| This has fabulous potential if implemented right. To all the detractors, I would like to point out that your opinion of kids needing a good human teacher is overfit to your experience of having had some of those growing up. In third world countries like mine, we grow up with absolutely unqualified teachers who were unable to muster anything but a learnt-by-rote understanding of key concepts. In hindsight these were just desperate adults trying to eek a living for themselves and their family in an impoverished country and resorting to any means by which to do it: gaming the school system or calling in favours to join school faculty. I bear them no ill will. But we as kids were much worse off for it. I can assure you that no matter what concerns you may have about hallucinations in LLMs, I can bet everything I have that a reasonably modern model (and I'm thinking in the range of gemini-flash, not Fable) in a well designed harness geared towards tutoring would handily and repeatedly outperform every single teacher I had all throughout my schooling. Don't let a quest for the perfect ruin what is likely already way better than status quo. |
What can we do to help them? Better teacher training? Better new teachers? Better new teacher colleges? Consider the latencies. A decade cohort is 1+ B kids.
So refining intervention safety and efficacy is nice. Especially for development problems. Less so for an acute humanitarian disaster. For maximizing the golden hour in crisis mass-casualty triage. In some literate and numerate sense, most of this last decade's 1+ B kids did not survive our collective care.