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by sanderjd 1088 days ago
It's just another useful tool, just like books, the internet, and real teachers are useful tools. They all have their pros and cons. The advantage of chat bots is that they're always there and scale to an arbitrarily large number of students. The advantage of teachers is that they're, well, people.
1 comments

I'm not sure they scale so well. They probably need so many GPUs that teachers are more efficient.
That seems very unlikely to me. Certainly LLMs are very compute intensive relative to past applications, but I would find it shocking if they are not nonetheless far more scalable than human labor.
It's easier to make a teacher than to make a GPU though.
Again, no it isn't, what are you talking about?

Human beings are incredibly incredibly expensive to "make" into any useful adult thing. I have spent more money just this week just on a single one of the humans who are dependent on me than it would cost me to buy a fully packaged GPU in a box at best buy (and I think that box would actually have multiple GPUs packaged together in it). And I'll do that week after week for many more years. And then it will still be like four more years after that before they're capable of being a teacher.

It was harder to make the first GPU than to make one marginal unit of human teacher, but it's vastly easier to make a marginal unit of GPU.

I'm honestly curious what your mental model is, where you seem to think human labor is cheaper than computer hardware...