We're smart, lets figure out how to create the same impact on general education.
Could we wire up ChatGPT so it asks us questions and leads the conversation instead of us? Could we also make it present the questions in ways that make educational youtube channels like Kurzgesagt so easy to engage with?
We could start with private tutoring. LLMs tailored to educate kids of rich parents. Easy market fit as they're already looking for private tutoring. We prove out the need then quickly move onto schools.
Imagine if we could show that engaging with an LLM for an hour produces as much learning as sitting in class for 4. Could we cut school days in half, set LLM interaction as homework for an hour (teachers would get reports from the LLM on how the child is doing)?
I agree that I didn't have trouble interrogating a subject until it clicked before if I was sufficiently motivated. However ChatGPT reduced the time needed a lot, and thus motivated me to take on more learning than otherwise.
Of course, I take "facts" it outputs with a pinch of salt until I double check things with my own research, but it's great at uncovering unknown unknowns and is like an infinitely patient tutor that will let me throw analogies at it to test if my understanding is correct or needs adjustment.
Regular chatGPT is even more dangerous because you have no idea what it's referencing most of the time. Yet it lowers the bar to this poor information to such a degree that people will be incentivised to use it regardless.
The problem then I think is that this means that students will have to prompt "on rails" to get reliable answers. The most curious students who want to stretch their knowledge are likely to cause it to generate falsehoods which are presented confidently and convincingly.
I suspect we'll soon figure out an effective way for LLMs to look-up reliable references to confirm their answers, which should improve the situation drastically. As they are now most LLMs are very barebones. An educational LLM could e.g. connect to the university textbook library and use that to verify its answers.
I think this is probably a technically solvable problem but doing so has potential 'optics'/marketing issues in terms of reducing the level of confidence it projects which a lot of people associate with competence.
More likely we'll replace poor people's teachers with ChatGPT and whoever has more cash affords actual teachers. This is so real that we're experiencing this >today<, in a different scale with private schools and distance learning in countries such as Brasil where there are projects to reduce schools and/or move some of them to use distance learning.
To this day I find myself doing a double take every time I'm about to ask ChatGPT to produce a ludicrous amount of output, because it would simply not be reasonable to ask that of some random person. But with LLMs you can do that, over and over again and it will comply every time.
How great is it that if I want to learn about, say, hexagonal architecture pattern, I can ask this thing to produce 500 LOC in a language I happen to be familiar with, and then interrogate it to no end until it clicks for me?