[jkeddo]

I think that the first revolution to come from LLMs will be in education. Tutoring is a HUGE industry that creates massive achievement gaps between haves and have-nots. China went as far as banning tutoring because desperate parents would bankrupt themselves trying to give their kids a leg up. To be sure: GPT-3 makes mistakes. It struggles with leading questions, perfect/correct code, sparsely trained subject areas. But when it comes to trying to help give intuitions to a high school chemistry student, the stakes are low and the training data is good enough.

Imagine a world where every child alive had access to unlimited 24/7 pseudo tutoring offered by robots who were almost as smart/correct as actual tutors? How many millions students just "give up" every day because while they can find thousands of pages of facts/guides/lessons about a subject, there are zero results that are custom tailored to their exact gap in understanding? As a student,

-->Google can give you endless facts about a subject that you can ram your head against until a subject makes sense.

-->Chat-GPT can give you intuitions and explain the exact part that confused you with as much detail/complexity as you want!

You wouldn't even need to call it AI or a tutor (so students don't wrongly give 100% trust). It could be a peer. You could call it "My Study Group's Best Guess". How much further could students get in high school with a 24/7 tutor beside them?

~~"Hi study group, I don't understand how my teacher jumps between steps 3 and 4 for this proof in Geometry class. Can you explain it in simple terms?"

~~"Hi study group, why did my flask turn blue when I did xyz in chemistry class? Everyone else had theirs turn pink."

~~"Hi study group, I wrote "cosin - sin = co" on my math test but my teacher put a big x on my problem without telling me why."

~~"Hi study group, why is the x "number of cars" on this homework problem XYZ"

Millions of students give up trying to understand challenging subjects every day. LLMs can dramatically lower the difficulty of absorbing new ideas. In 10 years, LLMs can likely raise SAT/ACT scores 20-30% equivalent and help more students finish the key math/science prerequisites for STEM careers in high school instead of college, lowering the barrier of entry for everybody!

[RupertEisenhart]

This. This is what I use it for most often at the moment (helping out my rusty physics). Its super helpful. If I was 20 again, teaching myself maths on Khan Academy, with this grade of chatbot in the corner ready to help out? Heaven.

[Valakas_]

This comment sounds like when electricity was just discovered and people would discuss how it could improve the speed of windmills.

We have to think broader and get out of the confines of how things work now and just think that technology only makes what we have now better. Some technology just completely changes the landscape.

LLMs will make education as we know it obsolete. There won't be need for tutoring if LLM is good enough to do anything. Anyone can ask anything on the fly. There won't be need to study anything except for fun.

[lowbloodsugar]

A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.

[danielodievich]

The Primer is a cool computer full of rod logic but note that Nell's tutor is Miranda, a human.

[lowbloodsugar]

One of the plot-lines is getting the Primer mass produced for the seven float orphanages. The Primer is designed to react to its owner's environment and teach them what they need to know to survive and develop. It can do so by using human actors (in the theatrical sense), but it is not the case that a human is the tutor using the Primer like an encyclopedia, as your post seems to suggest.

[citruscomputing]

Exactly. For anyone interested in this idea, definitely go read "The Diamond Age."

[bo1024]

That would be fantastic, but I think it’s very far away. Right now LLMs are far too dumb and unreliable to be useful as tutors. Ironically, they’re only useful in domains you already know very well, because then you can detect BS.

[davidblowie]

Ya people on this forum are a small subset of the population that know how to interpret ChatGPT. The general public, let alone kids, will have a hard time distinguishing fact from linguistic hallucination.

[singularity2001]

young students still have the tendency to remember things their tutor said as hard facts. couple this with confidently wrong chatgbot ... this issue needs to be fixed first

[ben_w]

If the AI never made mistakes in a certain subject, schooling in that subject would be obsolete.