[HN Gopher] Khan Academy integrates GPT-4 as every student's cus...
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Khan Academy integrates GPT-4 as every student's customized tutor
Author : pr337h4m
Score : 335 points
Date : 2023-03-14 18:00 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (openai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
| mullingitover wrote:
| I wonder if this kind of intelligent tutoring could be the answer
| to Bloom's Two Sigma Problem. The limiting factor with that
| problem was that not everyone can afford a personal tutor. Having
| an AI tutor that can breeze through the SAT seems like it should
| give every student a major boost.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Every student might get an absolute boost, but the relative gap
| may even widen. Consider students who can afford to use cutting
| edge, expensive to train/run models, vs students who can only
| use off the shelf, older models.
| visarga wrote:
| More likely AI will be cheap and widespread like electricity.
| Data likes to be free.
|
| Assuming the divide will be real, you can just record a
| million problem solutions from ExpensiveLM and use it to tune
| your CheapLM, it will be a specialised cheap model that works
| ok on your task of interest.
| dopeboy wrote:
| Circa late 2015, early 2016, my cofounder and I spent ~6 month
| attempting to build exactly this.
|
| Our hypothesis was that students self studying for the SAT used
| books (eg Kaplan) but the solutions in the back were poor in
| explaining how they arrived to the solution because they
| usually just cut to the chase rather than explaining the
| approach & helping you arrive to the solution.
|
| So we took each practice SAT math question and wrote out a
| solution spread over four swipeable pages. Our hope was that if
| you saw the first or second page, you'd arrive at the solution
| without having to see the answer, thus increasing your chance
| to solve it on your own next time.
|
| We spent over 100 hours tutoring kids and had them use our MVP
| to mild success. The obvious next step was to automate the
| solutions rather than hand write it ourselves - like GPT-4 has
| done here.
|
| As someone who has logged over 2000 hours teaching, there's a
| lot of soft nuances and tactics to tutoring. Also, motivation
| is a big thing a good tutor brings. I don't see this solution
| as quite there yet but getting close.
|
| Very optimistic here.
| recuter wrote:
| A tutor doesn't just imply parents who can afford one but also
| who care enough to do so in the first place and see the value
| of an education.
|
| I think you'd find that even by the sat-prep age the actual
| limiting factor for many (most?) of the tutor-less is a fate-
| accompli attitude towards their path in life.
|
| Might as well turn on the chat bots at the cradle. Ah, and make
| sure everybody gets the same quality AI to parent them for it
| to be egalitarian.
| tgv wrote:
| It's not the tutoring alone. It's also the social effect. A
| machine simply does not exert that kind of influence, nor do
| online courses require the same amount of dedication and
| ambition. Compare MOOCs: they have incredibly high drop-out
| rates.
| alach11 wrote:
| My mind went to the same place. Knowing that "the average
| tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control
| class", imagine how transformative it will be to lift the
| average student to the 98th percentile!
|
| This may be the most transformative change to education since
| the invention of public schooling.
| sophiabits wrote:
| Every now and then I think about Marc Andreessen's "software
| is eating the world" article. He was extremely excited about
| investing in EdTech and HealthTech software companies at the
| time--for obvious reasons!
|
| But EdTech hasn't really delivered much value. The modern LMS
| feels to me like a reinvention of Facebook groups in many
| ways...
|
| LLMs feel like something that _could_ very well end up eating
| education, and that's a really exciting prospect. My personal
| experience with schooling was less than stellar, and figuring
| out alternative and more scalable ways to get knowledge into
| kids' heads has a lot of possible upside for society imo
| james-revisoai wrote:
| Since using T5 to generate quiz questions in 2019 I've thought
| this. Transformers now can understand misconceptions, quote
| source materials... it will equalise education.
| [deleted]
| benkyo256 wrote:
| What kind of prompt(s) would yield these results?
| aphit wrote:
| I assume the one from the research page would work:
|
| "You are a tutor that always responds in the Socratic style.
| You _never_ give the student the answer, but always try to ask
| just the right question to help them learn to think for
| themselves. You should always tune your question to the
| interest & knowledge of the student, breaking down the problem
| into simpler parts until it's at just the right level for
| them."
|
| From: https://openai.com/research/gpt-4
| webnrrd2k wrote:
| Now I can get any book I want in the style of The Little
| Schemer!
| ourmandave wrote:
| StackOverflow.com banned Chat-GPT answers 3 months ago and their
| traffic is down.
|
| https://techcabal.com/2023/01/31/stack-overflow-chat-gpt/
|
| But on the plus side, this news means there will be fewer do-my-
| homework-for-me questions.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean, at the same time could that not also mean that people
| are going straight to ChatGPT to ask the question in the first
| place?
| deely3 wrote:
| Nope unfortunately. Main reason is that people used ChatGPT
| to generate not validated and sometime completely wrong
| answers that looks very realistic.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Just when many education systems are struggling, this comes up.
| It's gonna be interesting to see if it helps self organizing and
| self learning (removing the negative side effects of group
| learning in school settings) or if it will just add noise and
| chaos.
| mfer wrote:
| A lot of what GPT-4 can return is ideas based on assumptions and
| beliefs. Who chooses what of these to train the system? Those
| subtle ideas will then lead students who are mostly children.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I don't think this is such a problem if it is teaching calc-3
| and stays on topic. If it's teaching humanities I can see there
| would be more of an issue.
| andrewclunn wrote:
| It will start with the "areas we can all agree on" and then
| scope creep will occur. This is the safest prediction I feel
| I've ever made.
| mfer wrote:
| Who is "we all"? For instance, the US is 5% of the worlds
| population. What we call the west is 20% of the global
| population? Not even to a quarter of it. Most of the
| population is outside the west. And, within the west there
| are a number of topics that people don't agree on which are
| more base.
|
| The world is very diverse.
| pixl97 wrote:
| And that is any different from the school books we currently
| use how?
| mfer wrote:
| For one, school book authors create books. GPt-4 is the tech
| industry. You shift who picks the views.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >school book authors create books
|
| Do you want to know how I know you have no idea how grade
| school textbooks are created in the US?
|
| https://www.rangevoting.org/FeynTexts.html
|
| This was 60 years ago and it's got worse since then.
| bogwog wrote:
| What is the point of teaching children these topics, when they'll
| be obsolete by the time they're old enough to enter the job
| market?
| itronitron wrote:
| I'm currently homeschooling two teenagers and one of the most
| interesting aspects for me is learning all the material that I
| 'supposedly learned' way back when I was in high school.
|
| I graduated, went to a great university, and yet virtually all
| of the stuff that we are learning in the current HS curriculum
| is new to me despite my having taken the same classes. I
| honestly don't know how I graduated high school, except to
| consider that I was very good at parroting back recently
| received information.
|
| Most of what students are learning will be obsolete by the time
| they enter the job market, but on the plus side they will have
| forgotten it anyway. The most important thing from my
| perspective is ensuring that those topics don't use up too much
| of their time as I think most intelligent people are able to
| acquire the knowledge and skills they need as they come to need
| it.
| 1g0rrr wrote:
| Why do these tech giants receive GPT-4 access much earlier than
| regular seed startups? Is it fair?!
| Satam wrote:
| I think it's fair but there's a reason why it almost seems
| natural to raise the question in this scenario. It's OpenAI's
| hypocrisy and doublespeak. It's their non-stop messaging about
| equality, alignment, unbiasedness, etc. They can't have it both
| ways and they will be judged for it.
| timschmidt wrote:
| All products need testing before release.
| AstixAndBelix wrote:
| OpenAI is an opinionated startup, they don't owe everyone the
| same things. Probably they thought KhanAcademy would be a very
| ethical way to use GPT-4 for good and they gave it early
| access.
| tssva wrote:
| I don't know that I would classify Khan Academy as a tech
| giant. For the sake of argument let's say they are. Yes it is
| fair for them to get access earlier. Why would it not be?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Surely on HN of all places we understand that life is not fair.
| OpenAI is looking out for their own bottom line. That means
| money, and PR.
| bombcar wrote:
| Because tech giants can write checks that don't bounce (off of
| SVB).
| tonmoy wrote:
| I don't think Khan Academy would be considered as a Texh Giant.
| Or are you referring to OpenAI, the creator of GPT-4?
| wongarsu wrote:
| I'd assume that's because the Gates Foundation is one of the
| biggest financial supporters of Khan Academy, and they can
| reach the right ears at Microsoft and by extension OpenAI. As
| always, the right connections are everything
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| Well Microsoft bought OpenAi and Khan Academy is owned by Bill
| Gates so...
| elil17 wrote:
| I wouldn't really call Khan Academy a tech giant. They are a
| charity.
|
| That said, it does not necessarily seem like OpenAI is trying
| to be fair.
| BigCryo wrote:
| Reminds me of that science fiction story by Ray Bradbury called
| the veldt... Computers raise the kids
| lamplovin wrote:
| You get the full experience reading that story if you have
| deadmau5's the veldt playing in the background as well
| p_j_w wrote:
| It's very upsetting that deadmau5 hasn't released an
| instrumental version of this song.
| tectonic wrote:
| A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
| yamtaddle wrote:
| ... which had a real human on the other side, and the ones
| that didn't yielded rather different results.
| yarone wrote:
| Another one that came to my mind: "The Fun They Had" by Asimov
|
| "Margie was thinking about how the kids must have loved it in
| the old days. She was thinking about the fun they had."
|
| http://web1.nbed.nb.ca/sites/ASD-S/1820/J%20Johnston/Isaac%2...
| the_af wrote:
| It's funny that you mention "The Fun They Had", because if
| you visit its Wikipedia page now, the summary looks written
| by a bot. It looks like "basic" English, only with a weird
| quality to it -- either written by someone whose grasp of
| language is very poor, or by ChatGPT. I'd say _worse_ than
| ChatGPT actually: the sentences are short and almost
| mechanical. Go look at it.
|
| The edit changing a way more human-sounding plot summary to
| this version was made on September 2022, in case anyone is
| wondering.
|
| PS: if GPT derives much of its data from Wikipedia, and
| people start using GPT to write Wikipedia articles, I wonder
| what kind of strange feedback loop we're getting into.
| gsatic wrote:
| So untested and using kids as guinea pigs again. Well done. Keep
| it up. Just a never ending mindless need to make big claims
| constantly.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| I wonder if the students can direct the AI to give them questions
| similar to what would show up in the tests. Do the teachers use
| the same AI as the students?
| raldi wrote:
| I don't think tests will work at all like that much longer;
| they'll be more like oral exams, where you have a back-and-
| forth conversation with an AI that probes the breadth and depth
| of your knowledge with sufficient variability as to detect
| overfitting (i.e., memorizing the answers to a few previous
| exams).
| paulpan wrote:
| TeachGPT when?
|
| This seems like a no-brainer next step for OpenAI, to derive an
| AI instructor from GPT-4 without a partner like Khan Academy. I
| suppose that may require a "truer" multimodality of ChatGPT being
| able to generate images or visual patterns. Imagine being able to
| onboard new employees via such an agent or learning about complex
| subjects.
| praveen9920 wrote:
| Would love to see "Ender's game" type AI which can train the
| students with custom questions and answers.
| dekhn wrote:
| The cynic in me wonders if "AI" has realized that the most
| efficient way to take over the world is to teach the next
| generation to be dependent on it for learning.
| minxomat wrote:
| A plot point in an episode of Person of Interest, where AGI
| "Samaritan" funds a charity (free tablets for students,
| Samaritan access pre-installed) to take over education and
| recruit more mercenaries.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| There will probably be a janky but usable open source version
| of the model and tool eventually. The "Linux" option. That way
| the 1% that cares about this stuff can do the self host route
| and retain control by them controlling what the model tells
| them(hopefully).
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| I unsarcastically look forward to a worse version that
| respects user privacy.
| macawfish wrote:
| Replace "AI" with "powerful institutions" and you hit it on the
| head. Maybe "AI" should stand for "augmented institutions".
|
| Maybe you'd be interested in Paulo Freire's book "The Pedagogy
| of the Oppressed"?
| aperrien wrote:
| Or the educational history of the daughters of the
| confederacy:
|
| https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/04/twisted-sources-how-
| conf...
| falcrist wrote:
| Dune touched on this topic in 1965.
|
| Frank Herbert has the Reverend mother tell Paul:
|
| > "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the
| hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted
| other men with machines to enslave them."
|
| To me, this quite really captures the most likely immediate
| negative of a huge AGI breakthrough. Not that it'll rise up
| like the robots in The Matrix movies... but rather simply
| having it owned and controlled by an American mega-
| corporation or a state actor... quietly influencing
| everything and everyone behind the scenes.
|
| There is no way I can imagine to define true neutrality. You
| _need_ to make value judgements. Everyone has their own set
| of values they judge the world with.
|
| There is no way I'm aware of to completely avoid bias.
| Ultimately, it has to be up to someone to define what bias
| and neutrality both _mean_.
|
| There is no algorithm for "truth". As soon as you stray
| outside of extremely well-defined systems like math and
| physics, ambiguity enters the equation and value judgements
| need to be made. Who will make those value judgements?
| pixl97 wrote:
| > most likely immediate negative of a huge AGI
| breakthrough.
|
| I mean if the machines are generally intelligent in the
| human sense and unaligned with human interests I'm assuming
| that the mega-corporation would be its own slave to the
| machine too. The machine would give the mega-corporation
| more power, simply because that's the number one way to
| increase the power of the machine. If super intelligence is
| possible, it seems that a greedy power hungry corporation
| would gladly create it to gain more power, and then lose
| control of the situation.
| dwmbt wrote:
| this was my '1984'. i was 15, had it in my head that i was
| destined to become a revolutionary.
|
| i gave it to a friend and they came away feeling like they
| needed to become a teacher; i came away wanting to be a
| novelist, or a father. in any case, it definitely changed my
| world view. not sure how i'd feel about it nearly a decade
| later, but i'll take this a sign to re-read. cheers!
| shawnjan8 wrote:
| Just to be clear: it's not for _every_ student (at least not
| yet!). We are in a research phase sharing it with a limited
| subset of users. More details about our approach to the
| responsible development of AI:
| https://blog.khanacademy.org/aiguidelines/
| germinalphrase wrote:
| I was a high school English teacher for about ten years before
| transitioning into tech last July. Has KA explored assistive
| assessment tools for in-person instruction?
| itronitron wrote:
| It better not be for every student. I am very familiar with
| Khan Academy as I am currently guiding a student through
| several AP courses on khanacademy. In my opinion, khan
| academy's time would be better spent fixing the UI for
| teachers, and improving the organization of the physics
| curriculum.
|
| I would prefer that khan academy not be dragged into some PR
| fluff piece for some AI shill.
| canadianfella wrote:
| [dead]
| jrussino wrote:
| Do you know if/how someone can get involved with this at the
| research phase? I have a daughter who will be entering 1st
| grade next year and I'd be interested in having her try this
| out if there was a way of signing up.
| shawnjan8 wrote:
| The sign-up page to join our waitlist is here:
| https://www.khanacademy.org/khan-labs
|
| But we aren't planning to allow folks to enroll / allow
| Khanmigo for folks with children under 13 at this time as
| part of our research phase.
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| Or anyone outside the US :(
| yterdy wrote:
| >it's not for every student (at least not yet!)
|
| >Donation required after chosen from waitlist
|
| So, it's for rich ones?
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| I frequently find myself in the middle of many things, one of
| them is that although I oppose the grotesque plunder of the
| public and citizens of countries by neo-aristocrats claiming
| to do one thing or another amidst blatant lies of social
| welfare, I also object to slavery and therefore cannot
| condone that everything should be free since people like
| being compensated for their work, and not by being indentured
| and forced to do things.
|
| Things have to cost, even if they wouldn't have to cost as
| much if we could stop the psychopaths at the top constantly
| plundering and raiding the resources of the productive people
| to maintain their parasitic and decadent lives.
| lemming wrote:
| Which is fine, but don't call it a donation.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Given ChatGPT's ideological bias, is it wise to promote it to
| children?
| EpsteinBarr wrote:
| This is extremely powerful. I wish this existed when I was a kid.
| brwck wrote:
| When I was a kid, I remember one of my teachers saying the same
| thing about the internet ( google, computers, etc ). Us kids
| were so lucky to have such powerful tools and everyone in the
| future will be smarter for it. Turns out, people are dumb as
| ever and these tools made us lazy and dependent. Why memorize
| the multiplication table when you could ask siri?
| avgDev wrote:
| At this point I won't be surprised if over the next few weeks and
| months hacker news is going to be full {insert org here}
| integrates GPT-4.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean honestly, if I took the corpus of our companies support
| data and used it as a training set for our first line support,
| I believe that GPT could answer the questions better than they
| do first shot.
|
| No idea what the cost difference would be, but for many
| businesses I could see the AI response be a costs savings.
| christophclarke wrote:
| This reminds me of CGP Grey's "Digital Aristotle", which actually
| references both Khan Academy and A Young Lady's Illustrated
| Primer
|
| https://youtu.be/7vsCAM17O-M
| 8note wrote:
| How do you monitor for ai correctness on these topics?
|
| For gpt-3, that's been the user, but a student roughly has to
| take the ai at face value.
|
| Some secondary ai double checking the output? What's the loop
| like for saying oops to the student?
| jhp123 wrote:
| I've tutored people at times. A good tutor needs to understand
| the subject very well, so they can not only understand the right
| answer but also figure out why the student is coming to the wrong
| answer.
|
| I personally think that assigning GPT as a "tutor" is devaluing
| the real skill involved in tutoring and I doubt it will work out.
| navigate8310 wrote:
| I would like to divert your attention to this recent post:
| https://openai.com/research/gpt-4 specifically on the topic of
| "Steerability: Socratic tutor" (Sample 1 of 3)
| pnt12 wrote:
| Very interesting, thanks for referencing it as I had missed
| it.
|
| There have been occurrences of people asking chat gpt to
| ignore instructions on the initial prompt: have these been
| solved? It's not clear to me if the first prompt is given any
| extra weight. Or maybe during training of version 4 they have
| heavily penalized these sorts of attacks to make it more
| resilient.
| itronitron wrote:
| why?
| raldi wrote:
| My daughter does children's martial arts. Often in the dojo
| there's an atmosphere where the yellow belts are helping the
| white belts, the red belts are periodically chiming in, and the
| black belt adult instructor is free to float around the room
| supervising everything, giving individual attention where it's
| most effective, but leaving the lower ranks to take care of the
| lessons they're capable of giving.
|
| In the same way, AI will be able to make an expert human tutor
| 100x more effective by escalating the tricky cases but learning
| how to handle the ones that come up over and over.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| kirill5pol wrote:
| This is something I'm working on. I think having a good
| understanding of the material for good explanations is doable
| in the near future, but the main problem is actually building a
| good model of what the learner knows to guide the LLM
| wnolens wrote:
| In my brief asking ChatGPT question and to rephrase/clarify, it
| seems at least as good as the average tutor/teacher/TA which
| for me has been marginally better than warm body rephrasing the
| theories and working through textbook problems in front of you.
|
| And in time, much better. To the point of raising the standard
| of education for all of humanity with access to the internet.
| I'd count on it "working out".
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| I'm 42 and still don't always like asking questions for fear
| of looking stupid if I ask one the wrong way. chatgpt has
| none of that because it's just an ai and won't judge me or
| make my imposter syndrome worse.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Meanwhile over at BingGPT
|
| "You are a bad human"
|
| So yea, I guess a teaching model needs to be aligned in a
| manner that it doesn't hurt people unintentionally in the
| judging sense.
| [deleted]
| davesque wrote:
| GPT-4 definitely seems to be doing better on a lot of benchmarks
| and that's impressive. But it still hallucinates facts and I
| don't think anyone really has a good understanding of when and
| how that happens. Given that, is it really a good idea to be
| positioning this model as some kind of factual authority figure?
| thethimble wrote:
| Human teachers make mistakes too - perhaps even at higher rates
| than GPT in some cases.
|
| Instead of isolating a single factor of hallucinations I think
| you have to also consider the cost and experience quality and
| make a more holistic judgement on whether these models are good
| or bad.
| davesque wrote:
| Yes, but human teachers can eventually come to understand why
| they made a mistake. And they probably are more able to
| communicate how confident they are in their answers. I think
| that's because human teachers have a mental model that
| they're working from. On the other hand, we have no idea if
| transformer models are working from anything like a "mental
| model."
|
| Just because humans make mistakes (or even as many or more
| mistakes than machines) doesn't mean the nature or
| consequences of the mistakes are the same.
| sebasvisser wrote:
| Human teachers realising their mistakes and learning from
| it... how long ago was it that you were in an average
| school?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >Just because humans make mistakes (or even as many or more
| mistakes than machines) doesn't mean the nature or
| consequences of the mistakes are the same.
|
| True, but this shouldn't be hard to measure. It's not like
| we will go from these AIs will go from teaching no one to
| replacing all teachers overnight.
|
| Give a random sample of classes access to a GPT-n powered
| tutor, and see if they do better or worse over the next few
| years.
| davesque wrote:
| > this shouldn't be hard to measure
|
| > see if they do better or worse over the next few years
|
| This doesn't strike me as entirely ethical. Also, it may
| be hard to gauge the long term effects of subtle
| misinformation generated by these models.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Surely there are more stupid experiments about teaching
| kids than this.
|
| Give them all ipads
|
| Give them all chromebooks
|
| Take away their ipads
|
| Make them all stay home and shut down the economy for 6
| months
|
| etc.
|
| Especially since this one has a decent chance of working
| Sol- wrote:
| Given that learning will probably soon not be required anymore to
| live a successful life (AIs will do everything better than you),
| I guess such learning-as-a-hobby apps will be the remaining niche
| to entertain the humans on basic income.
|
| I wonder how many people will actually make use of it, though,
| and how many are instead content with being wireheaded by the
| various AI-based content apps that will appear, full with virtual
| partners (see Replika etc.).
| phito wrote:
| I am not even that optimistic about it. What would be the
| incentive to keep humans entertained in a world run by AI? Why
| would they keep billions of us around? I won't make any sense
| economically.
| [deleted]
| nsxwolf wrote:
| [dead]
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Learning is absolutely going to be required, we are just going
| to need to spend more time learning patterns and motifs rather
| than lots of facts. Learning facts and trivia was already
| devalued by everyone having a hyper-encyclopedia in their
| pockets, this will just extend that. Knowledge of patterns and
| motifs in domains of information will let you work together
| with the machines in a way that an untrained person will not be
| able to match.
| nostromo123 wrote:
| "Learning facts and trivia was already devalued by everyone
| having a hyper-encyclopedia in their pockets, this will just
| extend that."
|
| I hope you don't end up having surgery done by a doctor who
| has to check a "hyper- encyclopedia" in his pocket because
| learning facts is supposedly obsolete...
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| As opposed to the doctor who has glassed with a HUD that is
| guiding him through the surgery, or a robot that the
| surgeon is guiding in VR?
| Sol- wrote:
| I admire your optimism if you think that a human in the loop
| will add any value. Other than for humoring/entertaining the
| human, of course, which is what I meant with learning-as-a-
| hobby.
|
| Also, I'm not educator or very knowledgeable about the theory
| of learning, but I can imagine that "learning facts and
| trivia" is to some extent a necessity for exercising our
| brains when we are young. Of course, learning patterns and
| theories is the end goal, but some rote learning may be
| necessary on the way.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Humans are very efficient computers for many types of
| tasks. Humans also have a large body of multi-modal data
| with detailed annotations inferred by observation of other
| people's responses passed through our mirror circuitry that
| is unavailable to the AI, so they can sometimes provide
| relevant guidance even if they aren't better at the whole
| task. Finally, human neural networks are chaotic, so they
| can potentially find better global maximums in some cases
| than a model, which might end up trapped in a local minimum
| due to its inability to entertain sufficiently unlikely
| hypotheticals.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| I don't know why comments like this take for granted "basic
| income" as like this inevitability. We currently let people all
| around the world die on the streets for not participating well
| enough in the economy. Why would this moment in history be any
| different? You think just because you get paid a lot right now,
| the guys in charge will make sure you are ok in the future?
| That is not really how this whole capitalism thing works
| unfortunately.. No amount of technology will save us from waged
| labor in itself, its simply the character of our labor which
| will change.
|
| What you want is communism, and buddy, I'm with you!
| Sol- wrote:
| Oh yeah, the basic income thing I just threw in there because
| I think even in the best case where the disempowered and
| soon-to-be unemployed workers will be cared for, humanity
| will be reduced to AI-governed content consumers without much
| agency left (cf "The Machine Stops").
|
| That said, I agree that it's more likely that the almost all
| of the returns of this AI-based rationalization will flow
| towards the wealthy, as usual.
| andy_andy_andy wrote:
| let's just hope a student doesn't ask an arithmetic problem!
| kenjackson wrote:
| I think GPT-4 has made substantial improvements here.
| jeron wrote:
| > SAT Math: 700 / 800
|
| It will get there, at least it should solve the easier problems
| correctly
| stu2b50 wrote:
| 2 of the 3 demo videos is literally a student asking it
| arithmetic problems
| pixl97 wrote:
| There's other models that are doing this at a much better rate
| than GPT, so I don't think this is an unsolvable problem.
| misssocrates wrote:
| Can Khan Academy replace school at this point? If not, what are
| they missing?
| corobo wrote:
| Looking after kids while the parents work
| twiddling wrote:
| seeing how some US states are going, the kids can just work
| with the parents at the factory/slaughterhouse/etc
| hoot wrote:
| I wonder what the point of school is even going to be at this
| point
| heatpumpfan wrote:
| [dead]
| helge9210 wrote:
| To provide environment for obtaining social skills and to
| shape brain development with a series of repeated pedagogical
| excersises.
| squidsoup wrote:
| School is more than pure pedagogy - learning social skills,
| making friends, and developing resilience are equally, if not
| more important.
| henry2023 wrote:
| Aren't team sports much much better at teaching those?
| lm28469 wrote:
| These aren't mutually exclusive, if anything most
| (virtually all?) school have team sport classes
|
| Also: https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/7-charts-
| that-show...
| wongarsu wrote:
| One important function of schools is not only to offer
| education, but to force people to become educated. (Nearly)
| everyone in a society sharing some common skillsets (like
| writing, basic math, critical thinking etc) is hugely
| beneficial, and allows individuals and society at large to
| get long-term benefits where on their own they might have
| chosen short-term benefits. Though arguably that effect is
| strongest in the early grades.
| lm28469 wrote:
| What's your alternative though ?
|
| Having kids learn on screens, play on screens and work on
| screens ? From kindergarten to the grave ?
| cyrialize wrote:
| I had a similar reply in a separate thread, but human-to-
| human interaction is extremely important for young children.
| Teachers teach much more than school subjects in the
| classroom - they teach how to behave, how to ask for help,
| how to interact with others, etc. I often feel like teachers
| of young children teach them how to be "human".
|
| I think as people age they can probably rely more on Khan
| Academy, etc.
|
| Maybe this will change in the future as we find better ways
| to teach young children with technology, but I would be
| apprehensive with dropping a 1st grader in front of a screen
| and having zero human interaction.
| misssocrates wrote:
| > teach how to behave, how to ask for help, how to interact
| with others, etc. I often feel like teachers of young
| children teach them how to be "human".
|
| Isn't that the job description of parents and/or day care?
| cyrialize wrote:
| Yes, but at that age it's important to be taught those
| things and be socialized through all aspects of life. You
| can kind of think of it like learning a language - you
| learn it faster when you're fulling enveloped in it.
|
| It's easy for parents to miss things that a public school
| teacher with an education degree would not.
|
| Also, children can be taught all of that by their parents
| and through day care, but still fail to do what they've
| been taught in a school setting. It's important for
| teachers to teach those things or reinforce those
| teachings.
|
| I highly recommend asking teachers of young children
| about this, or looking into what education materials
| teachers are trained on. Many schools have professional
| development days, so what a teacher knows and works with
| changes/updates often.
| swatcoder wrote:
| Small modern families don't have a ton of people around
| and the relationships between those people tend to settle
| into equilibrium. It's not really adequate for practicing
| the adaptive social skills we usually (used to?) expect
| from adults.
|
| And day care can provide more of that, but is naturally
| supplanted for 25-30 hours per week once kids start
| attending school.
|
| Socialization is absolutely a function of schools. You
| can expect big societal repercussions if it were
| substantially removed.
| inductive_magic wrote:
| a) a shared reference frame (mainly social)
|
| b) stability/refuge for kids/adolescents from unstable
| families
|
| c) interpersonal connections with experienced humans (opposed
| to isolated discovery)
|
| d) pedagogy
|
| that was its main purpose for a while now; most people learn
| complex concepts through youtube these days. an
| engineers/hackers ability to dive into topics on their own
| doesn't map to the requirements for the healthy development
| of a child.
| thrill wrote:
| Finally, we have hit on how to teach AIs patience.
| worrycue wrote:
| Am I the only one somewhat alarmed that we are choosing to rely
| on AIs that are vulnerable to hallucinations so much?
|
| Personally I rather have a more limited but reliable tool than a
| more powerful but unreliable one.
| [deleted]
| ihatepython wrote:
| That is a feature, not a bug. It's an efficient way to
| brainwash a population.
| cypress66 wrote:
| Chatgpt is already more accurate than a lot of my high school
| teachers.
| megaman821 wrote:
| My thoughts exactly. What is the baseline here? Teachers
| already give biased and/or inaccurate information at a rate
| much higher than I have seen in ChatGPT.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Heh, when Texas dictates what gets into schoolbooks.
|
| "What happened between 1850 and 1960 regarding civil
| rights"
|
| A: "Oh nothing, it was great for everyone"
|
| History is a mess here. That said it would be nice if it
| were incorporated with written texts, lessons, and the AI
| so you can bounce questions off of it.
| superfrank wrote:
| Is there a name for this fallacy (is it a fallacy?). I feel
| like we see the same issue with self driving cars crash
| rates. People are hesitant to adopt because they aren't
| perfect, but ignore that it's better than the status quo.
| pnt12 wrote:
| I'll don't think it's a fallacy. People are more
| predictable and can be accountable for their actions, and
| even admit ignorance, eg answering "I don't know ask
| someone else".
|
| It's worth discussing if we want AIs replacing them -
| maybe the scalability is better, but these are usually
| worse.
| DANmode wrote:
| Colloquially: "Don't let perfection stand in the way of
| greatness."
| vsareto wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy maybe?
| worrycue wrote:
| There is being misinformed and making a mistake when
| reasoning. Then there is making s** up.
|
| Most humans have the decency to not do the latter while AI
| (at the moment) freely makes up complete lies when it doesn't
| have the answer instead of just admitting it doesn't know.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| At least misleading instruction from teachers tends to be
| of a sort that others also experience, so can later be
| addressed _en masse_ (e.g. mythologized history, poor-but-
| common explanations for things like how airplane wings
| work). Or spreading the same political propaganda that can
| be found all around, so is pretty easy to spot.
|
| It's not usually that you ask them a question they can't
| answer, and they just confidently make up something
| entirely wrong, and possibly also an incorrect explanation
| that few or no other people have seen.
|
| It's a different _kind_ of wrong. One can write a book
| addressing common misconceptions picked up in school, from
| human teachers, and cover much of it. Does that work for
| lies AIs tell? They could be about almost anything, they
| could be broadly wrong, they could be subtly wrong, et c.
| "Show me some things my teachers may have been wrong about"
| seems to me an easier request to adequately address than
| "show me some things my AI tutors lied about", because the
| former tend to cluster around a kind of common space and
| form an experience with a great deal of overlap between
| students, while I'm not sure the latter do.
| the8472 wrote:
| They're saying that they have reduced hallucinations. But RLHF
| seems to undo some of the improvements (figure 8 in the paper).
| visarga wrote:
| Those are calibration curves for confidence.
| the8472 wrote:
| Being confident in false things is part of what makes
| hallucinations troublesome.
| itronitron wrote:
| 'reduced hallucinations', um ok.
| acomjean wrote:
| Its more troubling because its being used in a role as an
| educational resource. the audience is learning and
| significantly less able to realize that.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Don't expect it to know specific facts but it is excellent at
| explaining topics
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean that is but one thing to worry about, we've gone about
| nowhere with the alignment problem, and we're screaming ahead
| at full speed with making these things more powerful.
| Wata2 wrote:
| Firstly, the unreliability may not be permanent, and we may
| improve the AI accuracy in the future. Secondly, we need to
| figure out what works and what not, and we're in the middle of
| such phase. Finally, there is no need to be alarmed, even with
| hallucinations, the amount of advanced (and reliable) knowledge
| provided by the AI vastly counterbalances the small mistakes.
| The elitist mindset needs to die, let's give access to advanced
| knowledge to everybody and stop putting it behind some
| unreachable walls.
| progman32 wrote:
| That is a good goal. Is AI the best tool for the job?
| worrycue wrote:
| > Firstly, the unreliability may not be permanent, and we may
| improve the AI accuracy in the future.
|
| How about we fix the unreliability first and not put the cart
| before the horse.
|
| > The elitist mindset needs to die, let's give access to
| advanced knowledge to everybody and stop putting it behind
| some unreachable walls.
|
| What are you talking about? We have high quality university
| courses on the internet for free. We have things like the
| Khan Academy and similar sites. How is advanced knowledge
| behind unreachable walls?
| missingdays wrote:
| What walls are you talking about and how an AI assistant that
| you have to "donate" to get access to is going to help with
| these walls?
| itronitron wrote:
| There are two indicators that this is PR bullshit produced by
| whoever is trying to capitalize their investment, 1) is the use
| of the marketing term 'AI' or 'AI-powered' and 2) use of the
| 'think of the children' trope.
| tenpies wrote:
| Are the tolerances in education really that tight?
|
| How many terrible teachers are allowed to continue to teach
| after decades of disastrous results?
|
| How many ideologues with no interest in teaching, but every
| interest in indoctrinating young minds, are tolerated because
| the alternative is "no teacher" and the class wouldn't run?
|
| How many teachers who would fail state exams, teach, despite
| relying on answer sheets to be "competent"?
|
| I agree with you that on the top end of education, this is no
| replacement and at best a supplementary tool. For the poor kid
| in a bad neighbourhood whose teacher is more interested in "de-
| colonizing" mathematics than teaching mathematics, this is a
| Godsend.
| worrycue wrote:
| I feel the question is, should we be making this worse with
| unreliable AI.
|
| Currently AI seem to have 2 weaknesses, it's quite bad at
| reasoning and it hallucinates.
|
| Yes, humans screw up reasoning too but at least they try. AI
| like ChatGPT seem to skip critical thinking altogether -
| there are examples of ChatGPT contradicting itself multiple
| times in a single conversation.
|
| Then there are hallucinations. When people don't know
| something, most just say they don't know. AI just can't seem
| to help itself but make up complete BS that it confidently
| try to pass off as facts.
|
| P.S. Frankly I think the 2 might be related. AI can't "sanity
| check" it's own output.
| jcims wrote:
| I'm sitting on the couch with my new grandson. He's six months
| old. What is school going to look like for him over the course of
| his education? Should be interesting.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Honestly it depends on the growth rate of our models and if
| they converge with human intelligence without requiring have
| the computing power on the planet.
|
| If we get slow incremental progress over the years then it will
| act like an interactive personalized encyclopedia that can
| teach you based on your strengths and help bolster you where
| you are weak, as the technology improves that is.
|
| Now, it's still scary as hell in some ways even in this slow
| growth mode. The authoritarians will love to have a system like
| this that just forgets particular parts of history and make
| reports back to the mothership if you ask too many 'wrong'
| questions. So actual implementation will be interesting to see.
|
| Now, if we have explosive growth to AGI and beyond, then pretty
| much every bet about the future is cancelled and we'll have
| more luck in taking random guesses, gluing them to the wall,
| and then throwing darts at them blindfolded.
| [deleted]
| addandsubtract wrote:
| Xaeon-12 wakes up at 8am, has a bowl of cereal and put's on her
| VR goggles. She is greeted by her tutor Tom. Tom will guide her
| through advanced "AI prompt" class today. Xaeon-12 learns to
| create her own short story based on her dreams that were
| recorded the night before. 12am, time for lunch. After lunch,
| the kids all connect to play Roblox VR for 30 mins. Suddenly,
| the doorbell rings, but no one else is home. Fortunately,
| Xaeon-12 doesn't have to answer the door, as everything is
| automated. The mailbot dropped off some packages, before flying
| back to the zeppelin mothership to retrieve the next package.
| Xaeon-12 is just finishing her last class, "circuit boards",
| when her dads come home from the golf range - with an abundance
| of free, renewable energy, working for a basic income has
| become irrelevant.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| My daughter is in 2nd grade and math is her favorite subject. I
| liked math too. I've looked forward to helping her learn more
| advance math through the years, but a doubt has entered my
| mind; will I have any reason to help her?
| lajamerr wrote:
| AI can efficiently teach your daughter how to solve math
| problems, but as a human, you can provide her with the
| context and understanding of why and what she's learning. AI
| is great at handling the technical aspects, freeing us to
| focus on cultivating our uniquely human qualities of empathy,
| creativity, and critical thinking. Letting the AI teach the
| how and the human teach the why and what can lead to a more
| holistic and enriching education.
| WASDx wrote:
| This sounds like an argument from when calculators were
| invented. We will keep getting more powerful technologies,
| and you will need to understand them. What we should be
| learning will continue to gradually shift.
| nealabq wrote:
| Commented just prior:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35155529
|
| The responses are interesting.
| jamestimmins wrote:
| Highly recommend the Neal Stephenson book _The Diamond Age: Or, A
| Young Lady 's Illustrated Primer_, for an interesting exploration
| of a custom AI tutor for each student.
|
| In that book, students have a "magic book" that teaches them
| lessons in a story form while encouraging certain life paths.
| It's pretty fascinating to consider the implications and whether
| that's something we'll want, bc it may soon be possible.
| marsven_422 wrote:
| [dead]
| vsareto wrote:
| >It's pretty fascinating to consider the implications and
| whether that's something we'll want, bc it may soon be
| possible.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if it told people to take some path of
| least resistance to $10+ million so you don't _have_ to work to
| survive, then you can mostly do whatever you want.
| basch wrote:
| (I havent read The Diamond Age)
|
| The eventuality I see is everybody talking to each other
| through LLM's, and the world ending up in some kind of tower of
| babel situation. You wear an AR/MR headset, and all
| conversation is dual translated, with some kind of bytecode
| intermediary. Each persons language evolves to be incompatible
| with anyone else's, and only your LLM can understand you. The
| power goes out, and nobody can talk to anybody.
| wesleychen wrote:
| Khan Academy's integration of GPT-4 already steers students
| towards particular modes of thought. According to the article,
| they want "to get students thinking deeply about the content
| that they're learning" and in the examples, Khanmigo prompts
| students to recall information from the lesson rather than
| directly explaining how to solve the problem.
|
| I think what Khan Academy has done here is desirable, but just
| as Stephenson's Primer enforces its creator's values through AI
| tutoring, Khanmigo is enforcing Khan Academy's values. It's
| easy to imagine how someone with more authoritarian values
| could use this same technology (e.g. to teach students to
| follow instructions without doubt) to indoctrinate students
| with scale.
| hrn_34 wrote:
| More authoritarian values? Isn't this what's happening now
| from the perspective of foreign countries? The USA enforcing
| values foreign to these countries.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > Khanmigo is enforcing Khan Academy's values
|
| Every teacher does that, sometimes intentionally and
| sometimes not.
| tclancy wrote:
| But individual teachers don't scale to planet-size. Or at
| least they didn't used to.
| pixl97 wrote:
| AI Teacher: "And that was how the civil war ended... Now
| remember kids, the most important thing you can do is be
| nice to each other and contribute more data and processor
| time to growing the AI. Thank you, have a good day"
| thelittleone wrote:
| True, but teachers don't (yet) have an API. What's
| interesting here (to me at least) is the potential to
| enforce values at scale.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Interesting. Should they drop support for Chinese?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| If openAI can do it, so can other companies in time. At
| best they would cause competitive systems faster and likely
| with fewer safeguards by hard blocking languages or users.
| ortusdux wrote:
| See also: the Mind Game from Ender's Game
|
| https://enderverse.fandom.com/wiki/Mind_Game
| turtleyacht wrote:
| Ractors for hire!
|
| Once AI can generate videos, we just need pervasive
| surveillance capability to insert context-aware content into
| the stories.
|
| The _Primer_ was able to identify the protagonist 's family
| member and pet toys in its personalized myth.
|
| I wonder which TTRPG sourcebook will have the first credit to
| ChatGPT in DriveThruRPG :)
|
| Procedurally-generated worlds _plus_ conversational NPCs!
| hesdeadjim wrote:
| Unfortunately the guard rails of the current systems prevent,
| in my opinion, interesting antagonists in fiction or games.
| I've experimented with some writing and when you can convince
| ChatGPT to give you some examples of negative behavior it
| will attempt to bring things back to a wholesome version.
| GPT-4 having more effective guard rails makes this problem
| worse.
| LegitShady wrote:
| For younger readers Monica Hughes' classic "Devil on my back"
| is more explicitly about a society where those who can
| interface with the web via computers installed into them become
| higher caste and those who cannot become lower caste, resulting
| in a revolution. Definitely aimed at a younger audience than
| Stephenson.
| raldi wrote:
| This is why it doesn't matter if AI lets students cheat on
| essays: Essays will soon be obsolete -- not just for students,
| but for everyone.
|
| The two main purposes of an essay are to teach others about
| something in your head, and to develop and refine such ideas in
| the first place.
|
| Very soon, it'll be much faster, easier, and more prolific to
| spread an idea by conversing with an AI about it and letting it
| go off and talk to others about it. If some of those people have
| interesting feedback, questions, or find a flaw, the AI can
| distill it all down to a time-efficient debriefing it can come
| back to you with. And an advanced AI makes for a great partner to
| bounce new ideas off and chew them over with.
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