| So, scientific calculators - made tasks easy that were a necessary prerequisite for advanced math (basic arithmetic), but not what the lesson was supposed to be about - could in theory also let students skip over what they were supposed to be learning (applying the correct operations in the correct order to solve a problem) but doing so would require programming or getting a program from someone else, which the teachers probably figured was a high-enough hurdle to accept the risk Hence, scientific calculators helped teachers by removing unnecessary friction. Meanwhile, current LLMs - will happily attempt to do the student's entire homework for them - cannot reliably be restricted in functionality to leave the part the students are supposed to do themselves to the student Hence, LLMs undermine teachers by removing necessary effort. Sure, in theory LLMs could enable even more focused lessons by removing even bigger unnecessary frictions (e.g. in history class, have a LLM scour a large collection of primary sources to exhaustively list passages mentioning a certain topic), but students cannot be trusted to use them this way. Hence, teachers are trying to use all kinds of tricks to ensure that what they wanted to teach actually passed through the student's brain at some point. |
Small local LLMs are essentially that. If an LLM can tell you to eat rocks as a tasty snack or use glue to make the cheese stick to your pizza, imagine what it says when you ask it to analyze/explain complex academic subjects, or solve fiddly problems. But it will still reliably help you polish your language, like a subject-specific dictionary/thesaurus.