Examples given are: in coding and math, identifying potential mistakes in partial solutions, and suggesting how the student might get unstuck; in literature, an AI impersonates characters in a novel so the student can ask them questions (e.g. "Mr. Gatsby, why do you keep staring at that green light?"); in writing, the AI writes with the student, rather than for students.
The flip side is teachers saving time on lesson planning, grading, etc, all the work that's adjacent to actually teaching.
A lot of this is a feature preview for Khan Academy, and a big part of it is just the ReACT pattern[1] (have people settled on this name?).
To me, even all of the above is just an efficiency increase, which means workloads will increase to fill the available time, and we might see student to teacher ratios in the order of tens of thousands to one. How much of a future teacher's career will be about maintaining their AI systems? How much of learning will be like that too?
truer words haven't been spoken. one big one off the top of my mind was the us governments decision to allow civillians to access gps at the same resolution as the arms. with that, all sorts of applications that require realtime location tracking. uber, lyft, rappi, gojeck off the top of my head.
I don't think they do. It sounds more like a world, where in person testing and certification is extremely important when a human skill needs to be evaluated.
Do students as we know them even exist in such a world ? I'm thinking if AI can effectively teach (AI asks questions to the student, gives feedback and leads the lesson, reacts to situational events, maintains discipline etc.) then AI can also do. Aside from the romantic take of learning for the pleasure of learning why would we assume that such AI teachers aren't also going to be AI employees. Why would humans even have the drive to learn stuff on a mass scale if the main or one of the main motivators for education is the market (or is it ?).
The tutors scale up, but so can the testing. Instead of standardized testing, every student can get interviewed as if the teacher had only them as a student and be given an in-depth assessment of their skills and knowledge, rather than being simplified to a letter grade.
Pedagogy is an area of study outside of my expertise, but I do know there are institutions that didn't give grades.
We are removing the last vestiges of empathy and interiority from our reading process? Good good, carry on then.
[1] https://www.revisionhistory.com, which I originally thought would be most useful for cheating, but interestingly, many teachers are more interested in using it to help students work through revisions. I've gotten feedback from teachers that they plan to have students use ChatGPT to start their assignments and then task them with updating, modifying and annotating them, so I'm trying to figure out which features to build to support that.
Otherwise seems like snake oil thing.
That will also favor a specific subset of learners.
In school, you hand in your homework, get the feedback only after Christmas. Because human cannot evaluate 100 students' homework efficiently.
Majority of academic textbook are trash. Some author even say "we have 300 new exercises in this edition" proudly, while the solution is often either nonexistent, or at the end of the book. Why at the end, not next to that problem? Or next page? Why wasting my time to flip pages back and forth?
If the content of exercise is important, why not include that into the text?
If instructor is needed, why not making every concepts into Q&A as they had already been explained in office hour or email somewhere else? Why zero effort being put into knowledge accumulation?
Human failed at education. ChatGPT obviously is a more knowledgeable entity, personally I prefer that more than human instructor.
Probably at least 50% of current global governments / bureaucracy could be wholesale replaced by a single decent LLM, and the economic and social outcomes would be far better.
At the gym, people assume anyone with big muscles must be an expert in medicine. Let's not make the same mistake here.
This is probably the number one thing that excites me about AI. Throughout all of history, when you look back at famous scientists, there's a clearly obvious pattern. Almost without exception they were children of enormous privilege who were given the opportunities to study and be tutored individually throughout their life. Unlocking that for every child on earth is going to accelerate human progress faster than anything else.
Even if you want it to, how could it make a very engaging environment when deep down inside you know it's fake?
Student: "Hey LLM, I'm having trouble learning this concept."
LLM: "Here's a real story that a teacher shared with us that will help explain this topic..."
(Later)
LLM: "Remember that story from before? Here's another story from that same teacher to further explain..."
So, like all good fiction from the Iliad and Odyssey to soap operas and Star Trek and wrestling kayfabe?
If anything I expect a problem where AI will become too capable at making things entertaining, such that reality no longer appeals.
Students have access to all the information they need on Calculus through Google and other resources, for instance, but actually sitting down with a living, breathing human being and having them help you through your troubles...to me, that cannot be replaced with an AI.
If access to knowledge was all we needed to acquire and maintain intelligence in a specific area, we would all be a lot smarter...
But there's really no question that a small class where teachers can know each individual student is better than a large class of hundreds of students or more, where the teachers can't realistically remember who is who.
>> No longer will private tutors be restricted to the rich only.
It's not as simple. I've met plenty of poor people who leave well-tutored rich folk to bite the dust, and the other way around too. That's neither here nor there. A kid with all the tutors but with parents or an environment that doesn't favor learning, gets nowhere. That I have seen too, more times than I can count. And, let's face it, we have had the Internet for a few decades now, bursting to the seams with free knowledge. What difference will it make an AI system of dubious trustworthiness?
this!
AI isn't as good as a great teacher but its better than a bad teacher and there aren't enough good teachers to go around.
The exercises are invaluable. You don't get the answers because then you look at them. The whole point of the exercises is for you to do them, and then for you to figure out if you are right or wrong!
The content of the exercises isn't in the book because you need to actually do things to learn. You cannot learn math, physics, and many other topics passively.
You're ignoring the main lessons and features of the system.
And no. There are countless amazing books. The fact that you can't see that is because you don't understand how to learn.
The main issue with education is grades and how obsessed people are with those as a sorting mechanism for students.
That's why more formal academic studies are needed for topics such as these rather than anecdotes, because we'll find a whole range of contradictory opinions.
I do my homework when I feel like I need them. Accessibility to the solutions is a problem. Learning though examples is another prominent way that you don't see. People can choose to investigate into the problem right now or absorb knowledge then think about stuffs. I have 80 years in my life expectancy to do exercise and indeed solving problems everyday is that. What is the point of "figure it out yourself" about some useless math at the moment when people have their whole life to think about it? People know nothing because you never tell anything. You failed your job as a teacher. You are doing excellent job of not documenting stuff and being anti knowledge accumulation.
My formal education ended some 20 years ago, and I'm sure things have changed, and from what I hear from younger friends and relatives, it doesn't seem to be for the better ...
I was fortunate to get an apprenticeship at the age of 16, which enabled me to get into the real world of work and build experience years ahead of everyone else. It's a completed overlooked path - most students still think they need a degree to get a good job.
That's depressing. It was starting to move away from that when I did my physics and chemistry A-levels in 1974, had been for some years in fact with Nuffield courses emphasizing exploration and comprehension rather than simply getting the 'right' answer. The Physics A-level had a substantial section that tested the student's ability to understand the results of experiments.
Is this supposed to be a problem? Research says that delays in getting corrections are not all that important, you still end up learning even if there's a fairly large gap. https://pcl.sitehost.iu.edu/rgoldsto/courses/dunloskyimprovi...
Seems that you are quoting another paper instead. But I don't think it is definitive, as you see, n=27. Also the experiment setting is not about how long after initial test, it is about how short before the next test.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/MC.37.8.1077
> The participants were 27 students enrolled in Grade 6 at The School at Columbia University in New York City.
It's easy to blame the individual, but I wonder what are the collective social costs of such stringent attitudes on the long term.
Building a succesful learning platform which has impacted many students, certainly qualifies someone to have an opinion on education in my book. Would you be happier if he were some elected Minister Of Education -- who, from what I've seen, are generally about as qualified as a box of donuts?
Literally no one at a gym assumes that muscular people are experts at medicine. But it is reasonable to assume that they know a thing or two about building muscle ...
16% lift in overall test scores: https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/sprojec...
11% lift in math test scores: https://bearworks.missouristate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
And Khan Academy's impact page: https://www.khanacademy.org/about/impact has links to additional studies.
I'm pretty sure he has a better than average grasp on what it means to learn and how to improve the process. And even more importantly, he's trying to! If not him, then who should we listen to?
I don't have a clue why GP reduces Sal to "good at explaining things" when Khan Academy is so much bigger than just him for a long time now. And I, for one, am very grateful that he exists. People in first world countries can't imagine the impact that free access to great education resources has in the rest of the world, like in my case.
> At the gym, people assume anyone with big muscles must be an expert in medicine. Let's not make the same mistake here.
The gym analogy falls short to me. The mistake here is assuming that someone that worked in education for almost two decades, and has achieved extraordinary results in the mean time, doesn't have any clue about education in general.
Isn't explaining things well the heart of good education?
Who would be better at building strawmen?
An average HN commenter, a farmer, or an etymologist?
Sense of connection, perhaps.
But AI is getting better at faking that. Even ELIZA gave some people the feeling, though I'm not sure how.
> If access to knowledge was all we needed to acquire and maintain intelligence in a specific area, we would all be a lot smarter...
We kinda are though? XKCD comes to mind: https://xkcd.com/903/
Ask HN: Where do I find good code to read? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37248002
Anyway, there's no "one size fits all" in education, any scheme will favor some students more than others.
Children living in poverty will surely use LLMs, but they will continue to lack the capacity for curiosity and intentional learning. They will use LLMs to assist with the same things they invest their energy in without LLMs, which is their immediate life challenges and psychological escapism. And insufferable people like you will blame them when your ignorant plan inevitably fails.
You guys are making it seem like this is a common occurence and I've never heard of anything like this. I've never heard of teachers frequently sharing personalized stories that are also true to help people learn a subject.
In fact, the opposite, most subjects like math or physics have made-up problems to isolate and make simple the concept they're trying to teach. Adding a constraint for realism would just be needlessly complicated.
Also not scalable - if these stories are so effective, why not put them in a book to share with everyone?
The only stories any of my teachers ever shared with me were historical events that were grounded in reality.
Are there just a whole bunch of educational institutions that are teaching things around a campfire and a long-form stories like in ancient times?
Because someone still has to make decisions. Much as the educational-industrial complex would have you believe otherwise, living the good life does not equate with getting the right answers on standardized tests.
One of the unfortunate aspects of the education system we've built over the last several hundred years is that it conceals this from most people. This is because the purpose of the system is to feed a societal system where a very small number of people make decisions and the rest are expected simply to obey orders. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it's really important not to lose sight of the fact that replacing the current education system with AI is not the same as replacing educated people with AI, or even the same as replacing all of education with AI.
We generally hear about this under headlines like "man attempts to drive into ocean while following satnav" or "flash crash in stock market caused by algorithmic traders" or https://money.cnn.com/2013/03/05/smallbusiness/keep-calm-and...
That got me thinking.