I think LLMs are great for learning new things, but I also think you have to be skeptical of everything it says and need to double check the logic of what it's telling you.
But it might still help, especially if you think about the LLM as a fellow student rather than as a teacher. You try to catch it out, spot where it's misunderstood. Explain to it what you understand and see if it corrects you?
This was exactly my situation. Videos can give you a lot of structured, well presented information. And for MIT courses you'd get this knowledge from the very best. The problem is that no matter how well the subject matter is presented, I would hit some conceptual snag that I couldn't resolve just by repeating the sections in the video.
Now, years ago, to clear up the concepts, I would go to math stack exchange, write down exactly what I wanted to understand using mathjax and hope that someone will provide a detailed enough explanation. Most of the time I did learn from the answers, but sometimes the answer would be too succinct. In such cases there would be a need for a back and forth and stackexchange is not really designed around that usage pattern. This hassle would eventually make me give up the whole endeavor.
Now however there are LLMs. They don't need mathjax to understand what I am talking about and they are pretty good at back and forth. In the past 6 months I have gone through 2 full MIT courses with practice sheets and exams.
So I would encourage anyone who went through the route of self learning via videos and found it to be too cumbersome and lacking to give it another go with your favorite LLM.