Children look to adults as role models for what to learn and why. We already know that children respond better to role models who have similar ethnicities and backgrounds to them, let alone being the same species.

AI cannot and will never be able to provide this motivation to learn, which is what kids actually need, because it is not human.

We hear all the time about digital addiction, gamification, FB, Tiktok, etc. Addiction is arguably more difficult to achieve than motivation. AI will be able to motivate people just fine

I am about a month away from finishing my teaching degree (math). My experience so far AND the best research is extremely clear on the following:

Kids learn best by working in small groups with other kids.

These groups need to be gently guided by adults, but they should mostly be left to do a lot of independent exploration and discussion amongst themselves. The teacher is there to prod discussion in productive directions, provide feedback, answer questions, give hints and encouragement where needed. Admittedly, AI could do certain part of the teachers job, but it can never replace a peer group.

It was bad enough when the text was wrong because of shoddy editing.

My parents spent almost nothing on my education, just a couple of $ per year to buy a notebook or two. I used the same pens for almost ten years. I participated in zero sports, had zero tutors... I did ok but I had peers with even less resources and not all of them did good.

The clothes were fine: good condition, clean, etc. Just old from the perspective of kids who didn't understand they came from money or that their parents were bad with money and headed toward disaster.

/u/raisedbyninjas was hopefully kinder than those kids even though it sounds like they were in the same cohort by how small $20/month sounds to them.

Elite parents (read: the ones with discretionary money for schooling) do not see education in this way. They see it as an endless arms race to optimize every possible advantage they can for their child. From the moment the child was born, everything about their life was structured to optimize future earnings, which requires admission to an elite school, which requires exceptional learning tools.

Students don't want to pay for Google but every student still uses it.

Some students will want to waste time if given access to more tools like AI agents, but the motivated ones will use it to their advantage. Even if it's wrong sometimes, it's right a lot, perfect for rubber ducking, and almost always gives answers that are at least interesting or point you in a useful direction.

As for "GPT-4" fabricating things, I remember in school how I wrote essays and was given A's despite citing NYT and Wikipedia. Fabrications exist all over the place. If anything, hallucinations might give more examples as to how to be skeptical of any source and look for direct sources as much as possible.

In college I went to office hours and there was 30 minute line to talk to the TAs. AI agents respond instantly. These things are going to overall transform education for the better.

"Actually it's good that AI sucks because it will teach people to be more skeptical" is not a very compelling argument.

At least you wrote it by yourself? Copy-paste from GPT-4 removes the whole thinking process and need for basic skills. It is extremely difficult to prove that someone just copied the text without doing any own work. If it is difficult to detect and punish, then certainly almost everyone will do that, if they get an advantage.

What is the future of proving that I know something myself?

Right now, education focuses on getting people through the system so they can attain a credential. It teaches us, primarily, how to get one over on the system, how to look for loopholes and shortcuts. It creates a culture of corruption, of looking for approval from institutions in order to move up in life.

What does a world where anyone can learn anything they like for free very easily look like? Well undoubtedly it looks like a place where a lot of people don't learn much, because they have no interest in learning. But it also looks like a place where people who are interested in learning can and do learn endlessly if they like, the opportunity for anyone to get educated to a degree reserved for elites that most of us could only dream of even two decades ago is upon us. Writing the paper won't be about proving you wrote the paper to some authority figure, because it's no longer proof that you wrote it. Writing the paper will become about helping yourself understand something you want to understand.

So to your question, what is the future of proving that I know something, the future is you can't prove you know something, there's nobody to prove it to and you know things because you want to know things, because you recognize the value on knowing them beyond "this piece of paper qualifies me for a job." The future is the truth that we have been pretending isn't true for a century: that no matter what you try to do, those that want to learn will learn and those that don't won't, and their lives will be what they are on their own merit and of their own volition.

If you want to call yourself educated, the only person you need to be proving that to is yourself. We have entered a world of information post scarcity, which necessarily comes with post scarcity of noise, distraction and disinformation. The competition to understand things and the benefit that comes with understanding things will get stiffer, but access to that competition will become egalitarian. There will be a great divide among people: those that follow the noise of the day and those that continue to learn freely of their own volition.

That feels like a very uni-dimensional view

What is the point of knowing something yourself?

This is just a reheated version of the argument against literacy by Socrates:

>You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing.

Many of us are frequently using it to obtain answers requiring domain knowledge; the evidence that this works is that the answers it gives are often found to be correct, and yet things we did not know. So your description is simply contradicting the experience of many people. Perhaps you're using it in a different domain, or not writing clear prompts, but it's well worth experiencing what people are talking about.

Now imagine you're a kid who's still learning reading comprehension and hasn't yet developed a functional BS detector. You're not going to have much of an ability to separate truth from fiction, but you're likely going to trust this thing that sounds authoritative.

But that's OK. A teacher's knowledge doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be better than the student's.

If ChatGPT explains Chinese history in a way that is 80% accurate, to a student whose understanding of Chinese history is 10% accurate, the student will walk away with a better understanding of Chinese history.

ChatGPT makes mistakes literally every time I use it (in a domain that I'm knowledgable in). How is that the same thing? Being given incorrect information is worse than not having the knowledge at all IMO.

GPT-4o (the best current model) is now becoming available to free, registered users now. What do you think of it?

Unless your domain is very specialized, I think GPT-4T, GPT-4o, and Claude 3 Opus for example are quite good.

A different architecture or an additional component might be needed for them to generalize better for out-of-training-distribution questions.

At this point, ChatGPT is good enough that I can tell what authoritative source I should go look at for the answer, which is great, but I’m not going to believe any statements it makes without checking. I think people suffer a bit of Gell-Mann amnesia when dealing with ChatGPT.

I actually do get a lot of value from ChatGPT as a self-motivated learner with a specific goal in mind, but that’s not the scenario we’re talking about.

I know college kids are using edtech, but they don’t like it much. And there was one-time purchasing during the quarantine.

And obviously Khan academy must be doing okay.

Most school wifi isn't that bad anymore - the bigger problem for us is web filters that break things in interesting ways.

I'd be way more excited about getting 6 of my students to start reading and understanding textbooks than getting all 60 to pass. OTOH, my bosses would be pretty pissed...

Khanmigo doesn't have to be as good as a teacher to provide an advantage to the student.

Citation required as this is heavily dependent upon the purpose of the home schooling and the resources of the parents.

Anecdata: My cousin was not doing well in 4th grade. So, they pulled her out and her grandmother taught her for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, every single day.

By the time she came back to school in 5th grade she was doing extremely well and hyper motivated to never go through that experience again. :)

She was, however, the exception, not the rule. So much so that a lot of teachers complimented her and her family on the outcome. Her family had no agenda other than "fix her education". Most homeschoolers do not bring to bear that amount of resource and attention, and they have quite a bit poorer results.

AI is better funded than probably 99.9% of teachers, so ...

Ahem. Go sit in a class sometime before spouting that kind of unsubstantiated claptrap.

Like anything with a distribution, some teachers are subpar. However, 90+% of teachers are trying very hard. They have too many students. They have too few resources. Many of them are fight against bad home lives of the students. And, through it all, they have a bunch of bureaucrats promulgating the latest and greatest bullshit that never works.

We know what works. Small classes (<15 students) with two teachers. This has been documented over and over and over. Nobody wants to pay for it.

If anyone doubts this, just take a look at what Khan Academy currently offers for a fresh perspective. Make an account and click around (https://www.khanacademy.org/signup); it should be easy to see that a ton of effort went into making this and, as far as I can tell, they run purely on donations. I wouldn't be surprised if the current cost of operating Khanmigo is just being passed along by Khan Academy at no markup, or even a slight loss.

For parents who want to use it with their children, $4/month (for your entire family!) is very small compared to anything out there that you want to use to supplement your kids education (other than Khan Academy itself, which is free). Is it affordable to poor families in Bangladesh? No, but the barrier to sponsorship is low: "for $50K a year you could sponsor it for 1000 families in Bangladesh" is not a difficult sell.

Also, I expect Sal to raise funding to give it for free to those who can't afford it (just as he did with Khan Academy). At least it's not some VC-backed venture that we know is going to be look for a 10~100x return, so we can be thankful for that.

https://www.khanmigo.ai/pricing

Yes, teachers can use it with students if they pay for it. One day it might be free for students, but it presently is not. Which is what I was pointing out to the person I originally replied to. This discussion is about Khanmigo, a subset of what Khan Academy provides, and it is not free for students (though, yes, that cost is not exorbitant). But it does make it difficult to claim that Khan Academy is free when the specific feature being discussed is not.

First, clearly you had a crappy experience. And that sucks. There are probably many others with bad stories as well. I'm deeply involved with my kids education and can only imagine how much that sucked.

Second, we can't solve everything at once. Hungry kids, bad parenting, all that will take time, and may never be resolved. I wish it could be, but honestly, it will take time - probably a long, long time.

Third, he's building for the future. Richer schools (both private and public) will get this first, typical schools will get it next, and poor schools (both administratively poor and monetarily poor) will get it eventually. This is where that great quote applies - "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" - and boy will it apply to education. So much so that some parents will feel like they are left in the stone age by comparison.

Fourth, an anecdote. I do volunteer work for an education-related non profit. I learned during covid that HISD (Houston school district) couldn't easily move to online learning because 30% of their students did not have internet access at home. Thirty percent!!! I was blown away. Still am. But it's gotten much better, and we've evolved. Does it still suck? Yes, undoubtedly (HISD was taken over by the state, if that tells you how big their problems are). So I know this will not be evenly distributed because of this experience.

Bonds take a one-time cost and turn it into a recurring cost (like a subscription) that is paid in installments over time. It's baffling that that it's easier to do that than just having a subscription in the first place.

I see this as Khan Academy x10. It'll be a great tool for those for whom Khan Academy itself was a good tool. If it's free (or for a nominal free), then parents will use it at home with their kids as a supplement to school. Teachers might use it on a case by case basis with students who want to accelerate or who are behind. It will highly accelerate learning for those who want to and are able to learn. The problems you describe, which are very real and important, are social problems, not educational problems per se or problems solved with technology.

You misunderstand the buyers in this market. In my town, I'm in a good sized minority spending up on this stuff, despite being otherwise careful with money.

Then they start by asking "What is this" and just keep asking questions.

Teachers seriously underestimate how much damage they do to students ability to learn by sneering at questions that they think should be obvious.

Let’s say you want to purchase a math tutoring platform. The cost is $30 per student per year. CA schools get about $5 per student per year in lottery funds to purchase instructional materials (shared across all materials). General fund is pretty much all spent on staff/teachers or facilities. One time covid funds are running out. Schools can purchase textbooks at ~$100 per unit and use them for years without subscriptions.

In short, there is no money in public education for these tools.

These platforms look great, but the price is prohibitive. Maybe some basic aid district could pick them up, but those are usually small (I.e., it won’t keep a start up in business).

Note. This is an observation from California. Other states might find education better.

Smartboards and 3d printers etc. got popular because they came from a DIFFERENT budget - these were capital expenses.

My personal experience (ed-tech reaching ~15% of school districts) is that it is impossible to sell a solution to a district _without_ support of the teaching and learning team - i.e. teachers. And if you do, it’s impossible to get a renewal.

Lastly, 9 out of 10 startups fail. It’s not just ed-tech.

There is no money in EdTech for pupils. Better go for continuing education for adults. There potentially is money.

There is, but you usually have to rely on the gov't being the buyer, and not regular customers. I worked for a EdTech startup (catered to universities) so all our contracts were multi-year affairs paid basically by the government with the unis as an intermediary.

But also keep in mind that the people even getting involved in EdTech generally don't do it for the money, as is the case with Khan. The money my old company was making was pretty crazy, but basically all of it went to various funds and charities and what-not relating to education, because the CEO didn't care about making a buck and likewise with anyone working there.

I wholeheartedly agree with your points about AI though, outside of generating generic quiz questions and stuff like that I think it's a massive net negative on the entire educational system, though I suppose the cat is out of the bag now.

To me this post shares a future where kids coming from good households will have the ability to learn more efficiently than before. It is not to replace the teacher but perhaps it will replace the tutor.

Lastly, I am not sure why but I genuinely believe that folks focus too much on "hallucinations" and "fabrications" by LLM. Does it happen, yes but I think its one of those things you can actually tune for and it get down to low to no errors in a walled environment. It is definitely something to consider but not a blocker.