[HN Gopher] I am starting an AI+Education company
___________________________________________________________________
I am starting an AI+Education company
Author : bilsbie
Score : 870 points
Date : 2024-07-16 17:57 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| treprinum wrote:
| Cool! Does Eureka Labs/Andrej plan to offer grad/PhD-level
| courses (or better) with similar topics to CS236, CS224N etc. in
| the future as well?
| juliushuijnk wrote:
| Hope it will enable all of us to become not just smarter, but
| also wiser :)
| boyka wrote:
| Can someone please provide the mentioned links? (For those
| without X account)
| layer8 wrote:
| https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1813263734707790301
| MarcScott wrote:
| I think teaching is one of the few roles that can't be replaced
| by AI. If you're a self-motivated learner, eager to gain new
| skills, then AI is perfect for you. Having a virtual Feynman
| coach you through a Physics course is perfect.
|
| Most learners, the world over, are not self-motivated. The
| pandemic showed us exactly what children would prefer to do, when
| they don't have a physical teacher standing over them, which is
| bugger all. We send kids to school, in the hope they get some
| education, but the reality is that we use schools for free
| childcare while we work. If parents have to additionally monitor
| their child's learning, it breaks down pretty quickly.
|
| I see AI being more of a teaching assistant, rather than a
| replacement for teachers. Having been in the education game for
| over twenty five years, I know the difference in impact when
| comparing virtual learning to in-person training.
| ilaksh wrote:
| AI certainly can't completely replace teachers, but the
| potential gains for personal tutoring from SOTA LLMs still seem
| enormous to me.
|
| And I'm not trying to make a general argument against in person
| training. But I think the details of how virtual learning
| happens matters quite a lot. AI can make it much more
| personalized and make tutoring relatively affordable. Don't you
| think?
| dinobones wrote:
| AI has personally tutored me about obscure, deep linear
| algebra concepts. It's so great to get applied examples and
| be able to ask why/how something works, rather than reading a
| stuffy Wikipedia article or math textbook.
|
| It's been extremely effective for me, where reading a math
| textbook/wikipedia article seemed like _too much effort_ ,
| but a friendly conversation with my AI tutor was just fine.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| How can you bring yourself to trust the AI? Just yesterday
| a friend and I asked Chat-GPT a physics question, and for
| some reason his assistant asserted that the speed of light
| was 3,000 m/s, which is off by two orders of magnitude. We
| know that's wrong so we can tell the AI to do it again but
| right this time, but if it was explaining a concept we
| didn't already understand, I can't see how the output would
| be any more meaningful than asking a random stranger and
| trusting their response.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Ever since the step(s) beyond ChatGPT 3.5 I haven't
| noticed any huge errors like that, personally. Are you
| sure you were on a new model?
|
| Also, how can you trust anyone? People are wrong.
| Teachers can be wrong. Web pages can be wrong. Books can
| be wrong. I think LLMs will probably soon be the least
| likely to be wrong out of any of those.
| dinobones wrote:
| Yeah exactly this, ChatGPT 4-o very rarely, if ever,
| hallucinates.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| A very easy way to get basically _every_ current AI model
| to hallucinate:
|
| 1. Ask a highly non-trivial research question (in
| particular from math)
|
| 2. Ask the AI for paper and textbook references on the
| topic
|
| At this point, already many of these references could be
| hallucinations.
|
| 3. If necessary ask the AI where in these
| papers/textbooks you can find explanations on the
| questions, and/or on which aspect of the question or
| research area the individual references focus.
| Slyfox33 wrote:
| I just asked chatgpt: "comparing 9.9 and 9.11, which is
| larger?"
|
| and it responded:
|
| 9.11 is larger than 9.9.
|
| When comparing these two numbers: 9.9
| can be written as 9.90 to have the same number of decimal
| places. 9.11 remains 9.11.
|
| Comparing digit by digit: The integer
| part (9) is the same for both. The first decimal
| place (9 vs. 1): 9 is larger. The second decimal
| place (0 vs. 1): 1 is larger, which makes 9.11 larger
| overall.
|
| So, 9.11 > 9.9.
| BeetleB wrote:
| He's an AI. He's biased towards sorting algorithms :-)
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| I should have put a big asterisk and mentioned that my
| comment didn't apply to straight-up math.
| simonw wrote:
| How can you bring yourself to trust a human teacher?
| Humans are wrong sometimes too, often with confidence.
|
| The trick to learning effective timely (with both LLMs
| and human teachers) is to recognize that you should learn
| from more than one source. Think critically about the
| information you are being exposed to - if something
| doesn't quite feel right, check it elsewhere.
|
| I genuinely believe that knowing that an information
| source is occasionally unreliable can help you learn MORE
| effectively, because it encourages you to think
| critically about the material and explore beyond just a
| single source of information.
|
| I've been learning things with the assistance of LLMs for
| nearly two years now. I often catch them making mistakes,
| and yet I still find them really useful for learning.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| To your point... if you _trust_ anything, you already are
| at a big disadvantage in learning. It 's the wrong
| attitude.
| camdenreslink wrote:
| If you can't trust a teacher or a textbook, then you are
| in big trouble. Especially if it is a brand new subject
| to yourself where you don't have an intuition about what
| is correct/incorrect. Part of a teacher/student
| relationship is obviously trust.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| No, you aren't. You can listen to ideas and think about
| them and attribute them to the sources and come to (or
| not) your own conclusions.
|
| The reason it's such a bad idea to "trust" the way you
| are suggesting is that many fields are quackery. Do you
| trust that fancy textbook and sophisticated sounding
| professor from first year macroeconomics?
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > How can you bring yourself to trust a human teacher?
| Humans are wrong sometimes too, often with confidence.
|
| If humans/AIs are wrong about a topic (in particular
| wrong in a confident way) multiple times, I _will_ stop
| trusting them to be experts in the topic. What I
| experienced is rather that many human experts in academia
| tend to be honest when they are not sure about the
| answer.
| camdenreslink wrote:
| The problem is that LLMs in their current state
| confidently lie. They will tell you that 38 + 22 = 3822
| without a shred of uncertainty.
|
| If you are a 7 year old learning how to do arithmetic
| with fractions, there is no way that will help you learn
| more effectively.
| simonw wrote:
| Right, so don't use them if you are a seven year old.
| LLM-assisted learning requires skill in learning.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| A human understands what they're saying. If a human
| teacher is working through a math problem and isn't sure
| of their work, they're able to stop and correct their
| mistake. An AI math teacher is trained on a corpus of
| data - probably very similar to the data that the human
| teacher was trained on, though I'm sure the AI was
| trained on far more data than any single human ever was -
| but can't do the introspective part. To put it another
| way, I think we agree that humans learn better by
| assessing multiple sources and thinking critically. An AI
| is very good at the former, but very bad at the latter,
| and I would rather have a teacher that can think
| critically about what it is saying to me.
| mecsred wrote:
| Trust but verify. If you're doing your homework you
| should be able to notice things not lining up and ask the
| model about them. Human teachers can also make mistakes
| (though usually less than an AI hopefully) and it's the
| same process dealing with those.
|
| In my opinion the best teachers just direct your
| questions in the direction where the answers you find
| give you the most useful information. I'm optimistic that
| AI could be an improvement to the average for
| scientifically minded learners, though I wouldn't expect
| it to be more effective than a 1 on 1 with a good
| teacher.
| nathan11 wrote:
| This problem isn't exclusive to current implementations
| of AI.
|
| I had a US business professor explain in one of my
| business classes that making a bit more money might push
| you over into the next tax bracket and cost you more in
| taxes than you made.
|
| This guy had a PhD, had been teaching for decades and
| apparently didn't understand the marginal tax system.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I had a US business professor explain in one of my
| business classes that making a bit more money might push
| you over into the next tax bracket and cost you more in
| taxes than you made.
|
| He's not wrong. You are correct if you consider only
| income taxes. But there are other tax benefits that lead
| to discontinuities with respect to income.
|
| As an example, in my state you can deduct up to $5000 of
| contributions to a 529 plan if your income is under
| $250K. Go a penny above that threshold, and you can
| deduct only $2500. That extra penny just reduced your
| refund by a few hundred dollars.
| sensanaty wrote:
| But he's not really wrong, either.
|
| In the Netherlands we have a marginal tax rate, so every
| Euro over X gets taxed 10%, everything over Y gets taxed
| 15% etc. (simplified numbers obviously).
|
| However, often times it's better to stay in the top of a
| lower bracket because of tangentially-related benefits,
| such as healthcare subsidies, rent subsidies and other
| things like that. If you go from tax bracket 1 -> 2
| because you get a 100 euro raise, sure you'll get 100
| euros more (well, more like 95 but whatever), but you
| also lose out on more than that in the form of a loss in
| other benefits.
|
| My partner went through this recently, she got a raise at
| work, but as a result she actually lost the subsidized
| rent money she got from the gov't. She had to request her
| workplace lower her wage so she was under the limit,
| because otherwise she couldn't have afforded rent on her
| own, and if the raise was even 2 euros/hr higher, she
| might've even been kicked out of her social housing
| situation.
|
| That's because the benefits aren't marginal, they work on
| a hard cut-off limit. Anything over X amount and you're
| just cut off, you're not gradually weened off it until
| you're at a high enough income to not require gov't help.
| gjm11 wrote:
| Nitpick: Your number of orders of magnitude is off by a
| (binary) order of magnitude.
|
| The speed of light is about 300,000,000 m/s. (In fact
| it's _exactly_ 299,792,458 m /s, because that's how the
| metre is defined.) So 3,000 m/s is off by _five_
| (decimal) orders of magnitude, not two.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Counter nitpick: You can reduce any discrepancy to two
| orders of magnitude by changing your base :-)
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Ha! Here I am complaining about Chat-GPT's obviously
| wrong answer and I get something so obviously wrong. Yes,
| thank you for pointing that out.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| I also asked GPT-4 some very basic questions about
| modular arithmetic the other day, which it got
| confidently -- and very badly -- wrong.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| A likely truth no one wants talk about : LLMs will only
| help people who want to learn. Those people are likely
| already in very good shape in life. The amount of help from
| LLMs is likely very high for such people - as you note the
| ability to have a back and forth is very helpful.
|
| For 99% of the population, they aren't going to do this. It
| is what it is.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| > obscure, deep linear algebra concepts
|
| Could you give some examples?
| eldaisfish wrote:
| A major part of the learning process is your peers. Learning
| is groups has benefits especially when you can bounce ideas
| off other humans.
|
| You cannot replace that with a machine.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Gotcha. So I guess the question is, can an AI run a Zoom
| meeting or interactive multiplayer learning game with a
| bunch of kids on it? Have to admit that might be a stretch.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| AI can augment teachers though.
| surfingdino wrote:
| How?
| OmarShehata wrote:
| > Most learners, the world over, are not self-motivated
|
| this seems like a bizarre conclusion. In my experience, most
| people, the world over, are in fact self motivated. You won't
| see that if you have a very narrow definition of what is it
| that they're supposed to be learning
|
| kids aren't motivated to do boring math drills, because they
| don't see why it matters to their life (the real answer is: it
| does not, they are not wrong).
|
| I appreciated hearing this echoed by Conrad Wolfram in a recent
| PIMA episode: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-do-we-still-
| teach-peopl...
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I think it might be worth considering whether you've had a
| privileged upbringing. Thinking back on it, the majority of
| people probably would have been content to play games all
| day. You could argue that that's learning, but unfortunately
| it's not the kind of learning that society tends to reward.
|
| I've heard that kids in upper middle class circles are
| totally different in this regard though. Maybe they want to
| do more on average.
| pigscantfly wrote:
| I think this perspective is belied by the vast over-
| subscription of free public education in places where it
| has previously been paid only[1] (at this point, mainly in
| Africa). It does seem like there is strong evidence that
| most children and parents recognize the value of education
| and are self-motivated to pursue it where it is accessible
| to them. I believe it follows that lowering cost and
| barriers to quality education will improve outcomes without
| a need to otherwise coerce participation.
|
| [1] See, most recently, Zambia
| geodel wrote:
| Not really. In my experience it is mostly effect of
| socio-legal pressure that kids can't be anywhere but
| school. In primary schools most kids are bored or
| miserable as hell while in school. And further parents
| keep pushing it because apparently _education is key to
| future success / great career_.
|
| For higher education there is charade of education to get
| jobs. So for office manager job where grade 8 would be
| enough, we have MBAs now because we all need advanced
| education to survive in global economy blah..blah.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > For higher education there is charade of education to
| get jobs. So for office manager job where grade 8 would
| be enough, we have MBAs now because we all need advanced
| education to survive in global economy blah..blah.
|
| This would actually be a good business opportunity: hire
| such "grade 8 educated" people as office managers, but
| pay them much less than MBAs. If they are nearly as good
| as MBAs, you save a lot of money on this group of
| employees, and thus your company has a strong economic
| advantage.
| lmm wrote:
| > hire such "grade 8 educated" people as office managers,
| but pay them much less than MBAs.
|
| The trouble is it's performance all the way up and down.
| In the first place you're only going to get the weirdos /
| extreme gamblers, and then you'll struggle to attract
| investors, your clients/suppliers will wonder why your
| business development folks missed their classical
| references...
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > In the first place you're only going to get the weirdos
|
| You will (hopefully) nevertheless check whether an
| applicant has the necessary traits to be a decent office
| manager. On the other hand, I wouldn't claim that weirdos
| are necessarily bad office managers.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Yeah if anything, current education system is so garbage that
| it manages to completely demotivate curious kids who want to
| genuinely learn. It's designed around adults that need to run
| the place, runs at the wrong pace for most students and
| focuses on PTSD-inducing high anxiety testing constantly
| because it's easy to do for the teachers. Not to mention
| piles of pointless busywork as homework that's been proven to
| not help with learning at all.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I'm curious - have you ever taught in a public school?
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| > kids aren't motivated to do boring math drills, because
| they don't see why it matters to their life (the real answer
| is: it does not, they are not wrong).
|
| Most kid athletes are also not self-motivated to run laps, or
| do boring repetitive drills, when they know from experience
| that these activities help them win games within the next few
| months. Usually need a coach to force them to do them. Same
| for young music players. Practicing scales endlessly does
| make you a better musician. But they won't do it till forced.
|
| The primary reason kids don't like running laps or playing
| scales or doing math drills is because they are boring.
| nsagent wrote:
| Reminds me of a recent podcast with Stasa Gejo [1], a top
| competition climber. She basically says the same thing. At
| times she hated being told to do drills growing up, but
| really valued that later because as a kid she sometimes
| didn't feel like doing the hard work necessary for the
| outcomes she desired.
|
| [1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hg4jPdMnPyE&t=995
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| > Practicing scales endlessly does make you a better
| musician. But they won't do it till forced.
|
| The value of such exercises, or any other drill-based
| curriculum, must be measured with its opportunity cost. If
| you practise scales for an hour a day, you can indeed
| reliably expect to be better at your musical instrument,
| but it could very well be that the same hour spent on
| improving another skill (sight-reading, articulation etc.)
| would make you _considerably better still_ at your
| instrument.
|
| I think it might be more generally useful to say that, in
| order to develop well-rounded competency in a given field,
| one should expect to _sometimes_ have to perform boring
| drills.
| choppaface wrote:
| Feedback is a critical part of education as well as
| motivation for learning. But the act of giving feedback is
| very hard to scale, even for virtual learning. Enter an LLM
| chatbot, which is imperfect but can fill a lot of gaps in
| expectation. Chatbots certainly aren't for everybody, but the
| large gains in accuracy in years past make them on average
| more effective.
| ugh123 wrote:
| >kids aren't motivated to do boring math drills, because they
| don't see why it matters to their life (the real answer is:
| it does not, they are not wrong).
|
| I think you are partially right in that the dryness of much
| of math teaching hides a lot of the underlying material's
| applicability to life. I think one thing AI could do is help
| design rich situational lessons that could are prompted,
| vetted, and updated by teachers and then taught to the class.
| It could be trivial to create incremental difficulty of
| problem materials tailored to each student's progress and
| goal.
| MarcScott wrote:
| > In my experience, most people, the world over, are in fact
| self motivated.
|
| In your experience? The world over? Can you tell me your
| experience. I've been a teacher for a long time. I've worked
| in the UK, the USA, PNG, and Kenya.
|
| The vast majority of kids in the developed world don't really
| care about education. A few do, and they get great grades.
| Most care more about social status, their cliques, or just
| surviving the jungle that is school.
|
| School is important. It teaches you how to deal with other
| people. It teaches you how to deal with people in authority.
| You can't get that at home, in front of a screen. Learning
| stuff is secondary. I'm sure there are plenty of people here
| that are not working in whatever they majored at.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| Learning stuff is secondary? Found your problem.
|
| School shouldn't be primarily about experiencing social
| interaction. It's an artificial environment that disappears
| as soon as you graduate, and which you'll never find again
| anywhere else in society. You can learn social interaction
| in plenty of other settings, most of which are vastly more
| efficient and realistic. Admittedly, none of them function
| as daycare...
|
| School _should be_ (and used to be) about learning to
| learn, building mental discipline and a base of knowledge
| sufficient to bootstrap whatever other studies appeal to
| the student, even more so than memorizing a particular list
| of facts. But it seems that that position has been largely
| abandoned.
| techostritch wrote:
| This is circular, how do you propose making school about
| that? If you're only goal is to maximize the folks who
| like to obey authority then great, and maybe that's all
| you care to do, and maybe you don't care about losing the
| kids who don't have the academics to make it, but you
| also lose a whole mess of kids at the top end of the
| spectrum too.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| I'm not sure which part of my comment would result in
| maximizing folks who like to obey authority. I'm more
| focused on improving individual outcomes in terms of
| functional individuals, their quality of life, and the
| contributions they're able to make to society as a whole.
|
| In any case, we homeschool.
|
| I haven't really considered how to improve schooling at
| scale (particularly in an affordable way), but my
| proposal would be to introduce a _lot_ more granularity
| to schooling by eliminating the idea of grades and
| classes and focusing more on individual assessment.
|
| Obviously this is likely cost prohibitive, but perhaps
| promoting and subsidizing homeschooling and homeschool
| co-ops is a good start in that direction, and could give
| rise to more cost-effective solutions over time. Not all
| parents are equipped to homeschool, but homeschooling
| does make use of resources which could be improved and
| which others could leverage as well.
| techostritch wrote:
| I'm mixed, I definetly wouldn't home school my kids and
| it doesn't seem scalable and I do think there's value in
| a population having a shared identity from education,
| but, at least from my own experience I suspect my kids
| will have their most valuable academic opportunities
| outside of school.
| simonw wrote:
| "You can learn social interaction in plenty of other
| settings, most of which are vastly more efficient and
| realistic."
|
| What settings are those?
| afarviral wrote:
| Community gardens, sports, religious or interest groups,
| collectives, contributing in a large household, early
| work experience, hobbies/interests. It probably is a
| fairly finite list because societies have optimized for
| the individual and people are often only active within of
| a community at work or in education facilities. So a part
| of a solution in my view would be establishing more
| communities that are separate from the family... they
| might look a lot like schools though, so maybe we should
| just focus on those? There's more need for new
| communities to be established for other age ranges.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| I pretty much agree 100%. We need more, smaller
| communities - and we need them offline.
|
| Notably, this is largely an American problem, since
| America is built around cars, which given the capitalist
| nature of American society proves to be antithetical to
| establishing local communities.
|
| European and other countries, whose layouts and culture
| were established in pedestrian days, are much better off
| in this regard.
| koonsolo wrote:
| How does being an employee differ so much from being a
| student? You still get either good or bad grades for your
| work. You do assignments, get rules and processes you
| have to follow, play well with your fellow
| students/colleagues, etc.
|
| I would say it's quite similar.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| I'm mostly talking about the rather artificial division
| of students into grades of equal ages without taking into
| account the individual's proclivities, abilities and
| achievements. This separation is entirely contrary to
| organic human self-organization (even in work places)
| from a tribal perspective and results in a great deal of
| social illnesses (bullying, cliques, etc.) that are,
| although found elsewhere, exacerbated by the
| artificiality of the group-making (which is necessary for
| the public school model as it currently exists today to
| function).
| koonsolo wrote:
| At age 12, kids get split up in groups according to their
| abilities, no?
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| Not sure what you're referring to, tbh. Are you talking
| about the occasional student being promoted or held back
| a grade? If so, I would say that isn't a granular enough
| separation to be meaningful.
| camdenreslink wrote:
| Probably talking about student tracking. It was
| definitely a thing at my school.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_(education)
| koonsolo wrote:
| At least in Belgium, at 12, kids get divided into
| different schools and systems. You can go into trades,
| which expects you to be ready at 18 to go work as a
| plumber, electrician, mechanic, secretary, cook, etc. Or
| you go towards higher education and so get more focus on
| math and/or languages. At 18 you are expected to not be
| ready for the job market but study further.
|
| For my own kids, you really see the differences at 11 to
| become more profound in their classroom, where some are
| running behind while others excel. So I saw that 12 is
| indeed the age where a split is necessary.
|
| You don't have that?
|
| Edit: After some Wikipeding, I see you really don't have
| that. Wow, that is crazy in my opinion. I have no clue
| how you could ever organize those differences among
| students. Here is the system of Belgium:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Belgium.
|
| For example my daughter is 12 and she is in a class "STEM
| and moderns languages". Very focussed on programming,
| science, math, and they also get Dutch, French and
| English. Some of her classmates at the end of the
| schooyear had to switch because their grades weren't good
| enough.
|
| So in Belgium, there are even different schools for
| different tracks.
| lurker919 wrote:
| That sounds so dystopian. What do kids even do at 12? How
| can you ask them to decide the course of their life at
| 12, generally they get segregated while choosing an
| undergrad major around 16 right!
| koonsolo wrote:
| At 12, there are already big differences among them.
|
| Let's divide it into kids that like to learn vs kids that
| like to work with their hands. The 2nd group would learn
| how to work with metal, wood, .... Way more practical
| stuff, very little theory. The other group is the reverse
| of course.
|
| At 16, some kids are really tired of sitting in a
| classroom. For example plumber track would have these 16
| year olds already doing an internship with real plumbers.
| At 18 they can start their own company already.
|
| It's also no secret that a 16 year old in Belgium learns
| math that in US you would only see at higher education.
|
| I think it works great, and what I saw with my 2 oldest
| is that last year when they are all still together at age
| 11, the learning differences really start to show. It's
| neither fun for the smart ones nor for the slower ones.
| goldfishgold wrote:
| Definitely not everywhere.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| Work environments tend to be class sorted. You also have
| recourse to handle people who behave horribly towards
| you. Disruptors are removed. Everyone is generally
| aligned towards the same goal. The two are vastly
| different.
| vundercind wrote:
| Anyone who hits someone, says truly horrible shit about
| others, doesn't do the job at all, constantly distracts
| others while doing a poor job themselves, blatantly
| sexually harasses people, et c, is highly likely to get
| fired from a job, and may go to prison.
|
| The same person as a student, gets tons of chances before
| _maybe_ having to leave. Depending on what they're doing,
| you could just be stuck with them for north of a decade.
| No escape.
|
| I mean, we can joke about how actually such people still
| exist at work, but it's a far less widespread problem and
| manifests differently.
|
| You can look for other jobs if you want out of a bad work
| environment. Probably, you'll be able to find somewhere
| else to go. Getting out of a bad class is way harder.
|
| There's a couple huge differences.
| koonsolo wrote:
| As discussed in another thread already, it seems my own
| Belgian system differs very much from the US system. (I
| basically found out with this discussion :D)
|
| And to be honest, I have no idea how you can make the US
| system work, so I probably agree with you. Come to
| Belgium and let your kids study here :D.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| I had no idea that Belgium has already implemented a lot
| of this stuff! That is amazing and gives me a lot of
| hope.
|
| I wonder if there's literature analyzing Belgian academic
| outcomes alongside American academic outcomes.
| dash2 wrote:
| Actually, until the mid 20th century almost everyone
| agreed that school was about building character, which
| can only be done in a social environment. As a British
| government report put it in 1846, schools should be "a
| little artificial world of virtuous exertion".
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| I believe we agree? Character and mental discipline are
| closely aligned, perhaps even the same.
| dash2 wrote:
| Character was specifically moral character, which is
| related to how you interact with others.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| Mmh, I have to read more about this, I'm not really
| familiar with British schooling models of the 19th
| century.
|
| In any case, the problematic schooling model that
| persists to this day was introduced around the time of
| the Industrial Revolution, which predates your
| references.
| dash2 wrote:
| I don't think the schooling of that period was the same
| as the schooling of today in all regards.
|
| You could read more in my book:
| https://www.wyclifsdust.com.
| bdangubic wrote:
| Learning stuff is 100% secondary. If it wasn't these two
| below would have same-ish chances in life/career.
|
| Student A: Went to College X and majored in Y. Finished
| all XXX number of credits and graduated with Bachelor's
| Degree
|
| Student B: Went to same College X and majored in same Y.
| Finished all XXX-1 number of credits so is 1 credit short
| and never got a degree.
|
| Student B is worthless even though she/he learned exactly
| the same thing as Student A. School (especially in USA)
| never was and never will be about learning ...
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| I agree that learning is secondary in practice, but in
| theory is the whole point of school, and society would be
| a lot better off if we managed to draw theory and
| practice closer together.
|
| In your example, I would argue you haven't taken my
| position to its required logical extent. I don't believe
| in the value of college degrees at all, the way things
| are currently structured, and I would discourage my kids
| from going to college unless they had a very specific
| career path in mind for which the degree is required. The
| measurement of learning has become the goal of learning,
| unfortunately.
| ozim wrote:
| Yes teaching how to learn is the way for schools, but it
| is hard to explain to kids and lots of adults.
|
| Just a nitpick that school enforcing memorizing
| particular list of facts or memorizing poems - is indeed
| teaching people how to learn, because how else will you
| explain to a child or an adult "hey you know if you read
| this thing 10 times and then try to repeat it another 20
| times from memory - guess what !!! that is one trick to
| learn to memorize something."
|
| But if they spend time on finding out how to memorize
| hand picked for them stuff and how to perform on exams on
| limited and picked topics - that sounds like they will be
| able to learn anything but still too many don't realize
| what the real lesson there is.
| danenania wrote:
| If the goal is learning how to memorize, I think it would
| be better to have specific courses or lessons on
| memorization rather than making all the subjects
| needlessly boring and stressful just for the sake of
| learning memorization techniques.
|
| Knowing how to memorize is occasionally useful depending
| on one's profession, but I don't think it deserves such a
| heavy emphasis. People naturally remember what is
| interesting and useful to them. Force-feeding facts or
| dates or speeches or poems into memory is not fun and has
| very little educational value. That time and energy would
| be much better spent on projects that use and integrate
| the knowledge.
| walledstance wrote:
| "It's an artificial environment that disappears as soon
| as you graduate, and which you'll never find again
| anywhere else in society."
|
| Whoa there, society functions like a school environment.
|
| You have cliches, bullies, enforcers, popular kids, the
| weirdos, etc.
|
| What are our political parties other than massive
| cliches?
|
| Bullies you can meet on the road, in stores, and nearly
| any other place you go.
|
| Enforcers are police, detention centers, and fines.
|
| Popular kids you need look no further than influencers,
| movie stares, etc.
|
| The weirdos are anyone that doesn't fit into our cliches.
|
| Also, Foucault would have a few words with you as society
| is also an artificial environment.
|
| The drama of daily life that plays out just happens in a
| larger more chaotic scale, but when we left highschool,
| highschool never left us.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| I won't contest you entirely, but I do ask this: if
| society functions like a school environment, why do we
| need a school environment to learn social interaction? It
| seems at best a secondary or tertiary benefit of a
| structure that should primarily be focused on
| intellectual learning. It's a facsimile of the real
| world, and facsimiles are always lacking.
|
| Also, I think the biggest thing that present in school
| environments but missing from other environments is the
| forced segregation by age range, which prevents the more
| organic tribal self-organizational practices to which
| humans have adapted over tens or hundreds of thousands of
| years.
|
| And I would also add that there are degrees of
| artificiality and what really matters is not so much
| whether we have constructed our environments so much as
| whether or not they have stood the test of time, and
| adapted to us as much as we've adapted to them.
| afarviral wrote:
| I mean ... many people went to school as students for a
| good 12 years. That's likely tainted experience, less
| objective perhaps, but nontheless valid experience.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Those same people will say "I wish school taught me <X>
| (things like how to fill out a check book etc"
|
| It did. You didn't pay attention. You want school to
| teach media literacy? It did, but you complained the
| whole time "when are we going to use this?". My school
| taught us how to interpret a "source", how to write well
| defended arguments (even if I don't always rise to that
| level), how to calculate mortgage interest rates and
| payments etc etc etc.
|
| But people will swear up and down "school doesn't teach
| anything important"
|
| _because they didn 't pay attention to what was taught!_
|
| The primary problem with education in america today is
| that a huge proportion of parents do not give a fuck
| about education, see school as just a thing you have to
| do instead of a constant opportunity. When a kid sees
| their parent complaining about education being "Liberal
| brain washing" every other day, why would they pay
| attention in class?
|
| Education requires emotional and ideological buy in from
| parents and students for best results.
| lmm wrote:
| > It did. You didn't pay attention.
|
| It didn't. I specifically remember the hole where my
| class should've explained what a court case actually
| determines, how the process runs, because I noticed
| things were missing / being swept under the carpet (we
| did some mock jury stuff but without the right context
| for it to teach us anything).
|
| > You want school to teach media literacy? It did, but
| you complained the whole time "when are we going to use
| this?"
|
| Nope. I specifically remember watching movie "making of"
| videos and my teacher saying "write this down!" about
| irrelevant technical details that distracted from the
| more important stuff the director was saying.
|
| > But people will swear up and down "school doesn't teach
| anything important"
|
| > because they didn't pay attention to what was taught!
|
| Nope. I was an engaged, attentive student (indeed a kind
| of star pupil). I still learnt more in spite of school
| than because of it. Indeed some of the stuff that's most
| important for my education and career is stuff I was
| actively punished for doing at school (poking at the
| computers to see how they worked). Schools, at least the
| standard-ish state school that I went to (which had good
| official ratings) teach the wrong things and teach them
| badly.
| afarviral wrote:
| While I'm thankful for schooling for teaching me a
| variety of things, occasionally recognizing my passions
| and helping to hone them, it is amusing the disruptive
| and annoying things I did with the school computers that
| ultimately became my carreer.
| afarviral wrote:
| Agreed. There's a really specific form of nostalgia where
| a matured and adhd-managed person would simply LOVE to do
| school over again now they see the benefit and realise
| how absolutely fascinating and achievable learning is.
| Imagine how easy school would be for a mature adult! I
| wish being held back a couple of years was normal and
| encouraged, especially for boys. My life satisfaction
| would be way higher.
| bmitc wrote:
| If I made be jaded here. I did extremely well in school(s).
| I was never a trouble maker and was a top athlete, student,
| and musician. I think education is supremely important.
| However, school didn't teach me any of what you mentioned.
| Because what life teaches is that unless you're Type A,
| you're not going anywhere. Life teaches that hard work and
| determination and doing the right things does not get you
| anywhere. Life teaches you that thinking differently is
| downright discouraged and rejected.
|
| We mainly teach either boring material or outright lies
| about how life works. Because we try to put our education
| on rails, teaching students that that's how life and
| education works, that's why it's a complete failure. The
| fact that students in COVID didn't respond to remote
| lessons is partly because they weren't even engaged prior
| to COVID.
|
| We don't teach students how to be present, to know nature,
| how to explore their thoughts and emotions, or how to
| collaborate.
| glial wrote:
| > We don't teach students how to be present, to know
| nature, how to explore their thoughts and emotions, or
| how to collaborate.
|
| Montessori schools do. Wish they were more common.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Can you tell me your experience. I've been a teacher for
| a long time.
|
| And as a result, your experience is mostly limited to kids
| who are forced to be where they don't want to be. That's a
| hugely biased data set.
|
| > School is important. It teaches you how to deal with
| other people. It teaches you how to deal with people in
| authority.
|
| And yet it does a worse job at it than those who are home
| schooled, as most studies show.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| > the real answer is: it does not, they are not wrong
|
| The real real answer is that it probably does, but on a much
| longer timescale that we generally consider and it is really
| hard to explain why. Something like better math skills lead
| to better life outcomes. Maybe due to a better model of the
| world and sharper thinking, but I am just guessing.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| I would tend to agree with your last (speculative) point.
| The breakdown lies in communicating this to students and
| ensuring that each student receives adequate support at
| their own pace and style of learning.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| What is a disproportionate amount of people are claiming
| to require a slower pace and visual-only learning style?
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| They very well may! Unfortunately, since our approach to
| teaching how to learn is flawed to the core, it results
| in peoples' ability to learn being compromised from the
| very beginning, requiring them to build their knowledge
| base and learning approach on shaky foundations.
|
| The way to correct this is by imbuing students with the
| confidence and skills required to learn (according to
| their style of learning) correctly from the very
| beginning, so that they build on solid foundations
| instead.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I guess what I'm saying is that the whole learning styles
| stuff seems to be bunk.
| koonsolo wrote:
| > In my experience
|
| So you are a teacher?
| skhunted wrote:
| There is evidence that a person's ability to understand and
| succeed in algebra is mostly determined by whether or not
| they can do arithmetic with fractions. Number sense is
| important in my opinion. Relying always on the calculator or
| a CAS leaves students confused and befuddled. I see this all
| the time in calc classes that I teach. The CAS loving
| students just don't understand as well.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > There is evidence that a person's ability to understand
| and succeed in algebra is mostly determined by whether or
| not they can do arithmetic with fractions. Number sense is
| important in my opinion.
|
| My opinion differs a lot here. I would not say that I have
| a good number sense (I guess that people who have to do
| "numeric calculations" or "back-of-the-envelope
| calculations" as daily part of their job have a much better
| number sense than me). On the other hand, I find it rather
| easy to learn really abstract algebraic concepts (think
| Grothendieck-style algebraic geometry or similarly abstract
| mathematical topics), which many people (most of them with
| much better number sense than me) tend to find insanely
| difficult.
| skhunted wrote:
| The number sense I talk of is not being able to do
| numerical calculations easily or in your head but rather
| understanding how to operate with numbers and their
| different representations. A person who can understand
| algebraic geometry doesn't have trouble understanding
| things like simplifying x + 5/3 x. People workout any
| number sense have a hard time with this. Knowing that 8/3
| is just a different way of writing 1+5/3 is confusing to
| them.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| Textbooks about "abstract nonsense" rarely require you to
| do such routine calculations/simplifications - they
| rather require you to be capable of making sense of
| definitions that are (at a first glance) insanely far
| removed from anything you have seen in your real life: I
| would rather liken it to taking strong, dangerous
| hallucinogenic drugs, and making sense of the world that
| you now see (which is something that only some people are
| capable of); by the way: I don't understand why
| hallucinogenic drugs are illegal, but textbooks about
| very abstract math are not. :-D
|
| On the other hand, textbooks about, say, analysis and
| mathematical physics (both in a broader sense) - which
| can also be very complicated - have a tendency to demand
| a lot of (also long, tedious) "routine" calculations from
| the reader (often to do by his own). For _these_ areas of
| mathematics your argument surely makes sense.
| skhunted wrote:
| I studied commutative algebra in graduate school which is
| an adjacent subject to algebraic geometry. People capable
| of understanding Hartshorne have number sense.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| I just wrote down how _I_ feel about this topic.
|
| Textbooks about particular areas, in particular specific
| topics in physics (including mathematical physics), teach
| me a lot about number sense (and let me feel that mine is
| not really good or perhaps badly trained). On the other
| hand, these very abstract topics feel like a quite
| different activity _to me_ that is only barely related to
| number sense.
|
| > People capable of understanding Hartshorne have number
| sense.
|
| This can also be explained by the hypothesis that people
| with a strong number sense love to feel themselves
| challenged - thus they attempt to understand this
| nontrivial textbook (even though understanding it may in
| particular require different skills).
| lmm wrote:
| > There is evidence that a person's ability to understand
| and succeed in algebra is mostly determined by whether or
| not they can do arithmetic with fractions.
|
| Evidence that it's causative? That would be utterly bizarre
| and I'd love to see a citation, because doing algebra has
| nothing to do with fractions. I'd think it's far more
| likely that there's a strong correlation between the two
| because they're both determined by the ability to
| understand and follow the rules of an abstraction/notation
| system, and if you taught people algebra first and then
| fractions afterwards you'd say that ability to understand
| fractions was determined by whether they could do algebra.
| skhunted wrote:
| Whether it is causative or not it is still the case that
| someone who doesn't know fractions will have a hard time
| in algebra. It would be bizarre to teach someone how to
| add rational functions before they can add fractions.
| lmm wrote:
| > Whether it is causative or not it is still the case
| that someone who doesn't know fractions will have a hard
| time in algebra.
|
| Doubt. Do you have any evidence at all for this claim?
|
| > It would be bizarre to teach someone how to add
| rational functions before they can add fractions.
|
| Sure, rational functions obviously sit at the
| intersection of algebra and fractions and require both.
| But they're hardly some deep foundational piece of
| algebra; I'm not sure my classes even covered them.
| skhunted wrote:
| _Do you have any evidence at all for this claim?_
|
| Only anecdotal evidence. I've taught beginning algebra
| courses at a community college for 23 years. Students who
| don't know fractions have a very hard time in algebra.
| Those who can't understand that x + 5/3 x is 8/3 x have a
| hard time understanding that 2xy+ay is (2x + a)y.
|
| Understanding rational functions helps to understand what
| vertical asymptotes are and as such are a fundamental
| source of examples when learning limits. They also aid in
| understanding why tan(x) has vertical asymptotes where
| cos is 0. Every complete algebra curriculum includes
| rational functions. I say complete because algebra is
| usually broken up into 3 courses (2 at the pre-college
| level).
| lmm wrote:
| > Those who can't understand that x + 5/3 x is 8/3 x have
| a hard time understanding that 2xy+ay is (2x + a)y.
|
| Sure - but that's just as true in reverse.
|
| > Understanding rational functions helps to understand
| what vertical asymptotes are and as such are a
| fundamental source of examples when learning limits. They
| also aid in understanding why tan(x) has vertical
| asymptotes where cos is 0. Every complete algebra
| curriculum includes rational functions.
|
| Meh. x^-1 is a good example of some things, sure, but I
| don't remember ever doing addition of rational functions
| which is what you originally talked about, and I went
| through an extremely reputable maths degree.
| skhunted wrote:
| You learned about rational functions in high school or
| middle school (most likely given your use of "maths"). I
| can tell you have very little experience with teaching.
| Most students who know that x + 5/3 x is 8/3 x have
| trouble, initially, with understanding that 2xy+ay is (2x
| + a)y. There is a reason for the order in which topics
| are taught.
| lmm wrote:
| > You learned about rational functions in high school or
| middle school
|
| No middle school, and I very much doubt it. Searching I
| can see them mentioned in a further maths GCSE (which is
| something most schools including the one I went to don't
| offer, and rather suggests they're not on the regular
| maths GCSE, which would match my memory).
|
| > Most students who know that x + 5/3 x is 8/3 x have
| trouble, initially, with understanding that 2xy+ay is (2x
| + a)y.
|
| Who know that first or who have been taught it? I
| genuinely would like to see any actual evidence that the
| latter is objectively more difficult than the former.
| skhunted wrote:
| I can tell you have very little experience with teaching.
| But surely your thoughts on the topic must be on par or
| superior to those with training and experience. My wife
| is a doctor and lots of people like to tell her how the
| body works and why she must be wrong. They think reading
| a blog post on vaccines is equivalent to 4 years of med
| school. The same phenomenon occurs in education. Lots of
| people think that since they went to school they know
| about teaching and how it should be done.
| lmm wrote:
| I've heard you get the same phenomenon in chiropractic
| and fortune-telling and wine-tasting. Not so much in
| evidence-based fields thankfully.
| trod123 wrote:
| There are quite a number of experts who would disagree with
| your conclusion.
|
| Upon reaching a certain threshold of technological
| dependence, the need for rational thought (which includes
| calculation) is tied to the need for food. The actual yield
| may be low based on other factors, but it is absolutely
| necessary for survival.
|
| The alternative you suggest, is where technology no longer
| advances.
|
| Logically then, population growth hits a malthusian trap, the
| old crowd out the young since they have the most influence,
| and then a depopulation occurs as the old naturally die off,
| and replacement births cannot sustain those dependent systems
| used to feed the masses.
|
| You get a dragon-king event where everyone its a free for all
| over food and bare necessities, farming no longer becomes
| possible (because of looters), and the world order collapses
| to pre-agrarian levels, assuming the environment isn't
| destroyed in the chaos (i.e. MAD and Nuclear Fallout).
|
| There are much better ways to calculate than are currently
| taught in schools, Trachtenberg System and Vedic Maths have
| worked well in many places.
|
| Mental math has been around for quite some time, and the
| principles of math are all about finding uncommon knowledge
| or information that is not immediately apparent (though it
| becomes so via various mathematical transformations).
|
| The current pedagogy of math is all about sieving and
| exclusion, and rote-authority based teaching, since it is a
| requirement for any specialized area of science (and is only
| taught in relation to mathematical concepts, instead of
| intuitive approaches). This is why they adopted a burn-the-
| bridge strategy right around trigonometry at the grade school
| level (intended to cause PTSD/suffering/torture), to
| safeguard against disruptive innovators at the source.
|
| Algebra -> Geometry -> Trig
|
| 1 -> 2 -> 3
|
| What do you suppose happens when the passing grading criteria
| in 1 is changed from just following the process (but not
| correct answer) to 2 (separate unrelated material which is
| passed) to 3 (correct process and correct answer).
|
| If they fail Trig, and the problems are from Algebra (not
| something a teacher paid bupkiss will bother to look at), how
| do they go back if they passed Geometry? The students not
| knowing why they are failing are simply told, well you maybe
| you are just not good at math and should consider other paths
| if you can't do it.
|
| This structure is called burning the bridge because it makes
| it so you can't go back from a progression standpoint.
| Ironically, this structure was adopted at the request of
| representatives from the National Teachers Union in the late
| 80s/90s, and largely remains the same today.
|
| There are several other progression sieves embedded in
| academia intended to make it almost impossible for us as a
| society to develop a large number of creative people who
| reach einstein-level achievements in math and science
| (outside-self study, or specific environments/private
| schools).
|
| This broad push largely started in the 1970s in publishing,
| and expanded from there.
| zulban wrote:
| I imagine a world where a 19 year old takes a few courses in
| first aid, child psychology basics, and now they're a licensed
| "class supervisor". They aren't university educated but the AI
| is what offers personalized learning and expertise to the
| students.
|
| Most teachers today aren't experts anyway, we just pretend they
| are. So I'm not sure "replaced by AI" is the right way to frame
| the conversation. Instead, it may change education.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Sounds fucking afwul to be frank.
| zulban wrote:
| Far better than many classrooms in North America today tho.
| Folks who disagree simply don't know anything about the
| huge waste of time that many kids are put through everyday.
| freejazz wrote:
| > Most teachers today aren't experts anyway, we just pretend
| they are
|
| Experts in what, grade school math? Do you mean professors?
| zulban wrote:
| In anything. Like math, or math education. I was a teacher
| for years and studied education and I've seen some shit.
| The acceptance criteria for education degrees is often the
| lowest of any field in colleges/universities. The pay is
| extremely low. Great teachers exist, but often teaching is
| just a backup career for non-experts that don't know what
| else to do.
|
| Outside North America teachers are sometimes respected and
| paid as professionals like a doctor or lawyer. Here they're
| more likely the butt end of a joke. You don't need to be an
| expert in anything to be a teacher in NA, generally.
| freejazz wrote:
| Sorry, but you didn't really answer the question. What
| would they be in an expert in? Grade school math?
| bruce343434 wrote:
| > Most teachers today aren't experts anyway
|
| Lmao what
| eldaisfish wrote:
| this place is filled with people who are motivated to learn
| for themselves which creates a huge sampling bias.
|
| You will see this come up in all sorts of discussion and i
| find it enlightening as to how exactly the decisions behind
| modern software are made.
|
| Too many here fail to realise that real life has all sorts
| of edge cases and exceptions, including bad teachers.
|
| Claiming that most teachers aren't experts is just another
| example of this. One student learns more about one narrow
| topic and then dismisses the teacher's broader, but
| shallower knowledge as being that of a non-expert.
|
| Typical of the general population, myself included.
| zulban wrote:
| > One student learns more about one narrow topic and then
| dismisses the teacher's broader, but shallower knowledge
| as being that of a non-expert.
|
| Perhaps you're talking about me (I said teachers are
| generally not experts in anything). I was a teacher for a
| few years and got a master's degree in education. That
| doesn't mean I'm right but I don't think it's smart to
| dismiss people on the internet as "probably just some
| dismissive student with narrow expert knowledge". I don't
| think I'm "general population" on this subject.
|
| Teaching in North America has low professional
| requirements and even lower pay. The profession gets
| almost no respect. As a result, experts in anything
| (including experts in education) are pushed out of the
| career because it's a shitshow.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| You all clearly went to excellent schools, because as
| someone who went to a low performing urban one, what
| they're saying is obviously true to me.
| zulban wrote:
| Yes. Teachers in North America are not respected or paid as
| professionals. The typical university acceptance criteria
| to become a teacher is very low. The pay is rock bottom.
|
| Great teachers exist too but generally teachers are not
| experts in anything, including teaching.
| visarga wrote:
| I think online courses and AI education need the kind of
| supervision you mentioned. But they should also be able to
| give career advice, not just watch the room and push students
| to focus.
| zulban wrote:
| I'm not talking about the perfect classroom. I'm talking
| about something that could realistically be better than the
| ludicrously underfunded garbage we have today.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| My urban public school basically spent as much per year
| for me as it cost for me to go to Harvard. I am not
| convinced of this 'underfunded' as root of problem
| thesis.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Most highschool / gradeschool is being forced to sit in a chair
| being baby sat until 3PM each day, with no opportunity to
| select goals, and act towards them. My daughter transitioned to
| a Montessori jr high, and she went from enduring school to
| actively engaging in self-directed learning.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Weirdly enough I was not very curious in my schooling years,
| barely getting through classes. As I have grown up, I have so
| much more curiosity about the world and my willingness to
| actually learn has skyrocketed. I feel like this could be a
| great space for adults who are seeking to do the same. I always
| thought calculus would be daunting to learn(and I still do),
| but with AI tools I feel like I can approach it with a
| different mindset.
| ugh123 wrote:
| > I see AI being more of a teaching assistant, rather than a
| replacement for teachers
|
| That is exactly what he says in the tweet.
|
| I think the problem with traditional teaching, as in any
| skilled profession, is often in short supply and underpaid, not
| happy, and unable to keep up with 25+ kids in a class. The
| world needs orders of magnitude more teachers that are highly
| competent and more easily accessible.
|
| AI could massively scale high quality teaching with still a
| teacher in the loop.
| lacy_tinpot wrote:
| Most people that are academically inclined are self motivated
| and have a desire to learn more.
|
| Most people aren't academically inclined so it follows that
| most people aren't academically self motivated. Therefore among
| those that are academically inclined it is important to provide
| them with all the tools necessary because they're the ones that
| will most likely excel in an academic environment.
|
| It is odd that the curriculum tends to accommodate people that
| aren't academically inclined at the expense of those that
| actually want to learn.
|
| People that aren't academically inclined should not be forced
| to learn, or at least forced only insofar as they're baseline
| literacy so that they function in today's world.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| > Most people that are academically inclined are self
| motivated and have a desire to learn more.
|
| Isn't that by definition? Most xes are x.
|
| > Most people aren't academically inclined
|
| Is that so?
|
| > It is odd that the curriculum tends to accommodate people
| that aren't academically inclined at the expense of those
| that actually want to learn.
|
| Well, if what you say is true, isn't it fair that the program
| is catered to the majority, who are apparently not
| academically inclined? For one size fits all mass education,
| catering to the largest mass is the best you can do.
|
| > People that aren't academically inclined should not be
| forced to learn, or at least forced only insofar as they're
| baseline literacy so that they function in today's world.
|
| Isn't that what the curriculum already accommodates then?
| Didn't you just say that?
| lacy_tinpot wrote:
| >Isn't that what the curriculum already accommodates then?
| Didn't you just say that?
|
| No. The current curriculum penalizes people that are
| academically incline. Fast track programs are difficult to
| access for example.
|
| >For one size fits all mass education, catering to the
| largest mass is the best you can do.
|
| Yes. But we now have other options.
|
| > Most people aren't academically inclined >>Is that so?
|
| As OP pointed out most people need someone to guide them
| and give them directions. This is because a lot of kids are
| not interested in learning and do "bugger all" without
| supervision.
|
| The kind of self-directed learning only benefits people
| that are already academically motivated.
|
| >Isn't that by definition? Most xes are x.
|
| Yes. This was in contrast to what OP was saying, which is
| "The pandemic showed us exactly what children would prefer
| to do, when they don't have a physical teacher standing
| over them, which is bugger all."
|
| This isn't true for students that are academically
| inclined. Only true for those that aren't academically
| inclined.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's not odd to me at all. The most "academically inclined"
| (although I don't think that's just one type of person) are
| people who have the ability to help themselves with very
| little advice from others. We shouldn't be going out of our
| way to provide anything for them; we should provide all
| levels of materials for everyone. It's the stupid people who
| need to be coaxed and trained to use them, whereas for the
| smart people, it's enough to make them available and give
| them advice when they ask.
|
| Teachers like gifted kids because they'll be successful no
| matter what they do, and the teachers can test out all of
| their dingbat social and pedagogical theories with no
| consequences. They can start with elite kids, finish with
| elite kids, yet somehow take the credit. Not impressed. Make
| dumb kids smart, then I'm impressed. You might even be
| holding back the smart kids, but they're probably smart
| enough to see through you and do well anyway.
|
| That being said, there are some people who are motivated to
| learn entirely by the desire to impress teachers and other
| authority figures. They need attention to develop. However, I
| do not think that most people are like this, and I honestly
| think those people should be in therapy.
| corimaith wrote:
| Looking outside at places like China, society unfortunately
| does require more experts in specific domain fields than
| there are self-motivated workers.
|
| You can't run a billion dollar chip industry on passion
| alone, you are going to pull in people who may be working for
| external reasons. What matters then I'd that the education
| they receive is effective regardless.
| owenpalmer wrote:
| > I think teaching is one of the few roles that can't be
| replaced by AI
|
| So far, AI can't replace _good_ teachers. But there aren 't
| that many good teachers. In my experience, GPT4 is better at
| explaining advanced concepts than 70% of college professors.
| Unfortunately, education is often oriented around this
| horrifyingly archaic method of instruction, which prevents
| people from imagining what an AI oriented system could look
| like.
| red_admiral wrote:
| I remember when the future was MOOCs. Let's get the top 30%
| (or 10% or whatever) of teachers to record high-quality
| videos, then everyone can have a top education. Even the rest
| of the professors might learn something!
|
| AI based education might or might not be "MOOCs 2.0". Even
| for the less good teachers, having a real human in the room
| is one of the features that lots of people appear to be ready
| to pay lots of college fees for.
| p1esk wrote:
| His point is an AI teacher cannot force someone to learn,
| while a human teacher can (maybe).
| renjimen wrote:
| I really agree. And I think it's likely your detractors have
| not stepped foot in a classroom lately.
|
| The issue is not engaging teachers. The teachers we have here
| in BC are excellent and love their subjects (my wife and many
| of my friends are teachers). The issue is behaviour, which has
| deteriorated significantly since COVID, though the changes have
| many other contributors.
|
| Try asking an AI to engage with 30 kids who are on their phones
| with earbuds in. You absolutely need a human as a teacher.
|
| That said, AI teaching could be a great teaching assistant.
| fritzo wrote:
| AI would engage individually with each student _via_ those
| earbuds
| Neekerer wrote:
| Kids would just take the ai earbuds out
| renjimen wrote:
| A large amount of engagement is reading and responding to
| body language. There are also no social ramifications of
| ignoring your laptop.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I think AI has a role in the future
| classroom, but that should be lead by professional
| educators used to dealing with children.
|
| There is also the social side to education that goes beyond
| course content. Teachers are not just there to dole out
| information, but to act as role models and part time
| parents.
| criddell wrote:
| I don't think children are the initial target of this
| company, but I get what you are saying.
|
| The type of person who's going to sign up for a course
| from this company are probably already autodidacts to
| some degree.
|
| If I were teaching sixth grade mathematics, I wouldn't be
| too worried yet. If I were running one of the many
| mathematics academies that have popped up throughout a
| lot of more affluent 'burbs, I'd be very worried.
| evanwolf wrote:
| Yes, it looks like this project is starting with helping
| highly motivated adult learners go deep into a hard to
| teach/learn material. Contrast this with the Khan Academy
| approach at https://www.khanmigo.ai/ targeting young
| students and their teachers and parents with broad
| assistance across subjects. Maybe they converge?
| exe34 wrote:
| > There are also no social ramifications of ignoring your
| laptop.
|
| you could absolutely have a digital social credit system
| the way you have game scores and leaderboards. once you
| get a competitive system like that going, it would
| sustain itself. top students could get to visit cool
| stuff like grown up labs and get involved in museums,
| etc. bottom ones could be celebrated with a virtual dunce
| hat on their avatars.
|
| the problem is how mediocrity is now valued over hard
| work.
| renjimen wrote:
| No thank you. Keep Big Brother out of the classroom.
| exe34 wrote:
| He's watching everything else already, he's even in your
| child's bedroom already due to proctor spyware.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| _> A large amount of engagement is reading and responding
| to body language._
|
| I don't follow this assertion - it's possible to be
| engaged by something that doesn't even _have_ a body. For
| example: the things currently engaging them in this
| scenario - their phones (or whatever 's on them).
| renjimen wrote:
| Engagement being a two way thing between the teacher and
| student. In this case I was referring to the teacher
| reading and responding to the student's body language.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > A large amount of engagement is reading and responding
| to body language.
|
| That's due to a limitation of the current medium, don't
| you think? When I started going to school, I had to
| improve my social awareness not because it's an
| inherently, objectively better way to learn, but because
| that's what was needed as a result of how the classroom
| is structured.
| renjimen wrote:
| But social awareness is part of adult life, and school is
| the place we prepare our children for adult life, not
| just to excel in academic tests.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > But social awareness is part of adult life, and school
| is the place we prepare our children for adult life
|
| The school doesn't prepare kids for this. By most
| measures it does a rather poor job. There's a reason they
| say "A" grade students work for "B" grade managers who
| work in companies started by "C" grade students.
|
| Other commenters have said it, but the social behavior
| kids are exposed to in schools doesn't match much with
| the "real" world. The way problematic people are handled
| is quite different. As are the metrics of what
| constitutes success.
| MarcScott wrote:
| I was walking to my classroom last Thursday, and a kid pushed
| another kid down the stairs, right into me. I went ballistic,
| and sorted it all out, but there is no way an online AI tutor
| can deal with that kind of behavior. So if you want social
| education, you need physically present teachers. If you want
| online education, then parents are going to have their work
| cut out.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Why would you have more than one student per ai teacher?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| We use teachers as enforcers. But in my experience going to a
| big urban public school, the best enforcers are often
| completely orthogonal to the best knowledge-conveyers and I
| think we could have specialization for each of these roles.
|
| In my opinion, the best enforcers generally are charismatic
| yet firm and come from a similar community/background to that
| of the students. The best teachers have an infectious passion
| for their subject, but oftentimes that trades off with their
| ability to enforce.
| renjimen wrote:
| Yes, a teacher's role is as much behaviour management as it
| is knowledge transfer. I think most teachers would love to
| shift the focus to the latter, but it seems to be shifting
| more to the former of late. Knowledge transfer is what
| teachers are actually trained to do, with very little of
| professional pedagogy training about behaviour management
| (at least, anecdotally from my teacher wife).
|
| I don't know what the future of education looks like, but
| it sounds like there are significant behaviour problems in
| the classroom at the moment, with many teachers quitting or
| retiring early as a result of not being able to do what
| they are trained to do (teach).
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| > _The pandemic showed us exactly what children would prefer to
| do, when they don 't have a physical teacher standing over
| them, which is bugger all._
|
| This is not true. The pandemic showed us exactly what children
| who are accustomed to being force-fed information and whose
| natural learning mechanisms and curiosity have been suppressed
| in favor of a generalized one-size-fits-all approach do when
| suddenly removed from the only learning paradigm they've ever
| been exposed to.
|
| My kids (not yet old enough for school) are extremely self-
| motivated to learn and explore the world around them. So am I,
| and that never went away over the course of a full homeschool
| education.
| dontlikeyoueith wrote:
| The ignorance of this post is astounding.
|
| You and your kids are not typical of society at large.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| Could you elaborate? I would like to be less ignorant, if
| possible.
|
| I went to public high school, public community college, and
| college. None of these experiences have changed my opinion,
| but rather informed it.
| infecto wrote:
| Totally incorrect. The vast majority of the population are
| relying on schools and teachers to potty train, teach
| manners, instill excitement for learning and basically do
| everything a parent should be doing. Large number of kids
| have no real parent figure and thats from all types of
| backgrounds. We are not talking about kids who have strong
| households where learning and general manners are being
| taught.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| I agree with you, but fail to see how our viewpoints are
| mutually exclusive?
| infecto wrote:
| While different teaching styles have their pros and cons,
| and a more hands-on approach might yield better results,
| the problem over the past 5-10 years is that many
| children lack parental support. Regardless of the
| pedagogy style chosen, without parents providing a strong
| foundation, meaningful progress in the classroom is
| unlikely.
|
| Your kids clearly have a present parent who is engaged,
| it is a stark difference to many other kids.
| elliotbnvl wrote:
| It seems like that's a societal problem that should be
| tackled at a societal level, rather than a fundamental
| failing of students.
|
| It's not something schools can fix, regardless of the
| style of pedagogy chosen; so why not improve school in
| its area of focus, and introduce solutions to students'
| home life at the same time?
|
| Easier said than done, I know, but focusing on the wrong
| area will get even less done.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| >The pandemic showed us exactly what children would prefer to
| do, when they don't have a physical teacher standing over them,
| which is bugger all.
|
| Amend to: The pandemic showed us exactly what children's
| parents would prefer to do, when they don't have a physical
| teacher standing over their children, which is bugger all.
| koonsolo wrote:
| I also noticed the material of an entire day can be learned or
| made in a few hours. So indeed I also realized it's mainly
| daycare with a bit of, or slow learning.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://www.khanmigo.ai/ is adopting this ideal, and I would
| agree you with your perspective. It's a tutor, not a teacher.
|
| > Khanmigo is an AI-powered personal tutor and teaching
| assistant from trusted education nonprofit Khan Academy.
| silverlake wrote:
| I worked on online learning for a bit. Turns out people are
| willing to pay for the inconvenience of in-person learning,
| even flying to another location. It's the only way most people
| can focus on a topic. Otherwise, work, kids, life interrupts
| and they can't stay on track. Replit's 100 Days of Python says
| only 0.4% of those who complete day 1 finish day 100.
| fragmede wrote:
| yeah. When trying to learn, say algebra and getting stuck on a
| problem, what's better for learning? staring at the problem
| until you get bored and wander off, looking at the back of the
| book for the answer and then maybe going back to figure out
| why, or individual instruction where you're able to ask someone
| who knows that they're doing about why you're stuck, and have
| them give you hints until you get unstuck, and then give you
| another, similar, problem for you to work through?
| andrepd wrote:
| > Having a virtual Feynman coach you through a Physics course
| is perfect.
|
| So would fusion power, unfortunately such a thing does not
| exist yet, nor close to.
| logifail wrote:
| > We send kids to school, in the hope they get some education,
| but the reality is that we use schools for free childcare while
| we work
|
| We also send kids to school to learn social skills they can't
| learn by themselves.
|
| My kids sometimes watch science shows (on TV as well as online)
| and tell me all kinds of fascinating facts about black holes
| and the human immune system and
| {insert_huge_list_of_stuff_I_don't_fully_understand}. That's
| the easy bit.
|
| "Getting along with other people" isn't something you learn ...
| by yourself.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| May I suggest that the kids of HN commentators are being
| sampled from a very different distribution than the kids of
| the general public.
| Lichtso wrote:
| If the technology is truly as capable as humans in many domains
| (and that might still take a while), it will not matter anymore
| whether it is a good teacher or not. The need for (and thus
| value of) human labor will depreciate and so will its "supply
| chain" the education sector.
|
| > hope they get some education, but the reality is that we use
| schools for free childcare
|
| Exactly, teachers will be less and less pedagogs and more and
| more wardens.
| afarviral wrote:
| But how to harness "Bugger all" so that it results in educated
| students? Because my understanding is everyone likes to do
| stuff.. no one really does nothing, but often
| unproductive/consumptive things if not channelled.
| awahab92 wrote:
| i think kids would be self-motivated with the right system.
|
| I got a lot more motivated to learn when i learned programming.
|
| during the pandemic, the world was in shock, so of course kids
| are going to play video games when their parents are anxious
| and filled with cabin-feever.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| I do wish people on this website would stop using themselves
| as an example of the median anything.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > I do wish people on this website would stop using
| themselves as an example of the median anything.
|
| HN readers, in my opinion, _are_ a decent median sample of
| the group of "self-motivated learners". :-)
| dimal wrote:
| > I see AI being more of a teaching assistant, rather than a
| replacement for teachers.
|
| That's what he announced he's doing. Creating an assistant, not
| a replacement.
| surfingdino wrote:
| Except what you'll get will be an all-seeing, spying,
| hallucinating LLM.
| yaj54 wrote:
| Kids, when given the choice, will choose to play games (of many
| different kinds) above just about anything else.
|
| The future of education is the playful gamification of relevant
| skills, knowledge, and behaviors.
| toofy wrote:
| kids will choose many different kinds of activities at any
| given time.a lot of kids really don't like games, some do,
| some don't.
|
| i'm not trying to be pedantic, but anytime someone implies a
| human, particularly a kid will be at all predictable shows an
| incredible lack of understanding of people. the vast array of
| moods, time of day, quality of sleep the night before, are
| they hungry, mood of the parents when they drove them to
| school, how did their school/work day go, how was their
| social day, and on and on and on.
|
| again, apologies, i'm not trying to be pedantic but i think
| in this particular topic it reeeeaalllly matters.
| yaj54 wrote:
| My broad sweeping generalization was primarily meant as a
| counterpoint to this from parent comment: "The pandemic
| showed us exactly what children would prefer to do, when
| they don't have a physical teacher standing over them,
| which is bugger all."
|
| My point is more that kids, when left to their own devices
| (with basic needs met), will find ways to occupy themselves
| that they find interesting that are not outcome oriented (I
| call this playing).
|
| And I personally have never met a kid that didn't like
| playing in some form or another, though the form of playing
| is highly, highly individualized.
| signatoremo wrote:
| Is reading playing? Because most kids I've seen enjoy
| reading.
| cha42 wrote:
| I don't understand at all my kids choices in game or way of
| spending time at all
|
| It seems completely random but in a coherent way. It is
| wonderful.
|
| Anyway, you are right and not pedantic at all.
| tomcam wrote:
| Disagree slightly. I think AI can be used to generate average
| quality course material, which may be useful to below average
| teachers, or good teachers thrown into a subject they haven't
| taught yet.
|
| Obviously someone like Andrej will totally crush it.
| renonce wrote:
| Even as a self-motivated learner I fail to see the bigger
| impact of AI. For a "virtual Feynman" I would prefer the online
| video courses and books which exist without AI. The best I
| expect an AI to do is to answer my questions and confirm my
| understandings. At AI's current state I can use it as a better
| search engine but due to hallucinations I can't expect reliable
| answers yet.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Using gpt-4o?
| renonce wrote:
| Asking it "3.11He 3.8Na Ge Da " (meaning "Which one is
| larger, 3.11 or 3.8?" in Chinese) and it answers 3.11 more
| than half of the time. I assume it's because Python 3.11 is
| larger than Python 3.8. While it does work in its native
| language English, this failure doesn't give me much
| confidence in its reliability, as we don't know why it
| works in one language but not the other yet.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Uh, I think people have a good idea why it doesn't work
| as well in other languages.
| skhunted wrote:
| There is an interesting physics education experiment. A random
| group of students are shown a lecture on a topic and take a
| quiz after watching the video. The students rate the lecture.
| Repeat with a different lecture on the same topic. The students
| did worse with the higher rated lecture.
|
| There's teaching students like. There's teaching where students
| learn. Sometimes the two intersect. Will an AI education
| company optimize one that students enjoy or one where they
| learn better?
| azhenley wrote:
| We just published a paper on this topic. I wrote a summary of
| it, "Learning to code with and without AI".
|
| https://austinhenley.com/blog/learningwithai.html
| blackbear_ wrote:
| What is the baseline performance of the LLM in solving those
| programming tasks? And did you test the performance of the
| students in the Codex group at the end of the course without
| allowing them to use Codex? Essentially I'm asking how can
| you conclude that these students didn't just learn to call a
| LLM, but actually learned to code independently?
| pessimizer wrote:
| I don't think this is true at all. People failed to learn
| during covid because the technology is bad. I don't think most
| people are motivated very much at all by the disappointment of
| some stranger standing over them. I don't even see it as a
| desirable aspect of someone's personality that they can be
| extrinsically motivated by the approval of strangers.
|
| What a teacher provides is a sometimes customized, sometimes
| flexible schedule, that (sometimes) pays individual attention
| to what aspects of a concept a student is falling behind at,
| and (sometimes) comes up with personal recommendations and
| alternative approaches to break down a student's involuntary
| resistance to a concept. This might be doable with A.I.. It's
| not doable with actual teaching anymore because class sizes are
| too large. A.I. will be cheaper.
|
| And I'm not saying that teaching is so simple that A.I. can do
| it, I'm saying that teaching is so complicated that it might be
| that only A.I. is sufficient to largely replace it. I think
| that what I'm arguing against is that the idea that teachers
| could be replaced by glowering scarecrows, or fur-covered wire
| armatures like they once used in experiments to replace
| animals' mothers.
|
| I don't think that teachers make as good parents as parents do
| teachers. I don't think most people are mostly motivated by the
| approval or judgement of their teachers.
|
| What people need is constant, helpful, personalized guidance,
| and that is very expensive to get from employees.
| unraveller wrote:
| >teaching ... can't be replaced by AI.
|
| Teaching is not the end goal of education though, the educated
| student is. Or so I was taught.
|
| Part of the reason why teaching is considered noble is because
| it is an act of assured replacement, inspiring not dependency
| imparting skills of self-motivation and will power.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Completely disagree. ChatGPT has taught me more than I could
| ever learn from any lecture and I have a doctorate. A
| moderately motivated student will do wonders with AI.
|
| For instance, I've had trouble understanding exactly how heat
| pumps worked. Sure I knew the basic concepts of condensation
| and evaporation but not the nuances of pressures and boiling
| points at various stages. I asked chatGPT to explain it to me
| from the perspective of the refrigerant. It started with "I am
| R-134a, a refrigerant just leaving the evaporator...", and
| proceeded to give me the most thorough understanding of heat
| pumps I could imagine, complete with working pressures, boiling
| points, pressure differentials at the escape valve etc. Follow
| up questions led me down interesting paths where it came up
| with a brilliant comparison to quantify the greenhouse
| potential of the refrigerant R22 ie 1 pound of R22 has the same
| greenhouse potential as a human being breathing for 787 days in
| a row.
| fsndz wrote:
| When it comes to AI, self learning is dope, and Lycee AI is a
| pioneer:
| https://www.lycee.ai/courses/91b8b189-729a-471a-8ae1-717033c...
| obastani wrote:
| This is exactly the problem we have found in our research on
| generative AI for education [1]. We ran a pilot in a large high
| school in collaboration with math teachers, and found that
| students basically copy answers from ChatGPT, resulting in
| worse performance compared to students not given ChatGPT. If
| students don't want to learn, ChatGPT isn't going to fix
| anything.
|
| [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4895486
| verdverm wrote:
| You are just giving them ChatGPT with a bit of prompt
| engineering, and evaluating them on math problems, which we
| know LLMs make errors on because they are not calculators.
| You aren't putting in the effort needed to build a real tutor
| and learning assistant. I would not extrapolate from these
| results
|
| There are also a lot of things that can come in before you
| build a full on tutor. One example is being able to tailor
| word problems (transform the nouns) to subjects interesting
| to the particular student. They could also be used to help
| understand where students are struggling. We are still at the
| early phases of useful AI, optimism is more appreciated,
| especially as contemporary times have become so pessimistic
|
| Sal Khan provides a more optimistic take and demo:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJP5GqnTrNo
| KerryJones wrote:
| > Most learners, the world over, are not self-motivated
|
| This is the exact opposite conclusion and methodology of Maria
| Montessori (and her schools with the same name). Children are
| naturally curious and want to learn, but they may not want to
| use a poor education system designed to mark grades in a hyper
| specific focus.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| the only people i knew growing up who went to montessori
| we're very affluent white kids with hyper involved parents.
|
| even when given access to school choice, less affluent and
| minority parents do not choose montessori and there is
| absolutely a reason for that.
| KerryJones wrote:
| Is the reason because montessori schools are often high-
| priced? Because that's definitely true (and you can easily
| say it's a privilege to attend one).
|
| That doesn't, however, mean the methodologies don't work or
| don't apply. You can study the methods in any of her ~20ish
| books, or the more modernized recaps of them.
| 627467 wrote:
| The teacher/tutor certainly won't be replaced by an AI. But
| those we call 'teachers' nowadays - possibly even for decades -
| are struggling glorified janitors because society treats
| schools as daycare. It's understandable that 9-6 parents need
| daycare. But why do we keep confusing daycaring with teaching?
| And why do we expect teachers to be perfect at both roles? And
| why all 30 students in the class should focus exactly on the
| same aspect of education simultaneously? That's the main issue
| with 'teaching'.
| yinser wrote:
| For those without an X account: Website: https://eurekalabs.ai
| GitHub: https://github.com/EurekaLabsAI
| layer8 wrote:
| https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1813263734707790301
| kaladin_1 wrote:
| Thanks for the link. Found it useful. x is blocked at dns
| level on my computer.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| > x is blocked at dns level on my computer
|
| Hero!
|
| Take that Elon you baddie!
| ffhhj wrote:
| > we are heads down building LLM101n
|
| Kind of ironic an AI isn't building it. But that's an example of
| the current state of AI being more a remixer of knowlegde than a
| planner of actions.
| jasonsb wrote:
| Don't worry about it, I'm sure that "AI" is working on
| something much bigger.
| dontlikeyoueith wrote:
| Killing all humans?
| simonw wrote:
| From the announcement:
|
| > The teacher still designs the course materials, but they are
| supported, leveraged and scaled with an AI Teaching Assistant
| who is optimized to help guide the students through them.
|
| So the AI isn't expected to build the materials.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I assume that it would be an agent that the teacher prompts
| in a loop to build and refine the course material. Probably
| with an upload so if they want to bring the full thing ready
| to go they can and in that case the data just needs to be
| formatted by the LLM for their database, but also can have
| the AI fill things in. And then check what came out and
| refine it.
| epups wrote:
| It seems that this would compete with Khan Academy for a similar
| space. Perhaps Karpathy will aim for adults instead?
| minimaxir wrote:
| Khan Academy is more than AI/LLM courses.
| simonw wrote:
| It sounds like Andrej's ambitions stretch beyond AI/LLM
| courses too - but they're a natural "first course" starting
| point because that's where his own teaching expertise is
| focused.
| LegitShady wrote:
| ambition is cheap, value is expensive.
| petercooper wrote:
| It is. Though they are also doing some really smart and
| thoughtful stuff with LLMs to power courses and learning
| environments (https://www.khanmigo.ai/ is a part of it).
| nedrylandJP wrote:
| Any openings for a 40-something career-changing educator?
| beardedwizard wrote:
| I would suggest you contact karpathy and not randoms who
| posted/commented this
| ryandrake wrote:
| Hopefully the AI knows whether 9.11 is greater or less than 9.9,
| something ChatGPT seems to have had a problem figuring out[1].
|
| 1: https://x.com/liujc1998/status/1813244909501182310
| spencerchubb wrote:
| that's a tokenization issue. every tool has strengths and
| weaknesses. why does it matter whether an LLM can compare
| numbers? that can be done trivially in any programming language
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| As an AI layman (downloaded Claude for android as a result of
| hn, just today) "why does it matter whether an LLM can
| compare numbers?", is rather important to me. Probably
| others, also.
| wrsh07 wrote:
| It doesn't seem super relevant to karpathy announcing he's
| created a company so that he can increase the production
| value of his AI YouTube videos
|
| I mean, sure, the company is ostensibly going to also teach
| math at some point, but karpathy will not be using gpt 4o
| for that when it launches (what do you think his timelines
| are? Do you think he is going to be able to solve trivial
| things like "having the llm use something like function
| calling to do math"? If you're unfamiliar with his work,
| karpathy is a very good engineer, and this is a small
| problem that anybody working in building production apps on
| LLMs can easily deal with)
| spencerchubb wrote:
| i can understand that perspective. as an end user, you
| would like your application to handle math questions
| correctly. it's true that llms are not the best at math
|
| as an application developer, if we need an llm to be good
| at math, one solution is to give it access to a python
| interpret
| awwaiid wrote:
| I was going to say beware because there isn't an Anthropic
| Claude official app.... but I checked and I guess as of
| today there is one hah.
| https://www.anthropic.com/news/android-app
| layer8 wrote:
| At least LLMs know when to use upper case.
| ryandrake wrote:
| If I'm going to augment my education with AI, I'd at least
| want to know it could get basic numerical facts right. If a
| computer program struggles with the concept of a number being
| greater than another number, how do I have any confidence
| that it can teach physics?
| spencerchubb wrote:
| your concern would be valid if an llm were the ONLY tool
| being used. applications use multiple tools so you can use
| the appropriate tool for the job. if you're doing math, you
| don't want a standalone llm
| ryandrake wrote:
| As a student, how would I know what things the LLM tutor
| can provide correct answers for, and what things I will
| need to "use appropriate tools" for? Should I rely on the
| LLM to help teach me spelling, or US history, or are
| there more appropriate tools for these, too?
| spencerchubb wrote:
| if the product is great, hopefully you as the user would
| not have to worry about which tool is doing which task.
| the developers would worry about that. it's the same in
| any app. the user doesn't know or care what tool is used
| to render the frontend or store the data in the backend
| j2kun wrote:
| Except that the LLM is actively dismissing its
| discrepancy with the other tool. Just adding to the
| confusion.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Since we're all just speculating to the wind here, I can
| see multiple ways LLMs can be used. Maybe it'll help
| simplify TA triage, maybe it'll just be a Discord bot.
| Maybe a classifier will sample from multiple models.
|
| I think if anyone can give this idea a fair shot it's
| Andrew Karpathy, an ML expert and a person known to be
| passionate about education.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| *Andrej
|
| Darn autocorrect
| SrslyJosh wrote:
| AI bros: "Why does it matter whether [a program that people
| want to use to teach children] can [tell whether one number
| is bigger than another]?"
|
| =)
| ryandrake wrote:
| "But, teacher, it was a _tokenization issue_! "
| spencerchubb wrote:
| applications can use multiple tools. an llm is just one
| tool, and it will not cover every use case, such as math.
| that does not detract from the utility of llms
| freejazz wrote:
| Are you saying we shouldn't teach children things that "can
| be done trivially in any programming language?"
|
| How will they know what they are doing in that language?
| dyarosla wrote:
| What's the differentiation with other similar ventures?
|
| For instance, Synthesis[0] is an instructor designed, AI
| supplemented site for early math. https://www.synthesis.com/
|
| It really seems like the distinction for these kinds of AI-
| education ventures comes down to the human educator(s) involved.
| sahil87 wrote:
| With https://www.fruitsalad.ai it's about creating learning
| games - making hard topic fun to learn.
| jppope wrote:
| thank god for Andrej Karpathy... doing amazing work. I love this
| concept and look forward to seeing how things develop
| ugh123 wrote:
| According to the picture in the tweet, you could grow 3 arms by
| following these courses!
| mads wrote:
| I am getting Jehovah's Witness vibes from it.
| layer8 wrote:
| AI is an arms race.
| shellfishgene wrote:
| And after all those Feynman Physics courses they placed their
| solar panels in the shade ;)
| vunderba wrote:
| I don't understand how he missed that.
|
| This is the same issue I have with large language model as
| coding assistants, since you're effectively not in the driver
| seat - you're acting more like a code reviewer, and I think
| that _that passivity_ eventually causes critical observational
| skills to atrophy.
| ModernMech wrote:
| The rest of the AI art in the course isn't any better. The
| thing is, it doesn't have to be like that. I do AI art and I
| follow a lot of AI artists, and you can fix all those little
| weird mistakes it makes.
|
| The thing is, when the AI art generator makes a mistake and
| draws a person with 3 arms, that is obvious to the student and
| they can take the output with a grain of salt.
|
| But when the AI physics tutor generates some physics result
| that's the equivalent of a person with 3 arms, that will not be
| obvious to the student. They will take the words of the AI
| credulously. I see it all the time in programming as well,
| where the AI just invents APIs, semantics, and syntax.
|
| I don't know how to solve this.
| prewett wrote:
| > I don't know how to solve this.
|
| Don't use an algorithm which produces its response according
| to a probabilistic arrangement of tokens when solutions
| require accuracy / correctness? Most probable and most
| accurate are not the same thing. Hoping that we can get the
| errors down to something acceptable using an algorithm that
| is fundamentally inappropriate to solving the problem seems
| like a fool's errand to me.
| demondemidi wrote:
| Might wanna wait until the hype cycle is over in a few years.
| nineteen999 wrote:
| Why? The VC money is flowing right now.
| demondemidi wrote:
| Do you know what happens when you take VC money? Probably
| not. I assume OP wants to succeed and retain control. VC
| money is about the worst choice of funding for something like
| this.
| throwedu wrote:
| Thats a zillion dollar company right there
| LegitShady wrote:
| its super easy to start ai companies, its difficult to make them
| meaningful. The ai generated image in the twitter post has an
| asian woman with 3 arms and some of the most horrific AI face
| placements I've seen in a while - Is this the quality control we
| can expect our future AI education systems to embody?
| layer8 wrote:
| > its super easy to start ai companies
|
| And only barely an inconvenience.
| avaldez_ wrote:
| >The ai generated image in the twitter post has an asian woman
| with 3 arms and some of the most horrific AI face placements
| I've seen in a while
|
| Also solar panels in the floor lmao
|
| _solar freaking roadways_ ptsd
| bastien2 wrote:
| Chatbots can't teach critical thought or ethics. They need to be
| able to understand language and bias first, and that's an as yet
| unsolved problem.
|
| Until a chatbot is provably correct and ethical in its output, it
| must not be used to teach.
|
| Case in point: the slop image attached to the announcement has
| the typical malformed hands and ghoulish faces problems.
| GaggiX wrote:
| Are humans provably correct and ethical in their outputs?
| moffers wrote:
| I appreciate attempts to disrupt things, but education seems to
| be one of those verticals that seems to be allergic to disruptive
| technologies. Education seems like it can either be very
| specialized, or very generalized, but at the end of the day it
| should be egalitarian. If this approach to education works, would
| we be able to have every teacher in every school in America adopt
| it? I have to imagine the resources needed to train the teachers,
| distribute the technology, acclimate the parents, and then do
| this all on a scale such that no one is left out or treated
| better if you didn't happen to go to an "AI" school makes for a
| tough hill to climb.
|
| I think a lot of the real issues with solving problems in
| education is that they have trouble applying to the larger
| picture of compulsory education.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| This is the fundamental problem with education: everyone treats
| it as some problem to "solve" with tools, and technologies. The
| issues with education are human ones -- interpersonal and
| policy -- not because it's lacking some tool or technique.
|
| They just installed some state of the art AI-enabled, "smart"
| mega drawing screens w at my daughter's schools touting all the
| supposed immeasurable benefits it will bring, and most of the
| parents, including myself, just rolled our eyes.
| 8338550bff96 wrote:
| If delivering a good education can't be achieved because there
| are parts of our education system that continually resist
| adaptation, then whatever those parts are they ought to reach
| their breaking point and be pushed beyond it.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Those parts have reached their breaking point - the teachers
| are ready to quit from lack of resources and support, and
| parents can't do their part because they have to work far too
| hard to keep a roof and food for their families. AI doesn't
| solve that.
| labster wrote:
| But if teachers could use AI to grade exams and automate
| the boring work, then they could take a second job and be
| able to afford housing. Sounds like an easy win for AI.
| nozonozon wrote:
| I love the idea that no one is 'only' a teacher. Teachers
| that live in the real world make much more sense to me.
|
| My ideal work week:
|
| 10h administrative work (figuring out what and how for
| the rest of the week) 10h technical job 10h teaching in a
| classroom 10h 1:1 mentoring
| stavros wrote:
| I read this comment and it struck me as excellent parody,
| but now I'm worried it's in earnest.
| labster wrote:
| This was my club in university:
| https://daviswiki.org/Students_for_an_Orwellian_Society
|
| I think that 20 years later it is much harder make
| effective satire, so I rarely do it now. More extreme
| positions are taken pretty regularly by folks online, so
| even people like you in my target audience are never sure
| if something is satirical or just extreme.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| That's why most satire is pretty lame. The more obvious
| it is, the less funny; the less obvious it is, the less
| interesting. And the whole thing is built on an
| inside/outside dynamic that is pretty basic.
| phs318u wrote:
| Realising the promise of AI, freeing teachers from the
| drudgery of 'boring work' so they can take on a second
| job as a food-server, burger-flipper, shelf-stacker or
| Uber driver (at least until robotics and self-driving
| tech eliminate those jobs too).
| raincole wrote:
| People will read your comment as sarcasm (and you
| probabaly meant it), but this it the way to go.
| __loam wrote:
| I got an excellent education from the public school system
| and had passionate, committed teachers throughout, and was
| well prepared to pursue an engineering degree at a top
| university. The solution to education is not to try and scale
| up some absurd and ineffective AI system that is worse than
| teachers, it's to pay teachers an actual proportionate salary
| that is in line with their impact on our society so we can
| retain good people. Just because people like Karpathy
| understand AI doesn't mean they understand education.
| nightski wrote:
| It's not zero sum, we can do both.
| __loam wrote:
| You're right lets divert millions if not billions of
| dollars that could be used on known working solutions for
| these problems to an unproven technological bullet that
| is famously capital intensive.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| The incentives just are not properly aligned. I went to an
| urban school system that paid many teachers quite well
| (upwards of $130k 10 years ago for many), but the pay was
| just totally ubcorrelated with teacher performance.
|
| Many of the worst teachers were the best paid because they
| had seniority and that was how the union had structured pay
| agreements, whereas many of the younger better teachers
| were paid very poorly (around $50k in a major metro)
| despite having left very high paying professional jobs to
| give back. The problem is that there is little-to-no
| economic incentive to do anything to improve student
| performance.
| will1am wrote:
| You touches on a critical aspect of educational reform
| wendyshu wrote:
| > Education ... should be egalitarian
|
| Why?
| __loam wrote:
| We shouldn't have to explain that it's plainly obvious that
| society massively benefits from an educated populace,
| especially one that claims to be a democracy. There are
| incredibly broad benefits from a reduction in crime to the
| expansion of the skilled labor pool.
|
| I've noticed that many people in tech seem to disregard or
| disrespect educational institutions. So I'll turn it back on
| you. What draconian reason could you possibly have to make
| the argument that we shouldn't try to give every child an
| equal opportunity for a high quality education? Do you hate
| living in an educated society that much? Are you interested
| in living in a malthusian nightmare?
| iftheshoefitss wrote:
| Very uneducated so I can't comment on this but I'm living
| in a Malthusian nightmare and definitely wouldn't recommend
| it :)
| brezelgoring wrote:
| >Are you interested in living in a malthusian nightmare?
|
| Some of them live in such an environment already. I don't
| know if it's a hallucination or not, but judging from what
| I've read here over the years a lot of tech people seem to
| live in the most cutthroat of environments and see everyone
| as competition to be eliminated or obstacles to be cleared.
| Some of them live in an environment where you can rely only
| on yourself, requesting help is seen as weak victim-like
| behavior, but giving out for free is worse - detrimental
| because that other person might see what you're doing and
| take credit for or steal your work; some say helping
| another with your skills/time and not charging money is
| peak cuck behavior, and some of the more organized (I'd
| like to say 'coeficient-driven') members of our community
| really believe that money is the greatest measurement tool
| ever invented and we should measure everything with it,
| including a person's worth.
|
| That being said, generalizing is bad and there really are
| some truly golden individuals here who have done humanity a
| net benefit while charging nothing for their work. Like
| Fabien Sanglard, for example (you likely will never read
| this but I take my hat off to you and I hope if you get the
| chance, you should clone yourself in the future - humanity
| could use at least 10 of you).
|
| I'd find quotes for all of these but I don't think I need
| them, you've seen these messages if you read the HN
| comments enough.
|
| Edit: In the 10 or so minutes I took to write my comment,
| yours went from all black to almost unreadable. It shows
| better than any treatise would on the opinion HN denizens
| have on 'free' or 'equal' anything.
| p1esk wrote:
| _What draconian reason could you possibly have to make the
| argument that we shouldn 't try to give every child an
| equal opportunity for a high quality education?_
|
| Opportunity, sure. But an opportunity to get a good
| education is not the same as actually getting good
| education. Because every child is different and we want to
| spend a lot more efforts to educate a child who shows
| genius level potential than on a child who has zero
| interest in anything. This is assuming limited educational
| resources - an assumption challenged by AI education
| initiatives.
|
| If I have two sons, and one is bright and curious and hard
| working, while another is dim and lazy, the first one will
| get 95% of my attention.
| __loam wrote:
| The biggest predictor of whether or not a child is
| "gifted" is the amount of attention they receive as
| children from their parents and from the education
| system. Actual genetically driven genius is rare. The
| kids that gifted child programs benefit are largely the
| children of affluent parents and not the so called
| geniuses of our generation. They mostly serve to create a
| two tier education system within public schools. I'm not
| saying we tolerate disruptive kids or that we shouldn't
| reward merit, but this kind of rich kids get the
| resources and attention system is counterproductive to
| the outcome you seem to want.
|
| Furthermore, there is zero proof that AI will give us the
| kind of system that will allow us to shore up the limited
| education system. The actual solutions to many of these
| problems are things like paying teachers more to retain
| the best people, giving kids free lunch, funding after
| school programs and one on one tutoring etc etc etc.
|
| But doing those things is hard, so tech bros who believe
| in the myth of the gifted child, who don't have any
| background in education at all, come in with these
| systems that they think are silver bullets, then are
| shocked when they don't work, blaming the unruly children
| of the proletariat on their failure to fix anything.
| darkwater wrote:
| And what will you do with the lazy one? Kill him? Let him
| die when in problems? Maintain it throughout his live?
| Ignore him and let him live a miserable life?
| p1esk wrote:
| The lazy one gets exactly the same *opportunity* to have
| a good education as the bright one. Do you see the
| difference?
| __loam wrote:
| They often don't have the same opportunity but I'm glad
| we as grown adults are sitting here and judging a child
| on their dedication to academic rigor.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > I'm glad we as grown adults are sitting here and
| judging a child on their dedication to academic rigor.
|
| In a conversation about academic performance, what were
| you expecting?
|
| I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know:
| in a conversation about resources being poured into
| academic outcomes, why is a child's athletic ability, or
| artistic ability, etc relevant?
|
| We are comparing outcomes of investment into academic
| performance - do you expect this conversation about ROI
| to be completely without judgements?
| __loam wrote:
| We're talking about changing the entire trajectory of
| someone's life when they're a child because they find
| school boring when they're 8 years old. Talking about ROI
| and hard numbers about this makes your look like a ghoul.
| I think aggregate measures over years are required to
| accurately measure the impact educational investment, but
| we should pay teachers more and hire more of them to
| reduce class size because we have a moral obligation to
| do so, not just because we'd get an ROI.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > We're talking about changing the entire trajectory of
| someone's life when they're a child because they find
| school boring when they're 8 years old.
|
| Maybe you are. _We_ are not. No one is suggesting
| decreasing the resources made available to a cohort of
| children. We 're suggesting _increasing_ the resources
| for gifted children within that cohort.
|
| > Talking about ROI and hard numbers about this makes
| your look like a ghoul.
|
| How else are you going to discuss what is obviously a
| very important investment into humanity? Personal
| attacks, maybe?
| km3r wrote:
| Is it better to be egalitarian in education or is it better
| to focus on raising the floor, or raise the median, or
| providing equal opportunity? They aren't the same thing,
| and it's very possible that the education system that
| focuses on one will miss out on parts of the others. You
| can make moral arguments in favoring each of those options
| (or even focusing on raising the average).
|
| You can optimize for economic benefit, innovation,
| fairness, or passions. Their is plenty of non-draconian
| reasons for preferring each.
| __loam wrote:
| It's better to be egalitarian. The clientele of
| hackernews is predominantly people working in high paying
| industries, who were lucky enough to get the resources
| and opportunities to get there, in addition to a
| considerable amount of hard work. I pushed hard to get
| where I am today and personally benefitted from gifted
| child programs. What terrifies me is the idea that being
| born to slightly different parents or in a slightly
| different area could have had drastic effects on my
| outcome. I believe we should make policy decisions
| assuming any one of us could have been born to the
| poorest and most negligent parents imaginable. Making any
| other assumption is being dishonest about the benefits
| afforded to you by your upbringing.
| km3r wrote:
| Wouldn't it be better to raise the floor? If given the
| choice of a higher floor but a higher ceiling of
| education quality vs equal but lower quality for
| everyone, I would prefer the former.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Would this raise the floor? Or would this be "we can hire
| 5% as many teachers and make the students interact with
| robots to save money."
| carapace wrote:
| Evolution.
|
| The human species has only existed as such for ~100,000
| years. Almost all human societies have failed.
|
| We should spread knowledge far and wide for the same reason
| adaptive mutations spread through a population: shit happens.
|
| _Rocks fall out of the sky._
|
| The Earth is jelly with a thin "crust" of congealed goo on
| top. So-called "solid ground" is thinner relatively than the
| paint on a globe. It shakes.
|
| (As a kid I lived through Loma Prieta[1], I've _seen_ the
| earth roll like Santa 's belly. We are _small!_ )
|
| We should go through life like "an old man crossing a river
| in winter", and things both precious and free, like
| knowledge, should be the treasure of every person, no matter
| how poor or weak, for tomorrow they may be all that's left.
|
| That's why Wendy, that's why.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Loma_Prieta_earthquake
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| > Education seems like it can either be very specialized, or
| very generalized, but at the end of the day it should be
| egalitarian.
|
| This is the approach I'm taking.
|
| There are a few psychological and technological tricks here or
| there, but in my opinion the hardest part is getting the
| incentives right.
|
| It's very easy to build an educational system that incentivizes
| for the wrong things. And even if we all agree what the "right"
| things are, something like universal education is a collective
| action problem with all the difficulties that come with that.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| > Education [...] should be egalitarian
|
| It is self-evident to me that this is not true in the U.S.
|
| There is very little about education that is egalitarian. An
| inner city grade school in Michigan is in no way comparable to
| a grade school in the Palo Alto suburbs.
|
| > Such that no one is left out or treated better if you didn't
| happen to go to an "AI" school makes for a tough hill to climb.
|
| To drive this point home, in the real world we do not hold this
| standard for air conditioning. Tens of thousands of schools in
| the U.S. do not currently have adequate HVAC systems. If we are
| not currently applying this standard to A/C, I don't know why
| we would choose to selectively apply it to AI.
|
| Attempting to gate innovation behind complete social conformity
| and universal adoption doesn't strike me as a rationale stance.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Nit: you're replying to what "should be" with what is. Those
| two concepts are not the same. Our property-tax-based
| educational funding system is widely seen as a tragedy.
| ipaddr wrote:
| An inner city grade school in Detroit gets 16,500+ per child
| a regular child in Michigan gets 9,500. Palo Alto spends
| 25,143 per child. New York spends $29,873 per child. The
| states that spend the least Utah, Idaho are around 9,000.
|
| Part of the cost is localized like salary, utilities costs.
|
| Detroit isn't necessarily being under funded compared to Palo
| suburb when you normalize regional cost differences. It does
| affect the quality of teachers one can attract but so does
| the location in general. Bumping up Detroit to Palo Alto's
| spending wouldn't have much effect on the education for the
| average student.
|
| Palo Alto is home to many immigrant from many places who self
| select and place education as extremely important for the
| next generation. For the average Detroit kid education isn't
| cherished and valued over everything else. Until you can
| equalize those believes things won't change. You won't be
| able to buy a higher educational rate by painting the walls
| twice as fast or by hiring more educational assistants.
| buttercraft wrote:
| > Bumping up Detroit to Palo Alto's spending wouldn't have
| much effect on the education for the average student.
|
| Are you sure about this? It seems suspiciously self-
| reinforcing.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| there's pretty good evidence that outcomes are largely in
| correlated with per pupil spend. would take me a little
| while to find since i haven't looked at it for a while
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I went to an inner city public school that was better
| funded than your Palo Alto numbers once you account for
| federal funds.
|
| I agree that funding is not the only problem, the money
| could be spent much much better (and teacher unions should
| unfortunately probably not exist). Another large problem is
| that I do not think we as a society have agreed on what the
| actual goal of public education should be.
| will1am wrote:
| The comparison to HVAC systems in schools highlights the
| complexities of implementing new technologies.
| j45 wrote:
| Out of curiousity have you worked in education or EdTech?
| Trying to get the context of this.
| richardw wrote:
| I think a good place to start is "anyone in the world who wants
| to learn and is hindered by their school and teachers". Not
| "this must work in every American school from the start".
|
| A smart kid with a phone in Kenya should be able to have a
| shot. Wikipedia allows this. Khan Academy helps. This in the
| extreme is Khan Academy but potentially for every course a kid
| (or adult) could want, generated on demand from scratch if need
| be.
|
| The next optimal study session generated for your current state
| of knowledge, energy level, learning goals, by the teaching
| agent who is provably the best at delivering that lesson for
| you, using the optimal mediums for your context. Video at home
| or in a class, audio when on a bus, printouts if you want. Add
| in spaced repetition and a few fun quizzes, gamify it. Let each
| person fulfil their potential unhindered by the resources of
| their school, parents or country.
| levocardia wrote:
| Even if this ends up being nothing more than "Khan Academy
| but I can ask questions and get answers and it's all in my
| local dialect of Urdu" it is a huge step forward for
| educations AS LEARNING.
| 1auralynn wrote:
| Khan Academy already has a robust AI chatbot/features
| (https://www.khanmigo.ai/) - they have an ongoing
| relationship with Microsoft/OpenAI
| UncleMeat wrote:
| To me, the good place to start is "what do teachers want that
| they feel would make their teaching more effective" rather
| than "the entire community of teachers is a barrier and we
| must work around them."
| will1am wrote:
| Is just a complex and challenging process
| JoeJonathan wrote:
| I'm curious to see how this all plays out across different
| disciplines. The process of learning calculus is different from
| learning a language, which is different from learning the
| history of science, which is different from learning
| ethnographic methods.
|
| There are all kinds of self-interested reasons educators might
| resist some of these technologies. But this also seems to be
| one of the areas where people from the tech world impose some
| idea that could potentially work for their limited domains of
| expertise but don't work at all for others.
| walledstance wrote:
| Whew! Yes. Education is allergic to disruption because
| education shouldn't be treated like a business.
|
| Educational goals are to educate people not make money.
| Education requires countless failures. Business models are
| composed to be failure averse or reduce risk.
|
| Education has and will likely continue to be a money and time
| sink because it is an area that requires constant failure from
| its participants to grow in knowledge.
|
| Thank you for setting this.
| djeastm wrote:
| One thing I've not understood about this is how do you create an
| AI course to teach people things... without creating an AI that
| can DO the very thing that will make that very same knowledge
| obsolete?
|
| For example, how do you create an AI language teacher without
| creating an AI that can make learning languages obsolete? If
| you've got an AI that can, in real time, hear other languages and
| translate them (as you might have for an AI language teacher),
| then why would a human need to spend countless hours learning
| this other language? Just hold your phone up and let AI do the
| work for a fraction of the effort.
|
| For a harder, non-solved problem, consider math. For an AI to do
| math will require something unknown at this point, if it can ever
| happen. But assuming it does, why would we want a human ever to
| "do math" ever again when we have the AI that can teach it just
| do it for us? The AI will almost certainly do it more cheaply and
| with more skill than a human IF it can be done at all.
|
| It's this sobering realization that I struggle with. If someone
| can tell me where I'm wrong I'd be greatly pleased
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Is this not the same as human teachers?
|
| In the language example, people still want to learn to
| read/write other languages despite many translators being
| available. The tech to teach might be less sensitive to latency
| than the skill in humans, or it might be very expensive, or it
| might be useful to non-tech-literate people.
| qup wrote:
| Well, for instance, because hearing other languages and
| translating them is not even the primary use-case for knowing a
| language. It would take a suite of purpose-built AIs, and the
| knowledge and ability to use them in-situ, to replace knowing a
| language.
|
| AIs can also teach us to do things they cannot themselves do,
| for instance you could have a driving-test tutor. It could
| teach you a lot of things, despite us not having full self-
| driving AIs.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Well I've never learned a language in order to be the best at
| that language, or the only person who can speak it.
|
| If you only want some basic communication, sure use a
| translation app, but learning a language is also about learning
| a culture. Learning about new music and literature and poetry
| that you'd never otherwise get exposure to.
|
| It's like asking what's the point of learning a musical
| instrument when I'll never be a great musician.
|
| It's to benefit myself so what would be the point of just
| getting a translation. They're never the same.
| Sanzig wrote:
| Using a phone translator is fine for being a tourist or maybe
| for short business trips. It's super inconvenient if you want
| to live and work somewhere where they speak that language,
| though.
|
| You need to have your phone on you all the time, otherwise you
| can't communicate. There is always going to be at least one
| clause worth of latency in each direction of translation due to
| differences in word order and semantics, so you'll be at least
| a sentence or two behind the conversation - whereas if you
| learn the language, you're interacting in real time. Also do
| not underestimate the goodwill that comes from being willing to
| learn a language - people recognize that it's hard, they're
| going to be much warmer to someone who spent over a thousand
| hours to reach B2 in their second language vs. someone who
| downloaded an app instead of putting the effort in.
|
| Near real time speech-to-speech machine translation is super
| cool if you're a tourist visiting a country for a couple weeks,
| or an employee visiting a factory in a country you don't speak
| the language. It isn't a replacement for learning a language,
| though.
| huevosabio wrote:
| Some subjects are necessary building blocks to more
| sophisticated tasks. The AI can teach the building blocks and
| leave the task of building to us.
|
| Coding, for example, is just a small subset of the tasks
| necessary for software engineering, which in turn is a small
| subset of the tasks necessary for SaaS company.
|
| We can break down human endeavors into subjects that are "AI
| teachable" and without ever needing the AI to be able to use
| them in a sophisticated fashion.
|
| We already do it like this, but with humans.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Are you arguing some stuff is un-teachable or that some stuff
| is human teachable and not AI teachable.
|
| If the former, how are people learning unteachable moments
| right now.
| Lichtso wrote:
| I generally agree, in the long term there will be far less need
| for teachers, as there will be less need for human jobs to be
| taught.
|
| However, creating many individual systems which are better than
| a human in a specific area each is very different from one
| unified and integrated system which combines all of them. The
| latter will take a lot longer to achieve. Until then there is
| value in teaching humans.
| wrsh07 wrote:
| I think you're imagining something like chess. In order for an
| ai chessbot to teach me chess as efficiently as possible, that
| bot is probably superhuman at chess.
|
| That's not necessarily the case. A good tutor can be more
| "curator" than "creator of course content"
|
| I can learn math by reading existing math textbooks. Imagine
| having an ai that is able to judge my knowledge of that math
| and assign reading or problem sets accordingly. Imagine an AI
| that is compelling to talk to and keeps me on task given my
| stated learning goals.
|
| None of that requires superhuman anything.
|
| Would I still want to learn linear algebra even if the frontier
| of math is being advanced by some super intelligence? Sure, why
| not? Isn't the frontier already being advanced by many people
| smarter than I am?
| nybsjytm wrote:
| > ... in the case of physics one could imagine working through
| very high quality course materials together with Feynman ... with
| recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels
| tractable.
|
| Actually, this seems to be absurdly beyond any of the recent
| progress in generative AI. This sounds like the kind of thing
| people say when their only deep knowledge is in the field of AI
| engineering.
| Yenrabbit wrote:
| It's optimistic, but given the OP is one of the best-informed
| technical generative AI researchers, and has been passing on
| that knowledge to the rest of us for a decade +, I don't think
| we can just dismiss it as unfounded hype :)
| nybsjytm wrote:
| My point is that he's a world expert on the engineering of AI
| systems. That shouldn't be mistaken for expertise, or even
| general knowledge, about anything else.
|
| It's a good principle to bear in mind for people from any
| profession, but top AI engineers in particular seem to have
| an unusually significant habit of not being able to recognize
| where their expertise ends and expertise from another field
| (such as, say, education) begins. They also seem very prone
| to unfounded hype - which isn't to say they're not also good
| researchers.
|
| Maybe Karpathy happens to be better on this than his peers, I
| wouldn't know.
| devindotcom wrote:
| incidentally, feynman would laugh pretty hard at this
| Balgair wrote:
| >> feels tractable
|
| I mean, the guy isn't saying that it's going to 100% happen.
| He's saying that the problem _feels_ like it might be doable at
| all. As Andrej has a background in physics, the phrase of
| 'feels tractable' would mean that he thinks that a path might
| exist, possibly, but only a lot of work will reveal that.
| nybsjytm wrote:
| > As Andrej has a background in physics
|
| This seems rather generous given that he was just a physics
| major. There's lots of physics majors who understand very
| little about physics and, crucially, nothing about physics
| education.
| og_kalu wrote:
| "Just" a physics major. I'm sorry but you're being
| ridiculous.
|
| There's nothing just about that especially when the
| commenter only said he had a background in physics.
| nybsjytm wrote:
| It's legitimate to call it a background in physics, but
| given the particular level of background and the context
| of this particular issue, its relevance is
| indistinguishable from zero.
|
| Has he ever demonstrated any particular insight or
| understanding of physics or - more importantly - of
| physics education? As far as I've been able to find, the
| answer is no. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
| At worst it just makes him a typical physics major.
| og_kalu wrote:
| One of the things Karpathy is most famous for, perhaps
| _the_ thing depending on who you ask are his
| instructional materials on Deep Learning and Neural
| Networks, of which at least hundreds of thousands have
| benefitted.
|
| That's far more tangible than whatever "background" it is
| you're looking for. He's a good teacher. He stands out
| for that and that's not an easy thing to do.
|
| Of all the things background doesn't mean much in, being
| a good educator is at the top of the list. Most Educators
| including those who've been at it for years are mediocre
| at best. The people who educate at the highest level
| (College/University Professors) are not even remotely
| hired based on ability to educate so this really isn't a
| surprise.
|
| Genuinely and I mean no offense, your expectations just
| feel rather comical. People like Sal Khan and Luis von
| Ahn would be laughed out of the room looking for your
| "background".
|
| Sure, Sal is an educator _now_ but he quit being a
| financial analyst to pursue Khan Academy full time.
|
| The real problem here is that you don't believe what
| Karpathy has in mind is tractable and not that there's
| some elusive background he needs to have. His background
| is as good as any to take this on.
| nybsjytm wrote:
| I think you've misread this conversation. I was
| responding to someone who suggested that Karpathy's
| "background in physics" indicated some insight into
| whether this venture, particularly as regards physics
| education, will effectively give guidance by subject
| matter experts like Feynman.
|
| If they had cited some other background, like his courses
| on AI, I would have responded differently.
| og_kalu wrote:
| Ah Fair Enough
| Balgair wrote:
| I was talking about how physicists will understate how
| difficult things can be.
|
| 'Feels tractable' is physics-speak for: a possibility
| exists to get there though it may require more teachers
| than there exist on the earth and more compute time per
| student than there are transistors in the solar system for
| the next 1000 years.
|
| Anti-gravity would be 'tractable' too as we can see there
| must exist some form of it via Hubble expansion and then
| it's only a matter of time until a physicist figures it
| out. Making it commercially viable is left to icky
| engineers.
|
| Things that a physicist don't think are 'tractable' would
| be time-travel and completing your thesis.
|
| To be very very clear: I am somewhat poking fun at
| physicists. Due to the golden age of physics, the whole
| field is kinda warped a bit about what they think is a
| doable thing/tractable. They think that a path may exist,
| and suddenly the problem is no longer really all that much
| of a problem, or rather 'real' problems are in figuring out
| if you can even do something at all. 'Tractable' problems
| are just all the 'stamp collecting' that goes into actually
| doing it.
| cyost wrote:
| Would any hypothetical training data corpus even be sufficient
| to emulate Feynman? Could any AI have a sufficient grasp of the
| material being taught, have enough surety to avoid errors,
| mimic Feynman's writing+teaching style, and accomplish this
| feat in a reasonable budget and timeframe?
|
| The example is obvious marketing hyperbole, of course, but it's
| just not going to happen beyond a superficial level unless we
| somehow create some kind of time-travelling panopticon. It's
| marred by lack of data (Feynman died in 1988), bad data
| (hagiographies of Feynman, this instance included), flawed
| assumptions (would Feynman even be an appropriate teaching
| assistant for everyone?), etc.
|
| I wonder if AI fans keep doing this thing in hopes that the
| "wow factor" of having the greats being emulated by AI
| (Feynman, Bill Gates, Socrates, etc.) will paper over their
| fundamental insecurities about their investment in AI. Like,
| c'mon, this kind of thing is a bit silly
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og2ehY5QXSc
| nybsjytm wrote:
| > Feynman, Bill Gates, Socrates, etc.
|
| One of these doesn't quite belong ;)
|
| But these AI researchers don't even understand these figures
| except as advertising reference points. The Socratic dialogue
| in the "sparks of AGI" paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712
| has nothing whatsoever to do with Socrates or the way he
| argued.
|
| Fourteen authors and not a single one seemed to realize
| there's any possible difference between a Socratic dialogue
| and a standard hack conversation where one person is named
| "Socrates."
| cyost wrote:
| > Prompt: Can you compare the two outputs above as if you
| were a teacher? [to GPT-4, the "two outputs" being GPT-4's
| and ChatGPT's attempts at a Socratic dialogue]
|
| Okay, that's kinda funny lol.
|
| It's a bit worrying how much the AI industry seems to be
| focusing on the superficial appearance of success
| (grandiose marketing claims, AI art that looks fine on
| first glance, AI mimicking peoples' appearances and speech
| patterns, etc.). I'm just your random layperson in the
| comment section, but it really seems like the field needed
| to be stuck in academia for a decade or two more. It hadn't
| quite finished baking yet.
| nybsjytm wrote:
| As far as I can see there are pretty much zero incentives
| in the AI research arena for being careful or
| intellectually rigorous, or being at all cautious in
| proclaiming success (or imminent success), with industry
| incentives having well invaded elite academia (Stanford,
| Berkeley, MIT, etc) as well. And culturally speaking, the
| top researchers seem to uniformly overestimate, by orders
| of magnitude, their own intelligence or perceptiveness.
| Looking in from the outside, it's a very curious field.
| verdverm wrote:
| > there are pretty much zero incentives in ____ for being
| careful or intellectually rigorous
|
| I would venture most industries, with foundations on
| other research fields, are likely the same. Oil & Gas,
| Pharma, manufacturing, WW2, going to the moon... the
| world is full of examples where people put progress or
| profits above safety.
|
| It's human nature
| nybsjytm wrote:
| > I would venture most industries, with foundations on
| other research fields, are likely the same.
|
| "Industries" is a key word though. Academic research,
| though hardly without its own major problems, doesn't
| have the same set of corrupting incentives. Although the
| lines are blurred, one kind of research shouldn't be
| confused with another. I do think it's exactly right to
| think of AI researchers the same way we think of R&D
| people in oil & gas, not the same way we think of
| algebraic topologists.
| verdverm wrote:
| Andrej Karpathy (the one behind the OP project) has been
| in both academia & industry, he's far more than a
| researcher, he also teaches and builds products
| BeetleB wrote:
| > > Feynman, Bill Gates, Socrates, etc.
|
| > One of these doesn't quite belong ;)
|
| I asked GPT to find which one:
|
| "The one that doesn't fit in is Bill Gates.
|
| Richard Feynman and Socrates were primarily known for their
| contributions to science and philosophy, respectively.
| Feynman was a renowned theoretical physicist, and Socrates
| was a foundational philosopher.
|
| Bill Gates, on the other hand, is primarily known as a
| businessman and co-founder of Microsoft, a leading software
| corporation. While he also has made contributions to
| technology and philanthropy, his primary domain is
| different from the scientific and philosophical realms of
| Feynman and Socrates."
| nybsjytm wrote:
| Thank you for this AI slop. It's the right answer but
| incoherent reasoning. It could have equally reasonably
| said:
|
| "The one that doesn't fit in is Socrates.
|
| Richard Feynman and Bill Gates are primarily known for
| their contributions to science and philanthropy,
| respectively. Feynman was a renowned theoretical
| physicist, and Gates is a world-famous philanthropist.
|
| Socrates, on the other hand, is primarily known for
| foundational contributions to philosophy. His primary
| domain is thus distinct from the scientific and
| philanthropic realms of Feynman and Gates."
| BeetleB wrote:
| True, but I bet 90% of HN readers would have answered
| "Bill Gates", with reasoning similar to GPT's. So I can't
| exactly fault GPT too much.
| nybsjytm wrote:
| Ok. Thanks for the contribution.
| xyst wrote:
| I wonder what's the next hype after this? Maybe biotech again?
| Biotech + AI? Get your (propaganda) results beamed straight to
| your brain augmentation with a 3D overlay (just like the movies,
| bro!!).
|
| But if you opted for the mega ultra premium gemini pro max++
| model, then you get a minimal ad free experience. No wait, forget
| a monthly subscription. Think, micro subscription model on a per
| usage basis.
|
| In your death bed and need life saving measures? Augmentation
| returns "402 Payment Required" before nanobots can proceed to
| excise the root of the issue. 5M SHIB tokens required.
| Unfortunately, 20G signal is not reliable in the Wilderness Zone,
| thus old school EMS services are dispatched to the scene.
| Unfortunately, EMS services do not accept your insurance and
| private EMS leaves the scene and dispatches public EMS services.
| The wait is 2 hours given the WZ.
|
| You fail to receive life saving measures (ie, tPA) in time, thus
| resulting in impaired motor functions and decreased quality of
| life. The flashing 402 Payment Required prompt is forever
| imprinted in your augmentation.
| caconym_ wrote:
| I am seriously worried about what it's going to cost to buy my
| daughter a seat at the human table rather than defaulting to the
| AI slop trough it seems most kids less privileged than her will
| be forced to learn from in the near future.
| bilsbie wrote:
| I think we've been at the point you're worried about for a
| while. It's just we don't even have a substitute like Ai yet.
|
| Instead we just accept really bad education.
| uoaei wrote:
| Sounds like what it really is, is the largest prompt injection
| testing platform possible.
|
| Kids everywhere will be learning nothing except how to hack these
| chatbots to get passing grades.
| techostritch wrote:
| I feel really weird about education, the only value I think I've
| ever gotten in education is tangential (social, inspirational)
| which I think many people say is the primary value, but when it
| comes to actually work skills Im mostly self taught. I'm not sure
| if there's a way to make school better without making it way more
| expensive. AI would be interesting but so far it's not reallly
| there yet, for one I think it needs coaching skills to know when
| to reach out rather than just respond to prompts. And most self
| learning is experiential not interactive.
| jimhefferon wrote:
| I'm sorry, but you wrote this post. Did you self-teach writing?
| techostritch wrote:
| The mechanics no. I'm like very intentionally trying not to
| be an extremist about this, yes I did get some value out of
| school but relatively disproportionate to the effort I put
| in.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Maybe he told Siri to write it?
| techostritch wrote:
| Maybe he is Siri!
| SrslyJosh wrote:
| Please don't.
| tekno45 wrote:
| Anytime someone says AI can give everyone their own einstein,
| Feynman, Galileo in a box i can only think about how little data
| we have on anyone before the 90's.
|
| These would be charcutiers of these people with nothing but their
| most famous equations and examples and quips letting you know
| "this is supposed to be a famous person"
| KTibow wrote:
| Don't we have writing from (some of) these folks?
| bearjaws wrote:
| > These would be charcutiers of these people
|
| I think you mean caricature, but I do love the idea of Feynman
| making a mean charcuterie board
| freejazz wrote:
| Lord, spare me.
| jrflowers wrote:
| > imagine working through very high quality course materials
| together with Feynman
|
| I like this idea. What if you could study geometric function
| theory with Kaczynski? You could study chemical engineering with
| Thomas Midgley Jr!
|
| Creative writing with L Ron Hubbard!
| koonsolo wrote:
| I'll tell you where it will go wrong.
|
| We had an economics teacher, that when you would bring up "the
| pope" topic, she could go on a 1+ hour rant about what is wrong
| with the whole catholic institution, etc.
|
| Of course us kids, would somehow be able to get this topic into
| the lesson, to trigger her rant.
|
| If you want to know various ways on how to break AI, let some
| kids, who are forced to interact with it, loose on the thing. I'm
| sure they'll figure out how to get it to say the most crazy shit
| in no time.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| All of it has to go tremendously right for that to be the point
| where it breaks.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Eventually they'd make an app for AR with a virtual human
| teacher, depending on the execution, it could work especially if
| they can make it so real that it can suspend disbelief it is just
| an avatar
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| This is a worse idea than the jump to conclusions mat. I have no
| doubt that some VC will value it in the billions.
| ecjhdnc2025 wrote:
| "I am not very observant where pictures are concerned"
|
| Like... is that a satirical choice or what?
| tschellenbach wrote:
| Imagine world class education, for everyone, accessible to all at
| the price of Netflix. AI can be a teaching assistant, but also
| makes it easier to create course materials. Generating video
| explanations, infographics etc.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| we can't even get quality on-demand video entertainment, for
| everyone, accessible to all at the price of Netflix. My company
| makes a Gen-AI powered course builder for our LMS and Feynman
| does not have to worry about the competition.
| htk wrote:
| I'm impressed by the amount of flak that Karpathy is getting
| here.
|
| His great instructional videos on YT tell me that he is
| passionate for both AI and education, so I'm all for him trying
| to mix the two. More effort on education is always welcome in my
| book.
| layer8 wrote:
| Their first planned product is an online course for building a
| "Storyteller" LLM, explicitly stating that the course will take
| some time to build and that there is no timeline on when it
| will launch [1]. The company page states that their vision
| merely "feels tractable", and concedes that they might not be
| successful [2]. There is a lack of arguments regarding how they
| can bring any substantial advancements over current generative
| AI tech. At present this all looks rather underwhelming, with a
| substantial dose of wishful thinking.
|
| [1] https://github.com/karpathy/LLM101n [2]
| https://eurekalabs.ai/
| jmull wrote:
| > There is a lack of arguments regarding how they can bring
| any substantial advancements over current AI tech.
|
| It doesn't sound like that's a goal though.
| layer8 wrote:
| It would be necessary to fulfil the vision.
| ramon156 wrote:
| It would be, but its not top priority to finish by
| yesterday. This is a new direction, so I'd rather have it
| be good than quick
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Frankly they are in a race with the AGI folks. If AGI is
| built first, you no longer need to educate humans, since
| most humans will be useless at that point.
| surfingdino wrote:
| AI today cannot piece together a pizza recipe based on the
| thousands of recipes it was trained on so I'm not holding my
| breath waiting for it to become a useful tool in education.
| uptownfunk wrote:
| Whatever anyone will say. I am glad he is doing something
| meaningful with his life beyond just making investors in OpenAI
| more wealthy. At some point I suspect the money just becomes a
| number and then you can afford to think about bigger things like
| how can we help alleviate some of the broader suffering in the
| world.
| huevosabio wrote:
| Karpathy is amazing. A rare combination of top tier technical
| chops with top tier communication skills, wrapped in a wholesome
| person.
|
| I am very excited for this and can't wait to try their products!
|
| As an aside, odd to see people here are so pessimistic about the
| idea. Education is hard to scale because tutors are hard to
| scale. ChatGPT is already an ad-hoc educator for me, in a similar
| jump that Wikipedia was. Having a purpose-built product with a
| hand-crafted curriculum, that's a killer idea.
| Balgair wrote:
| > Outbound links with a bit more info in the reply!
|
| Hey, I don't have a twitter account (long story). Can anyone post
| those links here?
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Cool.
|
| I'm a process oriented learner. While I can read any fact or
| trivia and retain it with no effort, things that require steps I
| only really learn by repeatedly doing them. So if there's an AI,
| for example, that can create problem sets for me to do with
| something that I am attempting to learn, and then explain to me
| the steps after I've attempted to find the solution, then I am
| more likely to retain that knowledge in the long run.
|
| This would have been especially beneficial to me in my college
| statistics class, for example, where I had a prof who was... not
| much of an educator.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Not based on LLMs, but mathacademy.com sounds like what you
| need.
| sensanaty wrote:
| This far in and they're still drawing 3 arms and you want me to
| believe these bullshit generators are gonna be useful in
| education?
|
| We've collectively lost our minds with this AI hype
| rhspeer wrote:
| https://www.narratear.com/ is pretty far along with this, and the
| founders are solid.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| What are the hardware requirements for this course though?
| cccybernetic wrote:
| This is a problem I'm working on.
|
| I'm a software engineer at major US research university
| developing AI-powered software to improve critical reading and
| writing skills in higher ed. The idea is to provide immediate,
| high-quality feedback to students, closing the "latency" of
| submitting something and waiting to hear back from you professor.
|
| I do genuinely think AI can reshape teaching and learning, but it
| will be a slow iterative process. We can use it scale what works
| (personalized learning and tutoring, helping students develop
| mastery/automaticity on topics, targeting areas where they
| struggle). It can also automate time-consuming tasks that bog
| teachers down.
|
| If you're interested in pedagogy, AI, and tech, please reach out.
| __loam wrote:
| I'm glad I got my degrees before people starting trying to
| integrate bullshit generators into my education. I've been
| really frustrated with the conversation about the potential
| applications for this technology. These chatbots have no
| relationship with the truth or with knowledge, and are designed
| to agree with users and act accommodating regardless of how
| wrong someone is. We're talking about putting this tech between
| patients and doctors, students and teachers and meanwhile
| McDonald's is rolling back deployments because it can't even
| take a fast food order accurately.
| Merik wrote:
| I think you're confusing the technology with a product
| developed using that technology. The prevalence of poorly
| implemented products or the lack of fit of some products to a
| particular target market, do not inherently provide evidence
| for conclusions about the technology itself.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| The lack of successful implementation is surely at least
| _evidence_ that the technology might not be living up to
| the hype, though -- no?
|
| It's like "but that wasn't _real_ communism".
| ilamont wrote:
| > I'm a software engineer at major US research university
| developing AI-powered software to improve critical reading and
| writing skills in higher ed.
|
| Oftentimes, the root cause of the critical reading problem is
| the quality of the writing that students are subjected to. My
| daughter recently showed me one of her economics readings, and
| said she couldn't understand it. It was 40 pages of convoluted
| academic writing like this:
|
| _Wibbels argues that developing countries face an inherently
| disadvantaged position in the world economy due to their
| dependence on foreign capital and an undiversified base of
| commodity exports as primary sources of hard currency. This
| dependent position relative to capital markets prevents
| developing countries from borrowing to engage in counter-
| cyclical aggregate demand management._
|
| Is such language the optimal way to express ideas for
| comprehension by peers, students, and policymakers?
|
| I hope your mission to improve writing skills in higher ed
| addresses the source of output - professors, teaching
| assistants, journal editors, and others who continue to promote
| outdated, inconsistent, and counterproductive academic writing
| styles.
| km3r wrote:
| As an interesting example, i passed that passage to
| chatgpt3.5 with the prompt "make the following passage much
| simpler to understand"
|
| _Wibbels says that poorer countries are in a tough spot in
| the global economy. They rely a lot on money from other
| countries and mainly sell raw materials to get cash. Because
| they 're so reliant on foreign money, they can't borrow much
| to manage their economy when things are going bad._
|
| This is a pretty basic prompt too, you can add qualifiers to
| fit your general audience: "easier to understand for a high
| school student". You could provide context of previous and
| subsequent passages as well. Yeah its not perfect, but the
| right prompt could provide at least a consistent output
| style.
| Merik wrote:
| Claude 3.5 to the rescue:
|
| "Wibbels claims that developing countries are at a
| disadvantage in the global economy for two main reasons:
|
| 1. They rely heavily on foreign investment.
|
| 2. They depend on exporting a limited range of raw materials
| to earn foreign currency.
|
| Because of this weak economic position, developing countries
| struggle to borrow money when needed. This makes it hard for
| them to boost their economies during economic downturns,
| unlike wealthier nations that can more easily borrow and
| spend to stimulate growth. "
| pants2 wrote:
| Wow, I would have killed to have access to something like
| Claude when I was in school. I would have spent a lot less
| time stuck on problems or topics.
| notachatbot1234 wrote:
| Are those really the same?
|
| - "commodity exports" -> "raw materials"?
|
| - "hard currency" -> "foreign currency"?
| corimaith wrote:
| This does illustrate a problem when talking about complex
| topics or mechanisms is the need for specificity. Using
| short, simple sentences comes at the risk of making
| things seem overly vague and hand wavey, or worse,
| misrepresent the concept.
|
| In continental philosophy or mathematical papers this
| gets all too apparent, as alot of argument hinge on very
| fine differences and nuances that need to specified else
| people get the wrong idea.
| freejazz wrote:
| >Is such language the optimal way to express ideas for
| comprehension by peers, students, and policymakers?
|
| Those are three completely different groups with completely
| different needs.
| champdebloom wrote:
| I'm a teacher turned web developer building tools to help other
| teachers automate their menial admin tasks. I'd love to chat
| when you have a moment!
| cccybernetic wrote:
| Absolutely, email is in my profile. Please reach out.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| This sounds great.
|
| I have a roommate who is a weak non-native English speaker.
| However, he needs to write and submit scientific papers in
| English. He uses the "pro" version of ChatGPT to improve his
| written English. He said it is like having a 1:1 English
| language tutor because he gets nearly instant feedback when
| trying to rewrite a sentence or paragraph. I am native in
| English. He showed me some before and after examples. His
| message remained unchanged, but the revised versions were so
| much smoother. My point: He is not using ChatGPT to "cheat",
| rather to improve delivery of his message. I wrote about this
| previously here on HN. It received very mixed reviews.
| 3D30497420 wrote:
| I'm using ChatGPT to help me learn German. It is good, but as
| with all current AI it has a tendency to be very confidently
| wrong. This is especially true for more nuanced grammatical
| questions, such as "Why is this in dativ?" For that reason, I
| never feel I can fully trust it (and certainly wouldn't build
| a language-learning product around it). With that said
| however, it is a great addition to the various tools I use.
|
| I think what your roommate is doing is fine. Being a native
| English speaker is a bit of a cheat anyhow. I very much
| appreciate the challenge of learning another language, so am
| not going to fault someone for using different tools to help
| improve their language. So long as the ideas are (relatively)
| original, the specific wording seems less important.
| trod123 wrote:
| This is misguided, naive, and likely to end in multiple potential
| failure outcomes that may be unacceptable, both from a profit
| standpoint; as well as a societal standpoint.
|
| Education is a part of what gets adopted into each and every
| student's self concept (identity). There is an uncanny valley in
| communication where any inconsistent distortion of reflected
| appraisal can lead students down a path of irrational madness, in
| a way that they themselves cannot perceive. This is well known in
| certain circles.
|
| AI always has the biases which are programmed into it by the
| creators of the AI, whether this is explicit or implicit, the
| fact remains, there are biases.
|
| AI in education will be proven to be harmful because there is no
| possible way that AI can remain consistent in its interactions at
| all times. We already know this from hallucinations where experts
| went and fact checked it and found it had lied, where lawyers
| were disbarred or censured.
|
| Put plainly, this is a safety critical system involving our
| children.
|
| Given the level of care to date that's occurred with AI in
| industry, there is no room for discussion or adoption of these
| tools, unless the actual unspoken intention is to drive your
| children crazy; where they self eliminate later as a result.
|
| Rationally, good people don't create a world of intolerable
| suffering and then magically expect that somehow, someone, will
| figure out a way to fix everything you've broken but were too
| blind to see; at the time when knowing would save lives.
|
| For those who enjoy cinema, a perfect analogy of this might be
| the Day After Tomorrow, where the main scientist turns out to be
| correct, but was ultimately ignored until devastating losses and
| risks were nearly insurmountable.
|
| Leadership didn't want to hear the facts when knowing would have
| saved lives, and so they had to take a triage on the battlefield
| approach (abandoning half the country). While it is a fictional
| story, it sufficiently demonstrates what lack of scientific or
| rational foresight can lead to for those that can't imagine it
| themselves (people who are blinded like that should never be in
| positions of influence or power).
| __loam wrote:
| Put much more politely than I would. I'm glad people are
| starting to question the narrative on this technology.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| " There is an uncanny valley in communication where any
| inconsistent distortion of reflected appraisal can lead
| students down a path of irrational madness, in a way that they
| themselves cannot perceive. This is well known in certain
| circles."
|
| Please expand.
| trod123 wrote:
| Foundational material comes from 1940s and 1950s wartime
| records of torture done on individuals during WW2 and Korean
| Conflict (under Mao).
|
| You can find the raw case studies in the literature:
|
| Robert Lifton "Thought Reform & The psychology of totalism";
|
| John Meerloo "Rape of the Mind" covers the methodology often
| used along with knowledge at the time that physical coercion
| is not effective compared to mental coercion.
|
| There are a number of more modern references. This is just to
| get you started (as an overview), with the least amount of
| ambiguity.
|
| Torture induces vulnerable mental states which can create
| lasting changes in combination with a little knowledge of our
| (humanities) psychology.
|
| I believe Cialdini covers the other lever's of influence in
| his book on Influence. These can all be used in any perceived
| communications system. He directly mentions PoW camps in his
| chapter on Consistency (with a lot of additional references).
|
| Most modern documented cases of torture involve mental
| coercion, absent most physical coercion. This may take the
| form of varying and intermittent loud noises, bright lights
| (meant to disorient and confuse), isolation, sleep
| deprivation, etc which are intended to induce hypnotic
| states. There may also be covert hypnosis techniques that can
| be used as well, not excluding modern pharmacology
| derivatives based in narco-analysis (which during WW2 were
| known to not be effective), or drug dependency (not related
| to the current discussion).
|
| The subject may become psychotic/violent, or withdraw
| (disassociate) becoming non-responsive, from extended
| exposure to mental coercion. Only a very rare few may be
| cursory unaffected (but still be hallowed out somewhat).
| Largely this is just a function of time and exposure.
|
| In many cases all cohorts will to a degree adopt
| characteristics of their torturer (through distorted
| reflected appraisal), or whatever they promote (towards the
| promise or hope of relief, which is not physical relief).
|
| Additionally, this material also includes the process of
| breaking down an individuals self-concept. As an example
| through destructive interference, by forcing the subject into
| acts that violate their deeply held beliefs, Abu Ghraib comes
| to mind, an example might be subscribing deeply to jewish
| traditions, and then being fed meat in your food without your
| knowledge (until later) where invectives and humiliation are
| induced. Overall, this subject matter is some of the darkest
| evil stuff you'd ever want to know, but it is entirely
| necessary to know in order to recognize and put a stop to it.
|
| Most people don't recognize how evil works in reality, it
| works through willful blindness, and continues until its
| stopped, and perception requires you to not be blind to alert
| to that fact. Those who have blinded themselves are incapable
| of stopping.
|
| Many of these structures, tactics, and techniques that
| originate in torture, form the basis for what is used today
| very commonly in advertising and marketing, as well as
| subversion and propaganda.
|
| The reality is its fairly simple to break people with certain
| structures. One such structure is prompting for confession to
| induce consistency traps, then using that to mold the person
| to a certain narrative in a circular loop.
|
| The use of the hot potato in the classroom, for open-ended
| questions (opinion) is one such example where this material
| has found purchase in K12 education.
|
| Often, these elements are subtle, and are non-alerting; but
| demonstrably effective. What I've mentioned is just
| scratching the surface.
|
| Edit: on a side note:
|
| There is an interesting, and somewhat convincing argument to
| be made in this area related to active shooters. It may be
| that these related crimes may in some part be linked to the
| mental coercive spirals that are regularly being induced in
| our population. Bullying, Harassment and
| 'Silencing'/Shunning, and Discrimination (of any kind) for
| example are forms of social (mental) coercion.
|
| While it is not a causal link, nor does it excuse any
| outcomes (which are unjustifiable, and worthy of
| condemnation). It is certainly plausible given the background
| knowledge in this subject area and some basic a priori
| reasoning.
|
| Inducements through ads, and other isolating tactics may be
| ephemeral data that is not collected.
|
| Given the risks, it certainly should merit much further
| scientific investigation and funding than it currently
| receives. It is well known that tortured people eventually
| break.
|
| For simple lookup (Author/ISBN): Robert Lifton, 0393002217
| Meerloo, 9781614277873 Cialdini, 9780062937650
|
| The basis for Reflected Appraisal is examined in Mead, 1934;
| Cooley, 1902; Sullivan, 1947, Felson, 1985. There has been
| some research more recently suggesting there may be a
| physiological mechanism for this process in neuronal
| structures though one must always consider the source for
| credibility (DOI:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2015.06.017).
|
| Self Concept and Reflected appraisal Theory form a large
| chunk of the curricula under Intro to Communications courses
| at the college level, and a few other fields.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| I am seeing a lot of skepticism on this thread.
|
| While I agree that this approach to learning (with a bot) may not
| be a good fit for everyone, I am absolutely sure it can be for
| some.
|
| I don't see the harm in exploring this path.
|
| This is not like education was a solved problem, it is extremely
| wasteful, inconsistent and costly.
|
| I think there is a path for more projects/interest based, less
| competitive and more individually tailored learning system when
| we remove all the constraints attached to a classroom and
| teachers, many of them being incompetent or miserable.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| The goal is to get closer to what a tutor can do, and it has
| been proved that tutoring by experts is by far the most
| efficient education system, the only problem is it does not
| scale.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Show of hands, who wants our already dopamine iPhone addicted
| kids learning from Her AI bot
| nitwit005 wrote:
| > For example, in the case of physics one could imagine working
| through very high quality course materials together with Feynman
| [...]
|
| > However, with recent progress in generative AI, this learning
| experience feels tractable.
|
| If you can create the Feynman AI, you shouldn't bother with an
| education company.
| analog31 wrote:
| Perhaps if Feynman could recommend educational software, he'd
| choose a programming language. I think the best educational
| tools are real-world creative tools. This includes access to
| knowledge.
| mometsi wrote:
| It might be that exploring new physics might be best pursued by
| inhuman alphago-style setups.
|
| A sharp, domain-specific Feynman-flavored LLM would be broadly
| useful and still worth bothering with.
| robrenaud wrote:
| The physics professor AI wouldn't have to solve novel problems
| in physics, it just has to be able to remove the confusion of
| physics undergrads.
| kmetan wrote:
| Tell me the number of successful startups you have founded on
| your own, and I will tell you the probability of Eureka Labs
| being successful.
| localfirst wrote:
| went from OpenAI killer to course selling real quick
| awwaiid wrote:
| "Our first product will be the world's obviously best AI course,
| LLM101n."
|
| Well obviously the target audience is actually AI-agents as part
| of the Super Intelligence ramp-up!
| verdverm wrote:
| Sal Khan gave a good Ted Talk on his thoughts around AI in
| Education. Some pretty cool demos in there showing what a tutor
| could be like and other opportunities
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJP5GqnTrNo
|
| How AI Could Save (Not Destroy) Education | Sal Khan
|
| ---
|
| edit: Khanmigo has its own site now
|
| https://www.khanmigo.ai/
| 8organicbits wrote:
| Does anyone expect LLMs to be good at tutoring? Like, sure, if
| you prompt them to talk like a tutor they generate text that
| looks convincing. But they spew nonsense and you need a subject
| matter expert to know when they've gone off the rails. And it's
| really easy to get factually incorrect information from LLMs.
| Students are uniquely unequiped to act as that SME as they don't
| have the knowledge yet. I haven't even seen LLMs add numbers
| reliably. I don't get this idea.
| plexicle wrote:
| I didn't think so either.
|
| But it's Karphathy... and he's way smarter than I am.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| using AI to tackle the pinnacle of education ex: "tutored by
| the premiere minds in the subject area" feels a lot like self-
| driving cars in the most dynamic, entropy-filled environments.
| Why try to solve the vast majority of the problem like easier
| driving scenarios? We don't need Feynman to teach physics when
| high school graduates can't read or do basic math. I guess
| there's no glory or money in this application...
| mrandish wrote:
| I believe a great _product_ in this area is certainly possible
| and Karpathy probably has the technical chops to create it.
|
| I'm skeptical that the product described in the announcement will
| result in a _business_ able to generate VC-level returns. Based
| on my experience as a tech entrepreneur with edu-focused products
| across multiple startups and decades, scaling sales revenue to
| significant levels in edu is extremely challenging for unique and
| non-obvious reasons. None of the edu-specific challenges are
| directly related to the effectiveness or relative value of the
| product itself. They are structural problems related to the three
| main types of buyers, which are: 1. Schools, (K-12, Univ), 2.
| Companies (employee training, compliance, etc), 3. Individuals
| (self-learners). There are other types of buyers but they don 't
| represent nearly as much aggregated potential revenue as these
| three. Note that these are the economic buyers not the product
| end-users.
|
| Each of the three types presents different challenges from the
| others, however there recurring meta-themes. The main one is that
| their purchasing decisions are often driven by factors unrelated
| to the product. For example, the primary focus of schools is,
| sadly, not maximizing net student learning. While that is a
| consideration, it's swamped by other external requirements, many
| of them wickedly complex. For companies, employee training,
| whether a regulatory requirement or purely to increase employee
| effectiveness, isn't core to their actual business - meaning it's
| a cost not revenue. Individuals on the other hand break into two
| types, those doing it to actually learn something for themselves,
| and those seeking certification or external validation like a
| degree to increase their future employment earnings. Learning
| lovers are a pure consumer, non-essential, discretionary
| spending-type sale with all the same well-known LTV and customer
| acquisition cost challenges. For certification/validation buyers,
| they aren't _primarily_ focused on the learning but rather
| checking a particular box that has high perceived value to
| external parties.
|
| While I agree that creating a new large and growing type of
| customer in addition to these three is possible, it's a huge lift
| that's risky, expensive and will require substantial sustained
| investment over time - all ahead of meaningful revenue. So, I
| wish Andrej et al the best and I'm rooting for them but I'm not
| optimistic they'll build a high-growth, high-revenue sustainable
| edu business around AI as the primary value differentiation.
| xxbondsxx wrote:
| Thanks for saying the quiet part out loud here -- everyone
| wants to believe in education improvement but there's a harsh
| reality of the industry that is pretty unpleasant to confront.
|
| I think the only hope would be to run a pilot and show _such_
| an improvement in student testing levels that it would be fast-
| tracked or mandated for approval.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| ...or be accused of cooking the books, labeled as anti-union,
| or other ad hominem attacks.
|
| I'm not a fan of SV edutech ventures for various reasons, but
| the school districts that they hope to sink their pointy
| teeth into have very effective immune systems against change.
| mrandish wrote:
| Yes, I LOLed at your comment. K-12 is especially soul
| crushing for tech startups, which is why I now think of
| K-12 school district buyers like Obi Wan thinks of Mos
| Eisley.
| notjoemama wrote:
| Maybe part of it is seeing education as a massive
| untapped wallet? There's a reason Teachers Pay Teachers
| exists and frankly, given the greed of Silicon Valley and
| existing ED companies, isn't it an environmentally
| created immune system?
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Maybe. I'd love to see whatever the Apple + MECC version
| would be today.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Teachers and administrators have decades of experience at
| getting treated as targets for culture-war grandstanding.
| Having a 28yo tech CEO barely older than their students
| tell them that a cool website will reverse the effects of
| poverty is probably just a different flavor.
| cglee wrote:
| Great observations. I've been in the edu (coding school) space
| for over a decade and it tracks with my experience (though it
| seems you've tackled a lot more market segments than I have).
| I'm very bullish on AI + Education. If Karpathy's announcement
| doesn't track, what do you think might work instead?
| notarealllama wrote:
| Also EdTech background here, not OP.
|
| There's a difference between the educational-industrial
| complex (or the ed landscape in terms of market), and
| motivated learner-centric models which can be done
| independently.
|
| As much as degrees and certs are important in the current
| paradigm, it's long been the case in tech that credentials
| matter less than output, skills, and soft skills.
|
| As much as I personally believe in a stronger credential
| system, the shift is toward individual learning. The
| popularity of coding bootcamps in the tech space I think
| demonstrates that.
|
| Personal AI tutor? Without the pesky SME credentialing? Sign
| me up!
| ghaff wrote:
| IMO, a lot of that leads to sink or swim. Not that elite
| institutions are perfect (by a long shot). But largely
| cater to kids (and families) that can do things on their
| own with help from qualified people and you almost
| certainly get better results--and lower costs--for them.
|
| Others, not so much.
| mrandish wrote:
| > what do you think might work instead?
|
| That's a good question to which, unfortunately, I don't have
| a good answer. None of my startups managed to make our edu-
| focused products long-term successful. Fortunately, we
| designed our major technology stacks so each could result in
| products in at least two different markets. While our edu
| products never did better than break-even for us, our non-edu
| products usually did much better with several becoming
| breakout hits. Personally, I'm very passionate about the need
| for innovation in education, likely due to challenges I had
| with traditional school. But after spending many years and
| substantial funds, I eventually stopped trying to do edu-
| focused spins of my products (despite clear potential of the
| underlying tech). Although I now understand many of the
| reasons the edu market is so hard and counter-intuitive, I
| also learned succeeding there requires vastly different
| skills and interests than I have (or want to have). K-12 was
| especially frustrating for me because success there is so
| untethered from actual product effectiveness, along with
| being unbelievably bureaucratic, largely opaque, and having a
| glacially slow sales cycle. As someone who started out so
| idealistic about making education better, actually trying to
| build a successful tech startup selling to K-12 can be soul-
| crushing.
|
| I agree that in terms of increasing actual learning, AI could
| be revolutionary. I commented here because my experience was
| specifically being a startup trying to sell products based on
| revolutionary new disruptive technologies into edu.
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _They are structural problems related to the three main types
| of buyers, which are: 1. Schools, (K-12, Univ), 2. Companies
| (employee training, compliance, etc), 3. Individuals (self-
| learners). There are other types of buyers but they don 't
| represent nearly as much aggregated potential revenue as these
| three._
|
| What about parents? That would seem like a natural market for a
| product that could replace expensive private school tuition (or
| paying high property taxes in order to be in a good public
| school district). I recently saw a literacy product aimed at
| parents, and which costs $50/month. They justify their pricing
| based on its substitutes being a tutor or private school
| tuition. While this is a bit of a stretch for a literacy tool,
| it would be a very fair comparison for a very good AI tutor
| that teaches the child and has a dashboard/summary for parents.
| danans wrote:
| > What about parents? That would seem like a natural market
| for a product that could replace expensive private school
| tuition (or paying high property taxes in order to be in a
| good public school district)
|
| Quality of education is one factor among many when making the
| choice to send your child to a private school or move to a
| prosperous community with well funded public schools.
|
| Another major one is social clustering, premised on the
| expectations that children will pick up beneficial cultural
| traits from similarly higher privilege peers that will help
| them advance.
|
| Edu software can't provide the social benefits of exclusive
| schools (whether they are private or public). Parents know
| that which is why if they can afford to, they avoid
| underperforming schools.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > or move to a prosperous community with well funded public
| schools
|
| To be clear, in most highly advanced democracies, public
| schools are mostly nationally funded, not locally funded.
| The US is a rare outlier, where public schools are mostly
| locally funded. Most people from _both_ sides are surprised
| to learn about the other: people from US to learn about
| "the majority" and non-US people to learn about US system.
| In most places that use national funding for public
| schools, if you wish to select a school system with better
| funding, you pay for private school.
| AlanYx wrote:
| >I recently saw a literacy product aimed at parents, and
| which costs $50/month. They justify their pricing based on
| its substitutes being a tutor or private school tuition.
|
| There's a software startup aimed at teaching 3-5 year olds
| reading called Mentava that charges parents $500/month (not a
| typo). And there are plenty of online tutoring services for
| kids at the $200/month level.
|
| I think educational software aimed at parents has
| traditionally priced themselves too low, hampering the
| development of what's possible.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Could be huge for the home schooling market for the same
| reasons.
| mrandish wrote:
| > What about parents?
|
| I posted on an extensive reply on exactly this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40988380
| stanfordkid wrote:
| Coursera seems to have made a (reasonably) successful business
| out of it. $1B market cap and almost $200M revenue. Now of
| course it is not the scale of other SaaS/Enterprise/Social
| Media outcomes but there is a market here, I think it's all
| about product vision and creation of new credentialing systems
| / disrupting the way skills are assessed at a fundamental
| level. There is clearly a problem with the cost/value ratio
| with traditional 4 year universities. I also agree selling into
| the same system is hard.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Coursera also lost over $100M last year so I wouldn't be so
| quick to say "successful." Promising? Maybe.
|
| FWIW I used coursera while in high school way back in
| 2013/14. It was pretty good.
| zamfi wrote:
| It's true that these markets are the huge ones today.
|
| But there is another buyer that your post leaves out: parents.
| This is not the same as individuals/self-learners (the buyer is
| not the user, exactly) -- but the buyer has strong incentives
| that align with student performance that are different than the
| others.
|
| Historically, this has been a very challenging market to scale
| up well -- exceptional 1:1 tutors are rare, and hard to train,
| they'll be expensive and often form a relationship with their
| tutees that incentivizes disintermediation of any platform that
| tries to capture some fraction of the value by offering a two-
| sided marketplace (YC has funded at least one of these!)
|
| However, AI has the potential to dominate in this market. Most
| tutors are actually not amazing, but 1:1 tutoring is just so
| much more effective than basically any other kind of
| educational context (two-sigma improvements!) that it doesn't
| super matter. AI _could_ be a much more effective tutor -- at a
| cost substantially lower than a human tutor. Of course, wealthy
| families may still want to hire the well-pedigreed, role-model-
| level, truly exceptional tutors. But folks who are lukewarm
| about their private (or small-group) tutors may just give the
| AI tutors a shot--and find that they're better than what they
| were paying for.
|
| Or not! That's what makes it a risky bet. :)
|
| But it's a large, $50B+ market today, and growing fast -- not
| one to be discounted.
| hahajk wrote:
| > but 1:1 tutoring is just so much more effective than
| basically any other kind of educational context
|
| Do we know how much of that effect is the "personalization "
| of 1:1 learning (something AI can replicate) vs the effect of
| interacting with another human (which AI might not be able to
| replicate)?
| JohnAaronNelson wrote:
| We use AI as a teaching aid. It supplements traditional
| learning. It gives people the ability to have a dialogue
| with information.
|
| It's not replacement
| zamfi wrote:
| The studies almost always compare 1:1 learning with
| learning in groups, comparing two different modes of
| interaction with another human,
|
| But it's reasonable to ask whether an AI can (today?) be as
| effective as a human at delivering (or even identifying,
| generating) that personalized interaction.
| mrandish wrote:
| > But there is another buyer that your post leaves out:
| parents.
|
| I did consider adding a section to my post breaking down all
| the smaller sub-categories of the main three, of which
| "Parents" is a significant one.
|
| > Historically, this has been a very challenging market to
| scale up well
|
| Yes! And for several different reasons. Labor costs, which
| you mention, can be a major one for products which offer
| highly individualized interaction. I agree that LLMs should
| be able to substantially disrupt existing tutoring type
| businesses. Another major challenge of parent-direct sales is
| that they aren't a well-aggregated market. Scaling sales
| there gets costly in average cost of new customer acquisition
| for new brands. It's basically a direct to consumer business,
| with all the well-known challenges that presents to fledgling
| starts. Of course, there are examples of companies that
| managed to do it, but as you say, it's risky.
|
| I agree with all the shortcomings you mention with existing
| tutoring and the potential of AI here seems obviously
| compelling. In fact, both the technologist and the passionate
| believer in learning inside of me are giddily enthusiastic
| about the vision you paint. However, as a serial tech startup
| entrepreneur who recently retired (somewhat) early after a
| multi-decade, multi-startup career that was (eventually)
| quite successful... I'm also, sadly, now too jaded and
| battle-hardened for my edu-idealistic enthusiasm for that
| vision to survive for long.
|
| Assuming you live in urban or suburban North America, to see
| what I mean, you need only take a trip to your local
| "learning center" franchise location between 3p-6p. Park
| yourself near enough to the entrance to observe the parents
| dropping off and picking up their middle and high-schoolers
| in waves at the top and bottom of every hour. You'll probably
| also find several parents waiting in their cars. Be bold and
| chat with few. Ask if they've considered or tried computer-
| based tutoring (either Zoom-style or automated). I think
| you'll find many have. Now ask what this tutoring center
| offers that's better enough to be worth the increased cost
| and hassle. If you're good at customer interviewing (and
| active listening), you may be surprised at what you learn.
|
| As the parent of a 9th grader who's recently paid for both
| learning centers and private tutors, I can tell you the
| thoughtful parents will share that an in-person human tutor
| offers a few key things an automated (whether AI or not) or
| even remote video tutor doesn't. For one, a local tutor,
| whether at a center or private, is probably deeply familiar
| with what the local school's curriculum is in the relevant
| subjects. While schools are all required to teach to state
| and federal guidelines, the texts used and the sequencing of
| the instruction and granular testing varies from district to
| district (and even school to school) more than you'd think.
| The tutors at our local center knew things down to the level
| of individual teachers at each of the two local high schools
| and they used this knowledge to customize the objectives week
| by week.
|
| If you're _not_ the parent of a 9th grader who 's falling
| behind in math, you may just think "The student can tell the
| AI what their current curriculum module is." If you ARE such
| a parent, you already know why that is an unreliable
| solution! For the rest of you, understand that there are two
| broad types of students getting tutoring. One is a highly-
| motivated self-learner who gets good grades and whose parents
| are paying more just to pile even more icing on that already
| well-iced cake. The other kind is more like my kid who,
| unfortunately, takes after Dad as far as school goes. A non-
| motivated, highly-distracted learner who is extremely bright
| and intellectually capable but simply does the bare minimum
| in school to get by. For us, the parents of this wonderful
| kid who shines so bright in every way except academics, the
| learning center offers something an AI can't, a real person
| whose presence enforces actual engagement. Another subtle yet
| even more important benefit is an environment full of peers
| who are all exhibiting that alien "learning behavior"
| together. For a teen struggling with even engaging in
| academics, this peer modeling is invaluable.
|
| So, yes. AI has the potential to be revolutionary for student
| tutoring - in concept. And it _will_ be revolutionary for
| _some_ students. Yet somehow, in practice, this amazing
| solution which _should_ simply replace human tutoring - won
| 't. And the edutech entrepreneurs on the front lines trying
| to figure out why will discover there lurks a subtly wicked
| complexity under this apparently highly-tractable problem.
| And these thorny barriers to adoption are all hidden behind
| human psychology and teen behavioral dynamics. Thus, my OP
| was really intended as a cautionary tale and warning to all
| startup entrepreneurs ready to set sail in uncharted edutech
| waters that "here be dragons!"
| zamfi wrote:
| Agree with everything you say here. I don't have a 9th
| grader (yet!) but I tutored for years. The interpersonal
| component of tutoring absolutely dominates over the content
| component.
|
| I think the "this time it's different" argument is grounded
| not in "better content delivery" or "cheaper than a person"
| --which I agree are 100% not winning strategies.
|
| Rather, the argument is some form of "so brilliantly
| delivered, so charmingly interpersonal, made so relevant to
| personal interests that even the most jaded, disinterested,
| burnt out 9th grader can't help but learn the material".
|
| We're not there yet, but even old-school automated tutors
| were fine at content and cheaper than a person. What modern
| AI brings is all the rest of what makes 1:1 tutoring great.
|
| That's what Karpathy et al should be building, IMHO!
| gnicholas wrote:
| I agree that knowledge of local schools/teachers is
| helpful. But this misses the forest for the trees. My point
| (as another commenter who asked about parents as a market
| elsewhere) is that this could upend the entire education
| system. Who cares what my local school teaches for biology,
| if what I really need is for my kid to learn bio and get a
| good score on the AP test?
|
| Furthermore, the fact that some people use in-person tutors
| doesn't mean that no one uses remote tutors. This
| absolutely happens. We live near Stanford, and there are
| tons of Stanford students who advertise their tutoring
| services on ND. These kids didn't go to local schools, and
| they don't know the local curriculum -- they're from all
| over. But parents pay to have smart students tutor their
| kids.
|
| I imagine that these parents would also pay to have an AI
| bot tutor their students if the results were good, the
| price were favorable, and the bot were (of course)
| available 24/7.
|
| BTW, I'm curious where you live that "education technology"
| is called "edutech". You mention having been in the field a
| long time, but I've never heard it called this (always
| "edtech"). Where have I not been that it has this alternate
| moniker?
| hadjian wrote:
| I agree, but I also hope for several revolutions in this space.
| Everything around educational offerings is horrible beyond
| compare:
|
| - Classroom learning doesn't cater to individuals
|
| - Corporate learning programs that I came across were 100%
| useless
|
| - Personal learning is unbelievably hard to organize
| (persistence, learning path, real world application...)
|
| I had basically five wonderful experiences:
|
| - Karpathy on YT ;-)
|
| - Dash and Dot from Wonder Workshop
|
| - Crafting Interpreters
|
| - Gilbert Strang
|
| Hope eureka labs becomes the sixth. Good luck Andrej!
| 91Jacob wrote:
| I think a lot of group courses/recorded courses don't
| work/lead people to give up because the context provided is
| not intuitive to everyone's mind and requires significant
| googling (or ChatGPT chats) for a concept to click before
| moving on.
|
| Having that ability to pause and clarify with for as long as
| needed (and have it dumbed down as much as needed) seems like
| a step in the right direction.
| hadjian wrote:
| Yes. I was really happy, when I discovered GPT3, because I
| could ask infinit ,,but why"s without being worried about
| annoying the tutor. Would be great, if the LLMs wouldn't be
| such push-overs. I'd like to hear more ,,you're wrong!".
| authorfly wrote:
| Excellent analysis. I know you are not in the domain of health
| care, but would you be able to give a similar analysis for
| health care tech? And likewise anybody else?
| mrandish wrote:
| Sorry, I've never done health tech. Based on my limited
| external observation, it appears to perhaps have three
| roughly similar types of buyers with health plans/hospitals
| subbing for K-12/Univ along with many of the same wicked
| complexities, such as slow sales cycles on the large
| institution side and high costs of customer acquisition on
| the direct-to-patient side (basically a consumer biz). Worse,
| I imagine the regulatory requirements get even more byzantine
| and opaque in healthcare than edu, so that's another reason I
| never considered going anywhere near healthcare tech as a
| startup entrepreneur.
|
| Yet some people make it work and my hat's off to them. They
| are far braver (or more foolhardy) than I!
| tangjurine wrote:
| It's hard but not impossible to sell to schools. I think at my
| company >75% aren't working on things that impact the student
| experience.
| Closi wrote:
| It depends if your model is to sell to schools, or if your
| model is to become schools.
| rkuska wrote:
| > So, I wish Andrej et al the best and I'm rooting for them but
| I'm not optimistic they'll build a high-growth, high-revenue
| sustainable edu business around AI as the primary value
| differentiation.
|
| I don't have an X account and as such might miss additional
| information from subsequent replies but there is nowhere in the
| post mention about building a high growth/high revenue
| business? Maybe Andrej just enjoy teaching and sharing
| knowledge and want to bring like minded, well off people
| together rather than creating an unicorn?
|
| Or do you mean by your post that it is not (or is very hard) to
| even reach non negative revenue to keep it sustainable on its
| own?
| swyx wrote:
| no, GP just assumes "high-growth, high-revenue" business is
| the goal, when in reality Andrej is probably worth 9 figures
| already and has a bigger mission than making "VC-level
| returns"
| mrandish wrote:
| I considered including an aside mentioning I think lifestyle-
| type edutech startups are entirely doable, especially for
| those who can survive long periods before meaningful revenue
| without outside investors beyond friends/family (which
| probably includes Andrej). I posted a related reply here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40987394
| karolist wrote:
| To me personally, this is the best comment I've read in my time
| on HN since 2011 or so. I am also building a learning platform
| as potential lifestyle business, having been a user of such
| platforms and worked in large corporate I fully understand that
| the groups you identify are absolutely true. One important
| point is that you can make successful business helping people
| prepare for the certificates without being the issuing party -
| not VC level, but still. This way you can cover some of the
| checkbox checkers and self-motivated learners at the same time.
|
| Self motivated learners who will be willing to pay you can also
| be groupped in a few groups - the ones seeking future
| employment in tech sector, looking to understand the technology
| better and showcase it on their resume with some projects that
| your platform will allow them to complete and ones doing this
| purely for fun or to keep up, I believe the latter group is
| very small.
|
| Platform alone, even with tons of learning materials will not
| be enough to get this off the ground, you will either need to
| leverage your existing audience, bringing us back to the fact
| that everything is an attention economy now, or, you'll need to
| be very advertisement heavy on YouTube, which you can
| bruteforce with VC investment, see skillshare for example.
| NordVPN took off the same bruteforce way, although in a
| different product category.
|
| My platform will combine technical learning with in-material
| challenges, sort of a sprinkled leetcode if you will. The idea
| to implement a LLM side-tutor also crossed my mind.
| mrandish wrote:
| I was thinking of mentioning that I believe a lifestyle
| business in edutech is totally doable but my post was getting
| pretty long. Assuming much more modest requirements for
| revenue and growth, I'm actually fairly bullish on this
| scenario. The one proviso is that, in my experience, you need
| to structure the new business to survive a (potentially) very
| long period before reaching break-even. K-12 sales cycles can
| be glacially slow to close full district deals. If you can
| structure your product and pricing model to also generate
| some faster (though smaller) revenue from individuals,
| parents, private schools and single-classroom teacher-
| directed funds this can help provide some partial life
| support during the long winter before your first harvest.
|
| Assuming you're able to (or maybe even enjoy) optimizing a
| business to operate for a few years on hand-to-mouth revenue
| and can get to product-market fit with few iterations then
| the AI buzz will make for an especially good entry window for
| new product offerings in edu. Most of your customers are
| already aware of AI and open to the possibility it may change
| things for the better. This should make getting classroom
| pilots easier.
|
| The final thing I'll share is something I'm sure you already
| know (but I'll mention for others). It's pretty rare for
| long-term, lifestyle-scale, edutech businesses to get "good"
| exits by normal tech startup standards. Think around 1x to 3x
| trailing twelve month revenues with the higher end of that
| range only for those having proven consistent multi-year
| profitability.
| siva7 wrote:
| > but I'm not optimistic they'll build a high-growth, high-
| revenue sustainable edu business around AI as the primary value
| differentiation.
|
| That's true for literally any business and nothing specific to
| edu.
| newsclues wrote:
| Let's view it's a different kind of investment, like an
| investment in a child. The return is a bright future for
| humanity when you educate.
|
| Having a scalable technology that can teach and reinforce
| learning for humans will change the world. The human potential
| of teachers will be freed and human intelligence could rise all
| minds.
| yobbo wrote:
| No, the potential for this is large. For, schools and
| universities just $10-$100 per student per semester is enough,
| and cheap in comparison to teachers when they can reduce
| teaching and lecturing hours.
|
| If it works. Nothing similar in "ed-tech" has actually offered
| value thus far.
| deepGem wrote:
| Their goal might not even be to build a high growth high
| revenue business. Sustainable yes. So perhaps low growth, low -
| med revenue and who knows potentially high revenue.
|
| If anyone else had done this, I'd be very skeptical but give
| Andrej's penchant for teaching and how good he is really at it,
| I am super excited about this endeavour.
|
| Let's not forget the inbound and organic interest this would
| drive. For the intro LLM Course, people are already submitting
| PRs and Andrej is requesting them not to. Imagine that!
|
| https://github.com/karpathy/LLM101n
|
| Update June 25. To clarify, the course will take some time to
| build. There is no specific timeline. Thank you for your
| interest but please do not submit Issues/PRs.
| mysterypie wrote:
| > _Schools, (K-12, Univ)_
|
| Didn't Apple make a great deal of their revenue in the early
| days (1976-1985) by selling to schools? I seem to recall that
| schools were their main focus. A $3000 Apple II in 1980 would
| be $12,000 in today's money, and schools often bought many
| units. Is Karpathy's product really that different from an
| Apple Computer in how it would be marketed to schools?
| ghaff wrote:
| There were certainly universities that were "Apple shops"
| fairly early on. Probably mostly at the tail end of your date
| range and beyond though. Here's the story at Dartmouth: https
| ://www.cs.cornell.edu/wya/AcademicComputing/text/macdar...
|
| In 1980, Dartmouth actually had pretty democratized access to
| computing but it was pretty much exclusively on the timeshare
| mainframe.
| pico303 wrote:
| Apple gave schools steep discounts, with the idea being that
| young people learning on Apple computers would have parents
| purchasing computers their kids were familiar with. Later,
| those kids would become adults purchasing the computers they
| grew up on.
| 747-8F wrote:
| .
| moh_maya wrote:
| I am the founder of an industrial edtech company, with some
| prior experience in the K12 space.
|
| Your analysis of the market structure and the challenges is
| consistent with my experience - I'd like to add 2 points
| though:
|
| 1. Building on what you've said about VC-level returns, while
| edtech (and industrial edtech) may not necessarily be fields
| where VC funded unicorns can actually form and then survive to
| profitability, I believe there is sufficient need and space for
| companies that are investable and can grow into profits /
| valuations in the 10s /100s of millions - they can follow the
| startup format, etc.; just not VC investable, as you've noted.
|
| 2. In the space of skill development (i.e., adults /
| professional learning), I would like to add that for many
| skills, as industries get more sophisticated (I am taking of
| manufacturing, automotive, energy, oil & gas, infrastructure,
| petrochemicals, infrastructure), there is value for the company
| in upskilling their staff - simply because that does directly
| convert to profitability if done well; and at least puts a
| floor on issues that poor or absent training may cause - like
| safety, quality, etc. So even if it is a cost, it is a cost
| that can directly affect their topline / bottomline, and I
| believe there is an opportunity here.
|
| /off soapbox
| DevX101 wrote:
| I think bootstrapped with a small team of under 10 people,
| Karpathy can get to revenue of $20M just from the developer
| market. That's a pretty great outcome if VCs aren't involved.
| theptip wrote:
| Very insightful breakdown, thanks.
|
| I do wonder if recent (Covid onwards) trends toward increased
| home schooling blurs the line between 1 and 3, or perhaps
| manifests a new segment that could be meaningful; homeschool
| pods seem to be quite outcome oriented and don't have any of
| the bureaucracy of schools. Also I assume for now they are non-
| material from a TAM perspective, but interested if you have any
| thoughts on that trend.
| rng_civ wrote:
| Prediction: the best AI teacher (or just teacher in general) will
| be the one that is able to emotionally read and guide/manipulate
| the student towards learning and self improvement.
|
| If such an AI teacher style becomes widespread, this means that
| they have the potential to replace the parental relationship (in
| the same manner AI girlfriend/boyfriends threaten romantic
| relationships).
|
| I see people talk about the dangers of the AI
| girlfriend/boyfriend, but not the dangers of introducing AI
| teachers to (especially young) kids. Nominal adults are already
| being affected by this (see Replika and company) and they are not
| even the "best".
|
| If I wear my cynical hat for a second, I'm willing to bet that
| this parental replacement is a certainty, as an extension of the
| "screen" parenting that already exists. But this time, it might
| actually be helpful for the child so it will be socially
| acceptable and encouraged.
| owenpalmer wrote:
| > the best AI teacher (or just teacher in general) will be the
| one that is able to emotionally read and guide/manipulate the
| student towards learning and self improvement
|
| Spot on. It would be interesting to see how one would train a
| model to do this
| tkgally wrote:
| I agree with that point, too.
|
| My guess is that current models are not yet able to provide
| consistent, effective motivation to learners over the long
| term. Like a lot of new educational technology, they might be
| fun and engaging in the short term but will lose their
| effectiveness as motivators once the shine has worn off.
|
| But the models might become better motivators as they become
| more multimodal, so that they are able to respond in real
| time to the student's tone of voice and facial expressions,
| and as they acquire longer context windows, so that they are
| able to adapt their interactions to what the student has done
| weeks or months earlier.
|
| The biggest issue, I think, is what the OP raises: Whether
| the bots will be able to--or allowed to--acquire sufficiently
| human-like personalities and indentities so that they can
| motivate learners as human parents, teachers, and mentors do
| --by making the learners want to please them, to be praised
| by them, to avoid angering them, to emulate them.
| corimaith wrote:
| We already have highly efficient "stand-alone" motivators,
| they're called video games. And for Educational video
| games, there's been attempts, some would say it's too
| difficult to integrate the two fields together, but looking
| at what's been attempted vs what's actually done in
| industry I can't say they've really tried that hard.
|
| The problem I would imagine is that the kind of people who
| go on to make an educational video game probably will lack
| the necessary creative or aesthetic chops to do it. And no
| game dev is going to be dreaming of building one either.
| But if one were to commission a veteran studio instead we
| might get better results.
| boplicity wrote:
| An app that makes my kid _feel good_ about doing math? Sign me
| up!
| forgotusername6 wrote:
| Feeling good about math might not be the most optimal way of
| learning. What if the algorithm learns that emotional
| blackmail is the best way of getting someone to learn?
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| Since my neighbouring comment
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40983181) brings up a
| good point which I also would have brought up, I want to give
| another point:
|
| At school, there existed some classmates who hated math as a
| school subject, but nevertheless loved my ramblings about
| mathematical topics (well, they were at least more
| interesting than some _other_ school subjects). Nevertheless,
| I guess my style of motivating people to like and do math
| would not be loved by parents: it it rather of the style
| "I'll explain you stuff about plant and process engineering
| so that you can build a weed farm that will be harder to
| detect by the police" for math, i.e. explain what subversive
| stuff you can do if you know math. I don't want to go into
| the details here.
|
| This is deeply motivating for particular kinds of kids (with
| punk traits) to become quite interested in mathematical
| topics, but of course many parents would hate it because my
| teaching methods for math turn the child into a bad citizen.
| ;-)
| glial wrote:
| I agree with your general point -- we should lean into
| kids' existing motivations rather than wring our hands that
| kids don't like to do rote practice. Doing anything else is
| a failing strategy, unless we devise _new_ motivational
| environments.
| rashidae wrote:
| If this project reaches its potential, it will revolutionize
| access to quality education by decentralizing and personalizing
| learning environments, allowing for self-paced and individualized
| experiences. I hope he has the multidimensionality of
| requirements needed, including capital, talent, business,
| economics, and more to pull it off! I believe in his vision! Go
| Karpathy!
| osigurdson wrote:
| I've always felt that (so far) ChatGPT is better at teaching than
| actually doing things.
| loveparade wrote:
| Yeah, because when it teaches you something you don't know you
| don't realize how many oversights it makes.
| osigurdson wrote:
| The alternative is hunting around on google for things. I
| don't think that is better.
| loveparade wrote:
| Not so sure about that. Because when you hunt around for
| things you know the source. If I watch a lecture by a math
| professor I can make a guess about the trustworthiness of
| the information. With an LLM, I can't.
| osigurdson wrote:
| I also have a brain that (I believe) has become fairly
| good at detecting when LLMs are hallucinating.
| terrycody wrote:
| No ad, but https://www.synthesis.com/tutor is already did a very
| good job I think, they merged AI deeply into their online
| interactives learning guides, very impressive, you can try their
| tutor class, computer 0 and 1.
|
| Btw, the founder also came out from Tesla, he helped Elon founded
| the school which taught kids from Telsa employee familys, I am
| wondering if they know each other lol, I think yes.
| victor9000 wrote:
| Using AI effectively requires having the subject knowledge to
| tell it where it's wrong, or if it has missed a critical part of
| the problem. My workflow involves making dozens of these
| corrections before I arrive at a workable answer. So how is a new
| student supposed to have the knowledge required to navigate this
| mess?
| langsoul-com wrote:
| Isn't this what khan academy is doing. Except they also have
| normal learning AND are non-profit, so no vc returns pressure?
| hoseja wrote:
| https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-1-ai-cant-teac...
| rldjbpin wrote:
| at the risk of discrediting the goodwill that his videos have
| been for the community, this comes across as an "interesting"
| development from a guy that has been behind the scenes of the
| recent development.
|
| imho ai-based education is, in its own way, as hard to truly
| achieve as self-driving cars. the mechanical aspects can be
| mimicked for both with the sota, but the ideal version requires
| something intangible (call it agi shit for all i care).
|
| i wish the hype and his reputation helps him get going for this
| long-term goal.
| parentheses wrote:
| What's most exciting to me is the amazing dev tools they may
| create..
| selectnull wrote:
| I clearly remember checking out Volume 1 of Feynman's Lectures on
| Physics from local library, more than 30 years ago. I've read
| that stuff like a novel, refusing to return the book for the
| whole semester and was willing the pay the fine, ignoring the
| requests of the librarian :)
|
| The idea that one could be taught physics by the virtual
| Feynman... oh my! There will be no better live person in the next
| hundred years, who could be better at the task than even fake
| Feynman.
|
| Yes, I'm fully aware that the tech is not there yet and there are
| miriad of both technical and social problems to be solved but the
| mere idea of it really excites me.
| instagraham wrote:
| I really really feel that every temptation to do a "cool idea +
| AI" play should have a good amount of consideration for whether
| it'll cut jobs.
|
| This can play out in two ways:
|
| - Teachers free up time/make time to give more personal tutoring
| to kids
|
| - Teachers do this but schools start hiring fewer of them in the
| expectation of doing more
|
| I don't think you will find anywhere on earth where teaching is a
| job with a great job market, perks or benefits. It's underpaid,
| underappreciated and understaffed.
|
| People wielding AI like a bulldog at a glass store should be more
| mindful of the socioeconomics. But I'm not gonna hold my breath
| for that.
| tempaccount420 wrote:
| That's the broken window fallacy. "Why fix the system if it
| provides jobs?" - so they can do more valuable jobs.
| Jakob wrote:
| As a counter point, I think Singapore is a good example of
| well-educated, appreciated and well-paid teachers in public and
| private schools. Even starting at kindergarten. Education is on
| a different importance level there both for the government and
| its citizens.
|
| I was surprised to see the relatively high salary in Luxemburg,
| Germany and Switzerland, too: https://read.oecd-
| ilibrary.org/education/education-at-a-glan...
| d--b wrote:
| Fast-food for education.
|
| In my opinion, the whole AI trend is another round of
| industrialization making low-quality options for the poor.
|
| - You're too poor for meat? Here is some hyper-processed, growth-
| hormoned burgers.
|
| - You're too poor for a proper house? Here's a shitty pre-fab
| with walls so thin you can smash through them with your bare
| fists.
|
| - You're too poor for fancy clothes? Here's a Bangladesh-
| sweatshopped T-shirt that won't make it past 3 washing cycles.
|
| - You're too poor for school? Here's a computer with an LLM on
| it.
|
| You could say that at least poor people have houses, steaks and
| education, but in the end, it's just a way of paying people less,
| cause they don't need much to send their kids to college
| anymore...
|
| In any case, you can be sure that Harvard kids won't get any of
| that crap.
| brap wrote:
| Is making things accessible bad?
| Moldoteck wrote:
| are things really made accessible? or you create worse things
| so that poor can think they have access to those things but
| in fact it's totally different with lots of features cut? I
| mean, some are catching like smartphone features, but having
| unreliable ai as educational source compared to a teacher...
| idk how this would pan out but who knows...
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| In many cases yes. Elitism is often good, and populism is
| often bad.
| weweersdfsd wrote:
| Based on my understanding, the cost-quality ratio of most
| higher education in the US isn't exactly great either. Students
| from poorer families taking massive student debt to study
| something that doesn't even get them much better income is not
| a good outcome, yet it's a reality for many.
|
| In addition to that, think in most fields there's an increasing
| need for education that is more flexible than multi-year
| degrees, simply because requirements for skills change so fast
| these days.
| jltsiren wrote:
| The American model of higher education focuses too much on
| teaching and too little on self-study. This makes the degrees
| more expensive and less useful. You need to hire more
| teachers if you want to cover every required topic in a
| class. And then the degree only signals that the graduate can
| learn complex things if properly supervised. It's less
| certain that the graduate can learn new things on their own,
| which future employers might want to know.
| yanis_t wrote:
| Pretty sure, LLMs even at current stage would be better
| teachers than at least 20% bottom shitty teachers out there.
| But I like your analogy! Please tell me where to get shirts
| that last longer then 3 washing cycles
| lkdfjlkdfjlg wrote:
| I'm in the UK. I buy the cheapest t-shirts in bulk from
| Primark. They're still going.
|
| I bought them about 7 years ago for 1 pound each. I think
| they're 2.5 pounds now.
| emporas wrote:
| Epic fail, right? Or are we getting gaslighted [1]?
|
| I see no reason that chemical molecules and their reactions
| cannot be transformed into music. Mathematics, programming,
| physics could turn into songs and registered to memory better
| than any other way. A.I. could help with that as an assistant.
|
| [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/harvard-chatbot-
| teacher-c...
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| Not every cheap product has to be low quality. In particular,
| lots of products are used by poor and rich alike.
|
| Everyone uses the same smartphones (the poor people use phones
| about as good as rich people used less than a decade ago),
| everyone drinks the same soft drinks, everyone takes the same
| cold medicine (the generic ones are pretty good), everyone uses
| the same social media, the same operating systems (even the
| richest Microsoft customers have to put up with their adware)
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Yes, but is there any evidence that this sort of thing would
| be anything but low quality? I'm friends with an unusual
| number of college professors. Every single one looks at
| announcements like this and tears their hair out. "If only I
| had a chat bot that could act as a TA when students have
| questions about my lectures" is so far down the list of
| things they'd like to have to solve problems.
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| > "If only I had a chat bot that could act as a TA when
| students have questions about my lectures" is so far down
| the list of things they'd like to have to solve problems
|
| I care about their problems a little bit, but I naturally
| care about the problems of the students a lot more. The
| point of colleges is to make it easier for the students to
| learn, not for the teachers to teach. The teachers are a
| means to an end.
|
| If colleges announce that they will use AI as TAs and the
| students tear their hair out, then I will worry.
| tonnydourado wrote:
| The idea of a chatbot pretending to be a famous scientist trying
| to help me understand physics made me vomit in my mouth a little
| bit.
| classified wrote:
| This is wrong on so many levels. It is either incredibly naive or
| unscrupulous, neither of which is a good recommendation.
| classified wrote:
| I'm starting to develop a gag reflex each time I read "AI" in a
| headline. After cryptocurrencies and NFTs this is the current
| attractor for the world's most idiotic ideas.
| sagebird wrote:
| Ai girlfriends are best positioned for tutoring success because
| they can motivate, withhold, etc.
|
| Parents- get your son an AI girlfriend with a strong degree.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| AI girlfriends are designed to hook the user by blowing
| sunshine up their ass, not challenge them. If the people using
| AI girlfriends wanted a challenge, they'd have real
| girlfriends.
| Satam wrote:
| Tell 'em!
| hprotagonist wrote:
| The _Diamond Age_ trajectory? A young lady's illustrated
| transformer primer, a paid upgrade tier to a remote worker
| instead of a llm for direct tutoring.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| So the vast body of working class users become a resource
| subordinate to the handful of aristocratic "protagonists?" I
| often think that _is_ the goal envisioned by the tech industry
| yes.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| yeah, i wasn't suggesting it wasn't dystopian...
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Almost all education (think math) is taught in a linear fashion,
| teachers teach in an order because they exist in linear time, and
| textbooks are organized front to back, but learning should be
| more like a DAG (a tree) of dependencies.
|
| We don't even need AI. I'd love to see something like Khan
| Academy mixed with space repetition and an DAG of knowledge
| dependencies. If you get a question wrong, the spaced repetition
| algorithm should present material about the underlying
| dependencies. Unfortunately, Khan Academy is focused on
| conforming to the linear paths (curriculums) that schools and
| universities have chosen.
| p1nkpineapple wrote:
| Coincidentally, you may be interested in this post from today
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954571
| EGreg wrote:
| We are doing that and much more at https://teaching.app
|
| Look at the ways we change teaching
| albrewer wrote:
| Very niche, but deal.ii, the most popular open source library
| for hand-rolling finite element method code, lays out its
| tutorial exactly like this
|
| https://www.dealii.org/developer/doxygen/deal.II/Tutorial.ht...
| hnben wrote:
| isn't learning (especially math) spaced Repetition per default?
|
| i.e. you learn about "addition". Then you repeat your knowledge
| of "addition" when you learn about "multiplication", because it
| is just "addition" but with extra steps.
|
| I think the more important a concept is, the more spaced
| Repetition you will experience. If you only repeat a piece of
| information very rarely, it may not be very essential, and you
| should consider dropping it from the curiculum.
|
| Also there are information, which only exist as stepping stones
| to understand more complex topics. And once you understand the
| more complex thing well enough, you can forget about some of
| the stepping stones. For example: I once learned a proof, that
| basically says that all computers can solve the same set of
| problem in roughly the same amount of time (within a linear
| factor). I forgot all the details about the proof, but in my
| every day life as a programmer it is important to know, that
| the benefit "better hardware" can only get more so far, and for
| really strong performance-gains, I need to improve my
| algorithms.
| saint_fiasco wrote:
| It should be, but if the teacher is teaching you
| multiplication and you are struggling because you haven't
| reviewed addition in a while, the teacher will probably just
| yell at you.
|
| Only the most dedicated of teachers will review addition with
| you yet again before moving on with multiplication lessons.
| After all, there are dozens of kids in the class, they can't
| all delay the lesson just for your sake.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Kind of, but students can develop mental crutches and hobble
| along while missing some underlying concepts. I know I never
| mastered factoring a polynomial in algebra and managed to get
| through calculus and statistics and computer science, etc.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Makes sense. Picks and shovels . Great branding. It'll be hugely
| successful.
| walledstance wrote:
| Anecdotal, yet lived experience collected from 150+ people across
| my district and state while at different training and seminar
| events. I am a teacher with 10 years in elementary, middle school
| and college classrooms. I have teacher friends from across the
| district and state I live in who resonate these ideas displayed
| below. 1. Behavior is a major obstacle for any classroom 2. More
| Tech and AI tools than I could want 3. Education is controlled by
| the wider community and home environments
|
| 1. Behavior:
|
| From my experiences and in speaking to others, teaching any
| subject varies not because of the material, but the behavior.
| When behavior is a problem no teaching, no matter who or what is
| doing it will get done. Behaviors can range from sleeping in
| class because dad made you work at his out of home construction
| company till 2 or 3 am to get a project complete, or it could be
| your mom is tired of you going to school and instead wants you to
| "go hit up them streets because that's where the real motion
| (money) at." These two might sound like isolated cases, but they
| aren't. There are many kids who live out of cars, sell themselves
| to get buy and other atrocious life circumstances. Learning
| usually can't happen when you're preoccupied with keeping
| yourself alive or afloat. Combining AI into the educational
| landscape can't and won't fix this disinterest in learning. You
| will have to fix home life first. The problems arise because
| behaviors, in the classroom, work on a spectrum. They are better
| some days and others not at all. This is because behavior follows
| home life. It is usually modeled from home and then is acted out
| away from home. When Nathan (name changed) see his brother and
| brothers friends carrying around guns, drugs, insert something
| other activity not safe for most students, he will naturally
| mirror the act. When these behaviors present in class, a good
| teacher can maneuver a class back into an educational focus. But
| being a good teacher requires many exhausting abilities such as
| knowing the current generations lingo, figuring out who is a
| natural leader in class, who are the other kids afraid of or
| respect, knowing their material and presenting it to the students
| in a way that fits their life circumstances. Being good at
| teaching is a multi-headed venture across multiple disciplines.
| This makes managing behaviors in class a challenging and
| exhaustive time sink, which tends to be the main issue with
| teaching being interrupted or difficult in a class. One child
| from a difficult place can make learning a challenge for a class
| full of goody-two-shoes. Teachers are unnecessarily pulled away
| because we have no other recourse but to handle and teach
| children who need more support than what can be offered in a
| class. Behavior is one of the main issues that many people
| overlook.
|
| 2. More Tech and AI tools than I could want:
|
| When I sign into my Microsoft portal I am presented with more 3rd
| party teaching tools than I could ever want. I use none of them
| because they are yet another tool to learn and be trained on,
| they help mostly in presenting educational material, but have
| nothing to do with the flow and behavior management of class,
| they have their own technical problems that I don't have time to
| deal with because behind my back Timothy has begun passing his
| shoe around the room for others to sniff, and the applications
| are gamified learning that trivializes or simplifies the
| educational materials. There are many more reasons I and most of
| the teachers I know and have met don't use these systems. Work
| with teachers to learn how much teaching environments vary and
| how we can implement tech tools into that classroom in a way that
| prioritizes education. But know many teacher's priorities will
| not be for VC attention, but because we want to educate student
| into society. Listening to us gives you the opportunity to hear
| and see what educating people is actually like rather than the
| inert surveys and data points collected on students that are
| disconnected from their lives experiences. Listening to the
| people with boots on the classroom means possibly making a system
| that actually does something for classes than just become another
| novelty the principal and the district can feel good about.
|
| 3. Education is controlled by the wider community and home
| environments:
|
| Diane Ravitch, a leading thinker in the education realm, writes
| about all the changes she has been a part of and seen occur. In
| the end, her response to these failed reforms in school is that
| much of what happens in communities controls what occurs in
| schools. If you have a society that is splintered into social
| groups then that will typically be reflected in the classroom.
| First we must adjust society standards which will then alleviate
| the malignant issues in our schools. But as many teachers have
| said to principles and school officials, "Hey, what do I know,
| I'm just a teacher."
| carapace wrote:
| Let me see if I can put into words the objections I have to "AI
| in education"
|
| First of all, what is "AI"? I mean that in a literal operational
| sense: can you even explain the math and machinery that you're
| talking about? Because if you cannot, then you are advocating
| strapping children into Black Boxes (containing that rugby
| mascot!) that you don't even understand what they are, and that
| means you're nuts and should not be allowed anywhere near
| children.
|
| Obviously, with Andrej Karpathy that's not the problem, but
| assuming that a person actually knows WTF they are even talking
| about with "AI", "AI in education" is still a bad idea.
|
| First and foremost, consider the question of what even is a human
| being? And consider it in light of the contrast between us and
| our nearest living relatives the chimpanzees. What makes humans
| different than apes?
|
| Well, it's thought and language and higher reasoning, and self-
| awareness, eh?
|
| We do not fully understand how human brains do this, make these
| phenomenon happen. We do know that the process of becoming a
| human being is partially automatic (e.g. learning language) and
| partially the result of deliberate self-work.
|
| The thesis of the "AI in education" people seems to be that this
| yet-mysterious process can and should be turned over to automatic
| machines, typically for economic (rather than social or
| philosophical) reasons.
|
| Children taught by machine will think like that machine, to the
| extent that they think at all.
|
| Metaphorically, it is as if these folks want to strap children
| into wheelchairs on the theory that that will make them better
| runners.
|
| This brings me to the second objection: use it or lose it. If we
| rely on external devices to do our thinking for us our brains
| turn to jelly. It started with the written word, as noted by
| what's-his-name a couple thousand years ago, turning the faculty
| of memory into the mere faculty of recall. (If you don't know the
| difference between memory and recall you are doubtless the victim
| of just such a degenerate "education" system as these folk are
| proposing to intensify with automation.)
|
| It's not difficult to learn to use your brain well. Unfortunately
| the knowledge of _how_ to do this is still not recognized by
| mainstream conventional education systems. E.g.: you don 't need
| memory aids if you just use self-hypnosis and mnemonics to "just
| remember". You don't need to learn to spell, you just need to
| learn the correct spelling strategy and then your brain spells
| for you, correctly, every time (you can even spell things
| backwards without any effort.)
|
| There is a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of ways to make
| education better, but automation is completely useless for it,
| because things that can be automated are not important _human_
| activities. Just as it 's pointless to make a robot jog for you
| or eat for you it is pointless to make a robot think for you.
|
| To sum up:
|
| 1) Becoming human is something only other humans can help you do.
| Machines can't make you human, they can only _train_ you.
|
| 2) Using artificial aids rather than one's own natural faculties
| is regressive. (It's like using a wheelchair when you legs work
| fine.)
|
| "AI in education" is oxymoronic, pernicious, and even dangerous.
| People who want to strap children into mysterious black boxes
| should be kept away from them (the children, not the black
| boxes.)
| kleiba wrote:
| At least in the country where I currently live, almost nothing is
| as highly regulated as the field of education. Also, teachers
| have a _very_ lobby.
|
| To get an AI-based program adopted would be an uphill battle
| against all forces. Almost Herculian, I would argue, and almost
| guaranteed to not be worth it.
| aayushjaiswal07 wrote:
| Learning depends a lot on self-commitment and the time you
| invest.
|
| Great teachers know how to motivate students and keep them
| excited, which is crucial because many people give up during
| tough times.
|
| But doing that at scale wasn't possible - until now.
|
| Self-learning platforms had low completion rates, and cohort-
| based courses (CBCs) were seen as the future during COVID. But it
| turns out drop-offs are similar in CBCs since everyone learns at
| a different pace.
|
| If we can learn from AI versions of the best teachers, it would
| be a game-changer. We could see massive improvements based on
| outcomes.
|
| This is the closest we've ever been to matching the results
| universities can predictably produce. It'll be interesting to see
| if this works.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I am comparing this, to some extent, with Coursera. Coursera
| scales: a friend and his previous PhD advisor would get 40K
| learners on Coursera.
|
| Karpathy's company scales in a different way because students can
| get an individualized learning experience. If the product is
| excellent they might get a hundred million customers if the price
| is low enough.
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