I am a high school dropout and who learned math using Khan Academy after never having completed more than pre-algebra in middle school.
Sal Khan’s work changed my life and allowed me to build a foundation in not only math, but also finance and economics, that allowed me to feel confident enough to go to college. I did not have a support system or people in my life who could teach me these things, but I had the internet and patience, which meant I had opportunities that did not exist even a few years before (this was in 2014).
Now I work in AI and generally have a life I could not have dreamed of. Every time I go to the grocery store to buy something and don’t have to worry about my card being declined, it feels like magic. Even years later.
If I had been in that situation a few years earlier, my life would be very different.
I’m excited to live in a world where my daughters and countless others will have a tutor that can help them maximize their potential throughout their lives. I’m excited not only for them, but for society. What a time to be alive.
> Every time I go to the grocery store to buy something and don’t have to worry about my card being declined, it feels like magic. Even years later.
100% with you here! Grew up in poverty, fought for myself and clawed my way out into a wonderful career as a software engineer.
This one still hits every time, even for me, over a decade later.
The other one for me is petty cash. I looked in my wallet the other day and I had $100 in it. That is still wild to me to walk around with $100 dollars without even really consciously realizing its there. I use to rush to put all unused cash into my bank account to make sure my balance was always as high as it could be just in case. Went through a can collection phase too. Sometimes it was the only way I'd eat.
Here's to better life circumstances! And may it continue for us from here on out.
It wasn't that ago when I has figured out how to mix/max overdraft checking because I was so damn broke. I'd over draw my account by $980, the overdraft fee was $20, and my account would be -$1000. Then 29 days later, I'd get a cash advance on my credit card, pay bring the checking account up to $0, and then make a payment to the credit card company for $980. I was slowly digging myself deeper into a hole just so I could hang onto having a bank account.
Removing this anxiety was one of the most unexpectedly powerful changes in my life. And then in a moment of hubris I signed up for an American Express card and now have to relive it every time because a good portion of vendors in the UK don’t take it.
Not having to keep a running tally of items going in the cart to make sure you don’t overdraft is amazing.
Knowing that whatever you put in, you’ve definitely got enough for it, is such a relief (once you break the habit). Maybe favor things on sale, sure, but no going “oh I can’t get a second package of chicken”.
Khan Academy is a treasure of a service. Probably my favorite non-profit out there. High quality information with low barrier to entry. It got me through Calculus, Calc 2, and Linear Algebra.
Growing up, I had a strong aptitude for both math and literature. I loved writing and reading. Also loved doing math, especially algebra.
But I grew up before YouTube or even broadband, and I had very limited access to quality math resources. Otoh, we had a pretty nicely stocked library at home and I could read all the literature I ever wanted to read.
I ended up majoring in English. Although I now work in the tech field, I’m not deeply technical and my math knowledge is effectively stuck at freshmen college level.
I wonder what my life trajectory would have been like if I had access to teachers like Sal Khan - or even YouTube - back then.
Young people today are blessed. They can learn from the best, often for free.
I do not think people understand or appreciate what a truly fundamental shift that access to zero marginal cost instruction has been (including YouTube, etc.). It is a tool that humanity still has not figured out how to take advantage of at scale, we’re in the early days and it will take time.
> It is a tool that humanity still has not figured out how to take advantage of at scale
I blame shitty recommendation system of Youtube for not making it easily available. They have high engagement sections like Gaming etc but not Education. Just goes on to show their priorities.
They could reccomend calculus videos all day long, people will ignore them and watch the stuff they find entertaining. Its not YouTube's job to rush behaviours down users throats. If they want to learn calculus, its there.
Well if there can be a dedicated google scholar, why not the same for education.
In the mobile, when one clicks on the compass icon, I get suggestions for gaming but not the same education. This is hypocrisy.
I think this is mostly true. IT/Software in general are a lot less focused on proxies for success than other fields, I think that is largely because it is much easier for individuals to learn skills outside of a professional setting, it is also much easier to validate knowledge and competency than in other fields; and, of course, there are many other factors such as a more progressive workforce, etc.
I was very lucky to have a professor who pulled me aside and steered toward IS. Once I got my first post-degree job, the company I worked for was happy to help me develop technical competency.
I had the same thing, I relearned all my mathematics from grade school to calculus when I was in my 30s so I could go get a degree. Khan literally changed my life for the better.
I also think his take is the correct one. AI's future in custom education is beyond anything else. It can teach it to you using the concepts you have available.
Love to see this - a miracle! We used it to partially homeschool a kid in math, then he graduated to SAT prep for himself, etc. Totally free. What a gift to the world.
Impressive! You should give yourself more credit as it takes more than just internet and patience to teach yourself enough to get into college.
I am also excited for society. However I am worried as well. While an AI tutor who is able to understand the child's current knowledge and gear the lessons toward what will make the most sense will be very powerful, it could also be used for brainwashing, propaganda, misinformation, etc. While we've invented a better way to transfer knowledge, we haven't removed the human desire to control information.
We live in a world where wealth is increasingly being concentrated at the top, social mobility for the average person is trending downwards, suicide rates in the US are at all-time highs, drug abuse rising, general deaths of despair rising, mental illness rising, climate and ecological catastrophes mounting by unchecked greed and all of this AI crap is mostly in the hands of the powerful who will use it to solidify the trends of the things I've mentioned above. Which begs the question, what kind of society is this to be excited about? Great if you live in a bubble unaffected by the above, but for the rest of us, the society sucks.
The average person has a higher standard of living and more wealth than ever before. Suicide rates are not at all-time highs, they were much higher during the World Wars and Great Depression. Drug abuse is down too, but newer drugs are more potent. Mental illness is a hard stat to compare over time since it is very sensitive to the collection mechanisms. The growth of carbon-free technologies has been exponential over the last few decades. Open(source?) AI models trail the leading closed models by 6-12 months, it's hard to say they are only in the hands of the most powerful. The world is better than ever before, but it could be even better. The internet is filled with too many doomerist takes.
Suicide rates during WW1 were hovering around 20 per 100k. During the Great Depression it peaked at 22 per 100k [0]. That's around 50% higher than the 2022 number you cite (14.3 per 100k), which is hard to describe as "really not that far off".
EDIT: The comment I replied to has been edited in multiple ways since I replied, so the text in quotes above is no longer present. The comment previously indicated that we had already exceeded "the world wars" (not just WW2) and that we were "really not that far off" from the rates of the Great Depression.
Slight meta tangent: OP, in general it's considered good form to reply to people who reply to you rather than just modifying your comment. Calling out edits explicitly (like I've done here) after you've received replies is also considered good form.
If you edited within ten minutes then something isn't working, because your comment changed multiple times after I replied to it. The delay is supposed to prevent me from seeing it at all until the period is up.
That might be true outside the US; I believe that the standard of living has gone down in the US, due in large part to the pandemic, followed by rampant inflation.
The shift away from manufacturing jobs to service jobs also played a role, along with the population boom in major cities.
The cities/countries with the highest standards of living all seemingly exist in Europe.
EDIT To Add: look at the revolting against McDonald's to see my point. Taking your family to mcdonalds used to be something you didn't really need to think about. Not anymore.
This kind of comparison always neglects to consider the fact that any given European country is much smaller and much more homogeneous than the US. Which US state are you comparing to?
Using the Human Development Index (HDI) as a passable proxy for standard of living:
Mississippi has an HDI of 0.866, about the same as Portugal and somewhat higher than Bulgaria (the lowest HDI in the EU) at 0.799.
Massachusetts has an HDI of 0.949, which is about the same as Germany and only a tiny bit lower than #1 Switzerland's 0.967.
In other words: both Europe and the US span a wide range of HDI scores, but the European Union has a wider range in both directions. Europe is both better and worse than the US, depending on where in Europe and where in the US you're talking about.
> This kind of comparison always neglects to consider the fact that any given European country is much smaller and much more homogeneous than the US. Which US state are you comparing to?
I'm aware of the criticism of Apples to Oranges. I assume given such a basic level of criticism on any comparison between the US and Europe that it's no longer remotely relevant because to any study ranking would clearly account for that.
Europe also experienced a pandemic, has even worse inflation and worse unemployment. It could just be cultural attitudes make European cities a more pleasant place to live.
> It could just be cultural attitudes make European cities a more pleasant place to live.
Cultural attitudes certainly, particularly around work vs leisure. Also mass transit systems, and social supports for people working in the service industry.
The criticisms for europe are that it takes a lot of tax revenue to support those things, bureaucracy, strikes, etc.
Im not saying one system is better than the other--just that in the US, despite our massive economic might, our standard of living sucks.
when you visit or live among people or parts of society that that essentially never "modernized" in any meaningful way, the only thing they really need is better healthcare.
the rest is a load of crap that is just solving problems created by industrialization and modernization
Are you talking about lost Amazon tribes? Most places I have visited people have seen real quality of life improvements by having clean water, refrigeration, sewage systems and access to the internet.
2. Always use an industrialized western perspective as a synonym for what is unequivocally good, without any inspection or consideration. Disregard anything else.
3. Worship at the altar of the information technology industry
This is a good point. And, most of those require civil engineers to accomplish. It's very hard to do that if you don't have a writing system, and, hence, literacy. Pre-literate societies struggle to build up scientific and mathematical knowledge because all knowledge transfer is oral.
Yeah yeah, but it’s so romantic that they use bamboo sticks for hunting and killing each other with poisoned arrows while dying of worm infections and shit
“Wealth” is becoming a tricky term. Bill Gates is approximately a million times richer than I am, but for many things he can’t get anything like a million times the value I can. He can spend 1000x what I do on clothes, but I won’t be appreciably colder or less comfortable than he is. His house might cost 100x what my apartment would go for, but again, it isn’t 100x nicer. He can eat steak and lobster for every meal, but I don’t go hungry. I’m not trying to portray myself as being the other end of the wealth spectrum from Bill Gates. There are people far below me economically, and wealth inequality is definitely a thing. But AI tutors and teachers will serve to reduce the gap, not increase it. Notably, Bill Gates and I use equivalent phones and computers to within a factor of 2.
The other issues are of course critically important, but are caused by more than the wealth gap.
Gini coefficient tell less valuable information than say total poverty rate, but a high gini coefficient can be an indicator of concentration of power in the "elites"
You are talking about point of diminishing return .
Personally I think beyond an income of 1 million dollars a year , one's quality of life does not change significantly.
> He can spend 1000x what I do on clothes, but I won’t be appreciably colder or less comfortable than he is.
This misses the point of expensive clothing entirely.
Many people would disagree that his house is not 100 times nicer than yours.
He doesn’t use computers and phones like you do. He uses people who use technology that is 100kx your computer and phone.
You’re talking about the essential function of an object. When things become expensive they take on additional functions that your items lack entirely.
I think the point about clothes is exactly the point I was trying to make: everything you are alluding to that gives "value" to expensive clothes is an artificial construct. A fashionable jacket is fashionable because people agree that it is stylish. That doesn't make it "better" at being a jacket. More to the point, I can only feel a disparity between Mr. Gates and myself by convincing myself that style matters.
His house is bigger. He can only occupy one room at a time. I know where his house is: I lived across Lake Washington from him. I've seen the houses across the lake from his, with the exact same view, and they are worth 1/30th of his house because they are 1/30th as big. But again: he can only be in one room at a time. I'm not saying there's no difference; I'm saying there's nothing like 30x difference.
I'm not sure I comprehend your point about hiring people to do work. 100,000 people using 100,000 iPhones are not 100,000 times as capable of doing most things.
In short, no: expensive things don't take on (many) additional functions. That was exactly my point, and I don't think you've disproven it.
Don’t look too closely or you might realize that your value system is not universal, and that it is an artificial construct and depends on all sorts of other artificial constructs such as a market system.
You can’t seriously believe that you can outperform 100,000 people, but that wasn’t my point. He has teams of people using among other things HPC to perform calculations that are both conceptually and computationally beyond an individual’s reach.
Just because you haven’t witnessed it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, and doesn’t easily 100x your own value.
Bill Gates can have other billionaires over to his house. That is not true for your house. That in itself is worth many multiples of your functional viewpoint.
Oh goodness. I didn’t say that I could outperform 100,000 people. I said there are tasks where 100,000 people can’t make 100,000 times the result. Maybe an example would help?
When Bill Gates wants to have pizza for dinner, 100,000 people can’t deliver it in a fraction of a second. HA! Now, having typed that, I’m thinking of Bill Gates having… let’s say 1,000 chefs, who each night cook 1,000 meals, all so that there is a high probability that whatever he asks for will be ready the moment he asks for it.
To your point, of course there are tasks where 100k people can make a difference. But again, I didn’t say that wasn’t true.
I’m not sure why you think I can’t have billionaires over to my house? I’m pretty sure Warren Buffett has had Bill Gates over to his house, and Warren Buffett’s house is (comparatively) extremely modest.
Finally, of course I understand that my value system is unique. So is everyone’s. How does that change the fact that for the vast majority of people, if you ask them how well their smart phone works for them, they will not reply, “Well, my phone is okay I guess, but have you seen Bill Gates’s phone? That thing is amazing!”
Your specific point you seem to be hanging onto is why do the billionaires not have phones whose technology absolutely crushes your personal phone? I don’t understand why the question is interesting, but here is why they don’t:
What would they do with it that other people cannot do for them, faster and more cost effectively?
The limitation on personal productivity is not the pocket computer, it is access to computing resources. Right now the closest thing we have to a competent human, which can be easily had for $50k/year or $2M/working life, costs around 500 times that, lasts 1/10th as long, doesn’t work unless I’m talking to it, and isn’t nearly as capable.
I am not discounting what you said about wealth concentration and upward mobility, but the top post that started this thread is surely a counter example for what you are saying? Yes, the makers of openai/gemini/whatever could power such ai tutors, and make more money, but there are legit cases where this will be an enormous boost that was unthinkable just a few years ago.
Nah, we live in a great world where most people recognize that absolute life quality matters more than relative life quality. Online commenters all go to therapy and are miserable, and their bosses are idiots, and everyone is spying on them, and so on and so on.
But most people are better off than their parents and knowing this, they’re generally happy.
I see your point. Obviously, the first paragraph is sarcasm, but the second paragraph raises an interesting point. In my family, my two older siblings are not better off than my parents. It is a bit sad.
A lot of that is just land use policies. When you look at the average American household budget, it makes sense. The #1 and #2 are housing and transportation followed by taxes. Climate change and ecological catastrophes, mental illness are really land use policies in disguise or at least can be explained partly.
Yep, we have so much freaking money that we've decided to bury it all in illiquid assets built on artificial scarcity - which we then endeavor to increase the value of by further constraining supply.
It's probably one of the dumbest things we do as a society, although that might be a fairly California centric perspective.
All your premises are wrong, even if they're grammatical and coherent (what does "general deaths of despair" or "climate and ecological catastrophes mounting by unchecked greed " even mean?
> all of this AI crap is mostly in the hands of the powerful
too funny when the subject of the article is the Khan Academy which is hardly a hate-target.
this is already an objection, that most of the LLMs are aligned to a certain kind of California thinking; Open AI, Anthropic, xAI, and Facebook, among others, being from there.
That’s pretty impressive. Any chance you can shed light on the feasibility of this for a standard high school dropout? Did you have certain luxuries from family or otherwise that made this possible?
I’m mostly asking to learn how the US system (assuming you’re in the US) supports folks taking this path.
I definitely had advantages in that I knew tools like Khan Academy existed, was not battling depression, and also had talked to people who I admired and saw they were not so different than me. I also had a mother who loved me and a step-father who came into my life a bit later who cared, but they were dealing with some pretty big challenges of their own, including mental health, bad relationships, debt, children who were in and out of jail, and everything that comes with that. I do not like to spend too much time focused on race, but I am a white male, which was also an advantage.
At the time I was leveraging Khan Academy I was around 24, had distanced myself from the people I had grown up with who were not on a positive track. I also don't know how, but somehow I got it in my head that finance was the universal language and that learning more about finance was the key to understanding more about the world. So I was very focused on that. I had no clue what economics was at the time, but once I learned about that, I was addicted. Finding topics like that deeply interesting is a HUGE advantage.
At that time, I was living on my own and had a stable job managing a department at Home Depot. I slept on an air mattress and didn't have any money to speak of, but I had enough time on my hands that I could spend time at a coffee shop after work and on my days off working my way through the knowledge map on KA, starting with long division (which was humiliating) and learning how to do everything by hand, and then progressing from topic to topic. My goal was to not have to take a remedial math class at the local junior college (2 year colleges in the US). I spent months mastering basic math and worked my way to more advanced topics (1 million energy points on KA, not sure if that's a lot but I'm still proud of it).
One last advantage I had was that I genuinely enjoyed learning and talking to people, and it showed. And I was young. So people were willing to take the risk. Many people were willing to give me a chance, encouragement, and their time as I was making my way through school. If I had a question or was interested in a career or topic, I would just ask someone if I could call them or shadow them, and most the time they would say yes. I had nothing to lose by asking, and was always amazed how often it worked.
I try to share this with others who were in my position so they know it is possible.
Wow, this is a personal Top 100 post on this board for me. What a great story. This part was really touching: <<starting with long division (which was humiliating)>>
Thank you! I would literally make sure my back was to a corner so no one could see what was on my screen haha.
Needless to say, I spend a lot of time on math with my oldest (who just turned four!). She does not need to be great, she just needs to not be intimidated and understand she can learn anything.
I got into a job in corporate IT at a good company and then moved through a bunch of roles, including putting together one of our first data science/ML teams. A couple years later when I was doing product work, gpt 2 came out, so I had started working with it for fun and writing Points of View for our company about how we could leverage these technologies and what the market dynamics would looks like and implications, etc. (I am basically a dollar store version of Ben Thompson.)
It was mostly dismissed at the time, because Alexa and Siri were what people thought of, but when ChatGPT got released I was in a great position and was able to quickly ship. Now I lead that capability for one of our relatively large subsidiaries.
For me, what lead me here was mostly a fascination with the decreasing marginal cost of knowledge work. There is something about building these types of products that is just very fun and feels like cheating, I love it.
Was the lack of formal education a big problem getting started with that good company? I'm pleasantly surprised your resume made it past the first line of throwing-it-out
No, but I work for a company with a very unique perspective on education and merit. They are a large privately held firm that does not care about degrees (for 95% of things).
When I was a year in to my career I sat down with one of our senior execs and asked if I should get an MBA, and he said “don’t waste your time, you are already in a university and we will teach you everything you need to know”. And that has been true.
Make no mistake, it is definitely a disadvantage but I got lucky.
I love such stories. Thanks for sharing. I'd be super glad to read about your process, your note-taking techniques, etc if you ever write a blog post about it!
I should do that. Will post it to my twitter (in my profile) if I do.
Honestly i wrote as many notes as I could in a way that someone else could pick up and understand and the main thing I stuck to was never using a calculator until I absolutely had to, even if it was slower, so I could build a stronger foundation. I’m not sure I ever looked at the notes though.
And then I was just very disciplined about spending a few hours a day, every day, for a few months, drilling course by course, and didn’t skip anything in the knowledge map (at the time).
I still make time every weekend to learn something new or work on a challenging project for a couple hours a day while my little girls are napping.
I have significant concern about this—that it is a story.
I don’t doubt that it’s true in OC’s case. But I don’t think it’s representative of the impact of technology. It’s the example that will get Bill Gates’ attention and end up on the stage at TED, but it might not be representative of 90% of how people are affected by technology. It might, and the story of how videos will change how people relate to each other (what made Chris Anderson buy TED, what Salman Khan has built, what Grant Sanderson a.k.a, 3blue1brown has done). It is true, anecdotally. It is a fantastic, compelling, clear story. I love that story: video is the easiest way to share any practice; people watch, learn, practice, and get good at something no one in their village knew was possible. Hurray.
But when I trained as a statistician, i.e., epistemologically someone working for the state, I was told I was the opposite of a journalist: my job is not to tell stories that explain what a problem is. My job is to tell the boss how common that story really is. A story tells all the details to pull your emotions, and journalists (at the time, at least) were telling fact-check, double-verified stories. “Truth” wasn’t our goal. It is too easy to get numbers that argue for any position. Representative was what we were told we should be aiming for—so that the government makes the right decision.
> I have significant concern about this—that it is a story.
Your concerns are very correct but while you are willing to give him/her the benefit of the doubt, I am very very skeptical of their story; it sounds "too pat" and made up. If you look at their other replies there are too many incongruities and "movie plot tropes".
I have a better chance of winning the lottery than "learning mathematics starting from long division and progressing to a good job in the current hot market of AI/ML while working at Home Depot, sleeping on a air mattress, with almost no money and a dysfunctional family, studying at coffee shops and rising through a bunch of roles starting from lowly corporate IT into high-paying data science/ML and leading teams". It is all just a bit too much and beggars belief.
In my perspective it is more believable to get into AI as a young guy without higher education than someone like me: a middle-aged person with higher education with a family and a reasonable corporate software engineering job. For me to get into AI research, I guess I would have to work for less money for a while than my current boring Software Engineering job, so the golden handcuff prevents me from doing it. While for a young guy there is nothing to lose, they can shoot for the most interesting thing right away. When I was young, I graduated from university with an AI specialization, but no one cared, especially not in Eastern Europe where I live. So I got into reasonably-paying slightly boring software engineering.
I am not arguing about whether a "young guy without higher education" can make it. It is "young guy without higher education and a whole lot more fundamental and severe hurdles makes it on his own without outside help/luck" that i am skeptical about.
To be fair, I am not in AI research either. Sorry if I implied that. I am on the applied side building products using GenAI, we also do some more traditional ML development but I do not spend much time there.
100% what you said about being young with nothing to lose. I had been part of a "start up" so I had equity on paper, but debt in real life. That equity ended up being worth exactly what I had paid for it ($0). I worked at Home Depot (which was a great company) and basically anything was better than making $15/hr and treading water.
For what it is worth, at the time I (24) felt really old because I saw so many 21 year olds who would come in to the store and had houses and everything that I didn't. I felt like I had missed the boat. It's been over 10 years and I realize how young I was, and frankly still am.
My point is that it's never too late to try something different, especially if you are starting from a position of strength (a good career in a field that requires strong problem solving skills, like software engineering).
I genuinely don't know why you have a hard time believing that chain of events. It's really not that uncommon. What "movie tropes" are you talking about that aren't just... extremely common real life things? Sleeping on an air mattress? Working at Home Depot? Teaching yourself a skill and working your way up to a respectable position?
Each event by itself may not be uncommon (but some like learning mathematics from absolute basics to AI/ML requirements via just Khan Academy is well-nigh impossible) but all together happening to one person which led to the claimed outcome is very very highly improbable. Real life doesn't work that way; time, energy(i.e. effort), money are all finite and wax/wane with context/environment and defines success/failure.
Also speaking from my own experience, early in my career for about 3-4 years i lived alone, working a software engineer job by day and attending a computer science course/labs in evening/weekends. The lack of proper sleep/rest/nutrition, constant stress due to work and studies almost broke me. Thankfully i managed to get through that (mainly due to my robust health) but it made me realize that if you don't have a supporting family, proper nutrition/sleep and some sort of support system (i.e. family/friends) to encourage/emphathize/push/pull you as needed there is no way for an average person to overcome all hurdles particularly when they come at you all at once. There is a reason it is impossible to get out of poverty just based on your own efforts without somebody external actively lending you a helping hand via money/opportunity etc.
I went to college but I resent the implication that the only way to make it into one of these fields is through college. It is incredibly difficult to learn advanced math outside of an academic setting, but it is absolutely possible.
Where I work we have invested in programs that take people just like me and give them an opportunity to go through a pretty rigorous 6 month program that teaches them how to develop software, work in a corporate environment, etc.
There are people FAR more impressive than me who have done more with less, and when they have come out of that program many have been able to go toe to toe with our college grads.
We’ve got a LOT of people who have similar stories, and we’re doing the same thing in accounting now. And it works.
This is just a generic platitude and means nothing. Lots of people have overcome hurdles yes but not a whole lot of hurdles all at the same and over long periods of time which is what i gathered from your posts. Also as i point out it is quite hard to overcome all hurdles just by one's own efforts but you generally need some outside help whether intentional or luck.
> I went to college but I resent the implication that the only way to make it into one of these fields is through college.
You had mentioned that you were a high-school dropout earlier but are here stating that you went to college? That is a huge discrepancy and if true proves my point.
>It is incredibly difficult to learn advanced math outside of an academic setting, but it is absolutely possible.
That depends on where you are starting from, your support environment and your definition of "advanced math". For some levels you have to go to academia and study. Not everything is possible in the real world.
> Where I work we have invested in programs that take people just like me and give them an opportunity to go through a pretty rigorous 6 month program that teaches them how to develop software, work in a corporate environment, etc.
This just proves my point that you generally need outside support/help/luck to overcome really difficult hurdles. You are providing them with a break.
> There are people FAR more impressive than me who have done more with less, and when they have come out of that program many have been able to go toe to toe with our college grads.
That depends on the nature of the work itself. If it is just a matter of simple programming then maybe so but if the work needs advanced mathematics/statistical knowledge there is no way this can happen. There is a reason Colleges/Universities exist.
In the first I clearly stated that I used Khan Academy as a high school drop out and it helped me get into college.
You didn’t bother to read it before commenting because you were too busy dumping on something that didn’t match your bias, which is wrong and incredibly depressing, by the way.
And of course you need outside help/luck/support, but you’re pretending their is some binary threshold and then cherry picking from an imaginary slate of deceptions that you’ve accused me of, to imply I was too lucky or received too much encouragement. Those factors are a continuum and I received more than some and less than others; of course I’m lucky.
I’m sorry that you do not have faith in people to succeed, but I have plenty of examples. I am sitting across from an architect I work with who is also a dropout (who finds this amusing) and work with plenty of others who made the leap. I’m also sorry that you feel you have to try and tear others down to reaffirm your depressing world view.
The really annoying part is, your story really isn't that uncommon, or even that crazy - not to belittle your struggles, of course, but I've heard far wilder stories of people struggling to success.
Anyway I wouldn't waste your time too much with GP. They won't believe anything you say without you actually providing physical proof of some sort - and even then I'm sure they'd try and poke holes in it.
Oh well. I for one am glad to hear how much better things are for you, and wish you luck in the future :)
I agree, I know so many people who have done similar and more challenging things. GP probably does too, but they would be smart not to open up about it.
I actually went and got my college transcripts and requested my highschool ones but it’s not worth it. I’ll probably just use them if I make a blog post or something.
I sincerely appreciate your encouragement and wish you luck as well!
> You didn’t bother to read it before commenting because you were too busy dumping on something that didn’t match your bias, which is wrong and incredibly depressing, by the way.
I don't have a depressing world view but a realistic one because of overcoming some hurdles in my own life and coming from a country where people overcoming hurdles is rather common (India with its huge population, economic mobility necessity etc.). But in every case (including mine) there is always one or more factors which made or broke them. Thus for example, a poor farmer's child becomes a ceo/doctor/engineer/etc. because the family sold the land to fund the child's education while the father/mother became daily wage labourers to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. The child's achievement while impressive would be impossible without the family's sacrifice. Should he/she omit it from the narrative of their achievements?
> And of course you need outside help/luck/support, but you’re pretending their is some binary threshold and then cherry picking from an imaginary slate of deceptions that you’ve accused me of, to imply I was too lucky or received too much encouragement. Those factors are a continuum and I received more than some and less than others; of course I’m lucky.
No man makes opportunity or luck or can overcome all adverse circumstances. The best he can do is be well prepared by his own efforts (and with some external help) to recognize opportunity when it comes and grab it with both hands. While opportunity can be binary sometimes you can backtrack and get a second-chance. There are plenty of people who never got the opportunity and hence could never make it. The external factor is not an addon, it is essential to success/failure and should never be discounted.
> Im sorry that you do not have faith in people to succeed, but I have plenty of examples. I am sitting across from an architect I work with who is also a dropout (who finds this amusing) and work with plenty of others who made the leap. I’m also sorry that you feel you have to try and tear others down to reaffirm your depressing world view.
You started this conversation with me and hence i am defending my views and not trying to tear you down or anybody else. I just dislike "toxic positivity"/"false advertisements" which is rampant in our society to the detriment of helping deserving people. In the context of this thread, your posts came across as "i did Khan Academy while overcoming a lot of hurdles by myself which led me to what i am today" which is of course untenable IMO.
> You had mentioned that you were a high-school dropout earlier but are here stating that you went to college? That is a huge discrepancy and if true proves my point.
What exactly is the discrepancy here? One can drop out of highschool, then years later, take the necessary tests, then go to college. Again, many people have done that. Is that really so hard for you to believe?
> One can drop out of highschool, then years later, take the necessary tests, then go to college.
You have conveniently glossed over events in those missing years. Did they get proper stable environment to live in, did they get enough food to eat, did they have somebody encouraging them to go to college etc. Events in those intervening years are what breaks you down or builds you up enabling you to go to college or not. In a sequence of events you cannot omit some and highlight some according to your disposition. That is called "false advertisement".
One for each of the claims they have made; At the minimum they may have embellished a lot of the hardships they claim they faced (eg. at one place they claim high-school dropout while in another they went to college). There is a reason experts in education/psychology and policy makers declare that family/neighbourhood environment (stable/nurturing or not) and economic conditions (proper nutrition and other basic needs for shelter/safety/education) are the main predictors of whether one can get out of the ghetto/poverty and govts. spend huge amounts of money to help them out.
Not at all. It is precisely because i have faced a few hurdles and overcome them that i know how difficult a whole lot more severe hurdles all at the same time are difficult to overcome without outside help/support/luck.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure what your point is with this comment. I don't think GP was presenting their story in the context of providing statistics or objective truth about the impact of technology. They were just sharing their experience with the topic of the article.
The EU has a system that allows people to get an education, at their own pace, even after they have been adults for some time?
My situation was not a failure of our education system. I was just not in a situation that was stable and conducive to learning when I was young. Part of that was my parent’s fault, but they were doing the best they could; part of that was my fault, there are many things I could’ve approached differently.
Although we were poor by US standards at the time, I actually was on the edge of a great school district for most of my early education.
A school system was not going to fix the problems, both situational and self inflicted, that lead to my situation.
And there is no equivalent to what Khan Academy is doing that I am aware of. Part of the value is it has zero marginal cost, so anyone can use it. That’s actually the point. You don’t have to be in the EU to get a great education. You can be in Mauritania, as long as you have internet, you have a shot at receiving an education.
Not so fast: my daughter could not afford Khan’s tutoring service at a crucial time in her development. I was out of work, had depleted our savings supporting the family, and couldn’t afford it. I pleaded for a waiver. The answer was no and basically “go eff myself.” My daughter lost all confidence in her math aptitude. Her teachers never alerted us as parents about her progress. We’ve been repairing the damage ever since.
Background: I taught high school science for half a decade and now I am in tech.
This will never take off. One, there is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. What little money there is goes to the obvious stuff like student records databases. Anything that requires an ongoing subscription fee is dead in the water. The only reason those stupid smartboards took off is because they make school boards look cool, they are a one time cost, and can be paid for with bonds (because they are a one time cost). Teachers don't want them (projectors and document cameras are good, though). Ed.Tech is a wasteland of failed startups. Part of the problem is also that classic "the people with the purchasing power are not the people who will be using the product" problem.
Two, everyone outside of education thinks "well has anyone just tried sitting down with the kids and talking to them/explaining it to them?" Yes, obviously. The problem isn't that they are lazy, snot-nosed kids (that's a problem well within an experienced teacher's skill set to solve). The problem is what is the AI going to do with the kid says "fuck you" to the AI because they haven't eaten since lunch the previous day (school is the only place they get regular meals), or they don't even know what to ask because they are basically 4 grades behind in math, or the wifi is dead for the 8th time that month because the school board will never pay for infrastructure.
Three, what if the AI is just wrong and starts confusing the student? Even GPT-4 fabricates things all the time. Sure it can generally put words in grammatically correct order and is passible for writing no one is going to read anyway (like marketing emails). But the moment it requires actual domain knowledge all these AI models completely fall down because, again, they don't actually understand anything, they just are really good at guessing what word comes next.
I understand the skepticism around AI in ed tech, and I think people have the right to be skeptical of this being portrayed as a "cure all". Saying that it is of no value because nobody will pay for it and the kids wont learn from it because they're hungry does not capture the whole picture. I was never a great student because I had trouble focusing in class, but if I had this to guide me through my homework, I believe I would have been a much better student. Looking at math homework and having no idea how to even start and no resources to help is very different than looking at the problem and working with AI to help you understand how to attack the problem. Sure, you can't turn every single kid into a math wiz, but I think there is a real possibility that this will help almost every kid become better at math than they would have. Assuming this is low cost, I think many parents would be very willing to pay for it.
If you have ever worked with children you will realize vast majority of them lack the willpower to learn new things and seek out answers. A good teacher can provide the social accountability and guide them, but it's not something you can put on auto pilot with AI.
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.
> 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
Using modern digital gamification to reinforce learning outcomes, a-la TikTok , will probably produce a generation of absolutely brilliant, weird psychopaths.
At the same time, I think asking a person or a parent requires much more will power than asking a computer (for whatever reason -- but part of it is just that a teacher might not have as much time as a child needs/wants). I do agree the social accountability of a good one-on-one teacher is the most ideal -- for me I got that from my parents/siblings. But lots of folks don't have access to that, and school systems don't have the resources to supply that, so maybe AI might be a good middle ground.
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.
There may be "no money in EdTech" but that doesn't mean there can't be impactful products for it.
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.
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.
"Actually it's good that AI sucks because it will teach people to be more skeptical" is not a very compelling argument.
Unfortunately, I think it will be true. Unfortunate, because we lack trust already in society and people can now revert to believing what they want to believe. But, they will be skeptical of everything else they read.
> 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.
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?
>What is the future of proving that I know something myself?
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.
You ask a very interesting question, that to me speaks to the future of education gets to the bottom of education entirely.
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.
>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.
Maybe no school board buys and puts it into every class. Parents will still buy it and it can supplement learning gaps when doing homework. $20/month is a rounding error compared to pre-school, clothes, extra-curricular activies, private school, private tutors, etc.
The kids of people who can afford all you mentioned usually don't have problems with education. It's those who don't have $20.
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.
Fond memories of being mocked for wearing the same clothes I wore the previous year or two. Wait no, not fond.
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.
Given that Sal has never turned Khan Academy into a commercial product -- despite its resounding success and popularity, and the large amount of $$$ he could have made -- has proven he's not in this for the money. So I expect the AI version to also be free or at least have a free version for parents (and schools who can't afford it).
> The kids of people who can afford all you mentioned usually don't have problems with education.
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.
The very people you are talking about that "don't have problems" are spending money and effort to get their kids to do even better, get into better schools etc. It's not some binary fine/not fine thing. They view it extremely differently to how you appear to be viewing it.
They won’t actively cut teachers, they just won’t hire as many specialists. We have a couple math specialists who just do remedial math. Kids who are at grade level or above get zero attention during math time. This will be a cheap way to provide attention to those kids, at a fraction of the cost of hiring more math specialists or classroom teachers.
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.
There is a small fortune spent on private education. After school classes, tutoring etc etc. The money is spent by the upper middle class and above. If this solution works better for some subset of those people, it will take off in that market.
I spend on private 1-1 sessions, group classes, books, apps, faceless saas subscriptions, toys, puzzles.
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.
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.
Basically, do you want a pipeline/process that utilizes LLMs and provides exactly the output you want? How do you formalize a human expert workflow using LLMs? With LLMOps. It is new, there is no standard or predefined resource that I'm aware of. At neuralnetes we are creating all of our methods ad hoc and use tight feedback loops to ensure ideal, precise output.
No need to set impossible standards here, the correct thing to ask is whether the guardrailed LLM confabulates less than its competitors. That sounds like a useful job to have.
I agree it's not a silver bullet doesn't begin to address the issue where students aren't learning because of issues they're dealing with outside of school.
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.
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.
Maybe my reading of the post is incorrect but I did not interpret it as solving the parenting problem. In the US there is a massive growing problem where parents are simply not parenting their kids and relying on institutions (schools) to do it. I honestly do not know what will solve that problem.
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.
> Sure it can generally put words in grammatically correct order and is passible for writing no one is going to read anyway (like marketing emails). But the moment it requires actual domain knowledge all these AI models completely fall down because, again, they don't actually understand anything, they just are really good at guessing what word comes next.
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.
I can ask ChatGPT to write code and assess myself whether it's correct or not. (It's frequently not, but it can still be useful for certain tasks.) I can ask it to explain something about the industry I work in or adjacent fields and have a pretty good sense of whether it's leading me in the right direction. But if I asked it to teach me about, say, Chinese history, I would have very little ability to assess whether it's telling me the truth or sprinkling little falsehoods into things. I would only be able to catch the most blatant mistakes; the rest would require more detailed independent research.
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.
Yes, that's fair, but I think we can do better in our education revolution than just plonking kids down in a classroom with ChatGPT! If we take a fairly constrained subject like high school algebra, we should be able to, for example, study its BS rate by having knowledgeable testers converse with it at length, and thus perhaps produce AIs suitably calibrated and QA'd for classroom usage. But I should go read Sal's book, it sounds promising.
While these are all valid concerns, they also apply to human teachers. Humans spew bullshit all the time.
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.
This seems very incorrect to me. Human teachers make mistakes, or understand details of something incorrectly sometimes, but it doesn't come up in every lesson. It only happens occasionally, and sometimes a student will correct them/challenge them on it.
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.
I do find that current LLMs are quite bad at design problems and answering very specific questions for which they may lack sufficient training data. I like them for general Q&A though.
A different architecture or an additional component might be needed for them to generalize better for out-of-training-distribution questions.
“Fall down” doesn’t mean they’re always wrong. It means they’re right just often enough to make you believe them when they’re making stuff up, which is a terrible characteristic for a teacher.
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.
That’s a very limited perspective. While bulk of district spend (US) is salaries, buildings, pensions, busses, cafeterias etc. there is still a substantial spend on educational materials. It’s a tiny % of the overall budget, but the larger school districts have budgets in many _billions_.
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's some money but there's really two markets: small medium (eg a lot of work for a relatively small sale) and mega districts (and those generally just goes to the big established players because of connections)
Most school wifi isn't that bad anymore - the bigger problem for us is web filters that break things in interesting ways.
This might be the exception that proves the rule but I used to work for an outfit that made a school website product (SaaS) and they seemed to be making plenty of money.
That's more of a service for the school as an institution. I believe the OP is saying that most ed-tech startups that have a goal of helping with the learning process have not been successful.
The thing that comes to mind to me was all the hype around MOOCs and how much everyone thought they would be a game-changer for education, but the reality is that the problem wasn't the fact that people didn't have access to the education, it's that so few have the focus/discipline/resources to actually follow-through.
I'm willing to bet that it will be in the future. Maybe a free version that can run locally on Copilot+ level NPU's or GPU's, perhaps taking advantage of software & hardware cost reductions to get it down to a level that they can talk Gates into paying for it.
> I'm willing to bet that [Khanmigo] will be [free] in the future.
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.
Who are not the learner which is the context of this particular writeup. Gates is talking about using LLMs to assist students as tutors, and that is not offered for free ($4/month, $44/year).
The idea is that teachers can use it with students.
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.
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.
I guess we'll see what the pricing is for school districts, but I expect it to be much lower than most educational tools, again given that it's made by Khan Academy which has proven that it's not out for the money. But something's got to cover the cost of the servers--maybe school districts will find sponsors. Overall, even if only parents and teachers use it, I'd say it's a big step forward.
Textbooks do a better job than 90% of teachers, and that's not a dig at teachers. I spend more time, by far, figuring out how to keep student attention than thinking about the material itself.
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...
IIRC studies show one-on-one attention is worth 2 standard deviations in test scores and a good teacher is worth 1 standard deviation. (Not coincidentally home schoolers have about one standard deviation of advantage).
Khanmigo doesn't have to be as good as a teacher to provide an advantage to the student.
> (Not coincidentally home schoolers have about one standard deviation of advantage).
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 does a better job than prob 90% of the teachers.
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.
My daughter was in highly rated school in NoVa some teachers would pretty much just put on youtube and be done with it. Now in CA again highly rated school just really sad especially compared to the school she was in Ireland. I am not even focusing on teachers that actually don't know the subject they are teaching. I mean teachers that will go into conspiracy theories or just blatantly say I am not in the mood so just basically do whatever.
> Anything that requires an ongoing subscription fee is dead in the water. The only reason those stupid smartboards took off is because they make school boards look cool, they are a one time cost, and can be paid for with bonds (because they are a one time cost).
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.
> But drawing on his experience creating Khanmigo, an AI-powered tutor, Sal makes a compelling case that AI-powered technologies will be different. That’s because we finally have a way to give every student the kind of personalized learning, support, and guidance that’s historically been out of reach for most kids in most classrooms. As Sal puts it, “Getting every student a dedicated on-call human tutor is cost prohibitive.” AI tutors, on the other hand, aren’t.
Personalisation fails for a simple reason - people don't really want to learn.
Classes work because the teacher can inspire (or at least push), and there's peer pressure to learn (or at least keep up with the herd). I'm sure there's a dozen or so self-taught Python or Rust programmers here who will loudly refute what I'm saying, and point out that they were perfectly capable of learning something they were very interested in, but I bet a lot of them would also like to learn a foreign language or quantum physics and haven't gotten that done.
AI will fail for the same reason Youtube, DVDs, video cassettes, radio lessons, and phonographs all failed to be a revolution. If you want to learn something, and have the motivation, then reading the textbook is easily good enough (for theoretical subjects) and for less theoretical subjects you barely need a textbook, just lots of practice.
Yes, you can probably learn a little tiny bit faster with AI, if you (or someone staring over your shoulder) have the motivation to play some AI learning game rather than a more fun-optimised game that's purely about having fun, but it's a small optimisation.
> Personalisation fails for a simple reason - people don't really want to learn.
Students/people who are interested in learning a particular subject are doing just fine learning it from already available material, be it books, videos, MOOCs, etc. They may or may not use AI, but AI won't make a huge difference for these type of people.
For people who are not interested in learning, AI won't do sh*t. Because the problem is not that they don't have a tutor available to them; the problem is that they don't have motivation to learn. I am not being judgemental here: it is perfectly understandable, for example, why a poor kid may not have motivation to learn.
A few years ago, MOOCs were touted as the next best thing to democratize education and make it available to underserved populations around the world. This did not happen. Some research shows that MOOCs are mostly used by an already-educated group of people who are interested in further learning. I think learning with the help of an AI tutor would be no different: its users will not be the intended ones.
Before MOOCs, it was TV that would revolutionize education, and before that, radio was supposed to replace the need for classes/lectures.
What each of these (including the latest wave of "AI" approaches) has overlooked is that humans learn from humans, because learning is only accomplished via motivation. Creating and sustaining motivation for years is not within the scope of a program you use on a computer -- it comes from a teacher who knows how to inspire, from a classroom and home environment that reinforces the importance of learning, and from peers who also care and reinforce this culture.
I'll quote Kentaro Toyama:
"Quality primary and secondary education is a multi-year commitment whose single bottleneck is the sustained motivation of the student to climb an intellectual Everest".
I'm going to be straight forward with you: You're wrong. Not everybody can sit their butts down and go through every word in a textbook. Watching videos on Youtube helps a lot, along with other methods.
Don't believe me? Look at those school tutorials on Youtube. Look at all the math videos, science videos and other topics. And I'm not talking about people who build cool DIY stuff and explain it at the surface level. I'm talking about people going through a school curriculum. There are kids who actually watch this, believe it or not, and it's wonderful.
This counters your statement which is "people don't want to learn". That's simply untrue. Everyday we are learning something new. You may not want to learn whatever they're teaching in school, but you will want to learn other things. And I think a personal tutor, especially a cheaper one, like Khan's AI tutor, will help a lot.
> If you want to learn something, and have the motivation, then reading the textbook is easily good enough
Anecdotally, I found it dramatically easier to learn math through Khan academy than from textbooks. For one, I have terrible handwriting which makes the pen and paper part messy and hard to read, and for two, Khan's lessons were broken down into much smaller, more digestible steps.
I took discrete math at Uni and had to learn it from the same Rosen textbook that many on this thread probably did themselves. If I had the same thing in an online version analogous to Khan Academy, I think I would've had a much better time. Now obviously, some of the harder problems and proofs in that book are much harder to grade automatically the way Khan does for grade school math, but that seems like something LLMs are trending towards being able to do
Yep. When I first saw how great AI was at answering my questions, I imagined myself talking to it every day to learn everything I'd ever wanted to know.
Turns out, what I actually want to know is just that small subset of things I need to know to get by, plus maybe a little extra for variety. And I consider myself intellectually curious. I have multiple college degrees, one of which I got purely for the fun of it.
So if I can't bring myself to get AI to teach me things, I can't believe that those less intrinsically motivated will be able to either.
Although I am not completely on the 'people don't really want to learn' train, I acknowledge one of the biggest problem in education in aligning incentives. No one is able to answer an innocent question by a kid about why do they need to learn what they are learning in class, without sharing an abstract into-the-future explanation, that the kid cant relate to.
On the topic of AI tutors will change the education, it reminds of this book i recently read (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546065/teaching-machines/). People have been trying to sell similar ideas, in different packaging(technology) for decades now. Video technology had the same pitch for how schools suck, teachers dont want to teach and we will revolutionise the access and personalisation to education. While videos, Sal's or YT in general, have done a great job(specially at accessibility), our education stats are continuously deteriorating.
Before the onset of LLMs we created an instant-tutoring service(https://askfilo.com/) that could very much connect students to teachers in real time. Thousands of tutoring session laters we are still learning what students want/need from a teacher, 'they want to learn' but not everything or every subject, 'they are very much capable of learning' but our assessment are built very rigidly.....learning to test well is a learning on it own. There is so much understanding we lack in terms of mass education and it is not because of lack of good content or tooling.
This is the most nonsensical statement I’ve ever heard. I don’t know how someone could actually believe this.
As someone who loves to learn, I’ve already been using AI to learn things I never had the patience for in school. I HATED classes. Learning at my own pace, in my own way with AI has been an incredible experience. It’s far from a “small optimization”.
We used to go to our IT teacher after school to help us find programming exercises because access was so hard. It's not some sort of exception either, kids would actively reach out for more learning but providing this opportunity is super hard.
Now with AI it's right there! I'm increadibly jealous to the point where OP's statements are making me actively angry.
> , but I bet a lot of them would also like to learn a foreign language or quantum physics and haven't gotten that done.
Learn a foreign language from school? How much do I know of the German/French/Spanish (it was one of them, one of the options) that I studied for years in school? None.
For some subjects, something being taught in school seems like a magnet for making a topic or subject boring and uninteresting. Like if it wasn’t taught at all people would at least not be actively biased against it and might pick it up by happenstance.
Which makes me doubt all of those “no one knows X; therefore we should teach it in school”. I don’t think that follows.
> Personalisation fails for a simple reason - people don't really want to learn.
What does (do? Lack of school English) everyone have in common? Schooling.
> If you want to learn something, and have the motivation, then reading the textbook is easily good enough (for theoretical subjects) and for less theoretical subjects you barely need a textbook, just lots of practice.
This may be true for the average student, but I don't absorb content from written text very well at all. The single biggest reason why I got A's through college was being able to listen to video lectures (YouTube, Khan Academy, and occasionally the professors themselves) at 2x speed. I absorb and retain information that way extremely easily, but put me in front of a textbook and I can't focus on it.
YouTube may not have been an education revolution for you, but it's definitely changed my life.
Python, foreign language, physics? I've got all three self taught!
I agree with you. Investing hundreds or thousands of hours of your own time into the slog of theoretical learning is statistically pretty rare. Most of the counterexamples come from people who found a way to finesse their own neural latticework into ardor for the subject, even though to the rest of mankind it's about as interesting as watching paint dry. It's very rare to meet someone who became a self made master of something they only did for the money, etc.
I totally agree, and it's not even an issue of motivation.: School gives the time, environement, motivation, support and syllabus for the children to learn. It may not be perfect for everyone, it may be improved, it is not egalitarian but it is the best way to give education to the children of a country.
AI like all other technologies that were supposed to revolutionize teaching and failed are a dead end to educate a country, even if they can be potentially useful for some people.
AI tutors can work around student engagement, mostly by making tedious theoretical memorization into small practical problems, trivias, "hand in hand" learning and active recall keeping the average student focused for more time
This is absolutely not true for kids in the range of maybe 9-13 or something. I have kids. I learn via text books. They just can't do it yet, and they are a good way ahead of most of the kids in their grade.
> Youtube, DVDs, video cassettes, radio lessons, and phonographs all failed to be a revolution
Hard disagree. Young people may never know the struggle, but using an old book to teach you how to build your first {$project} was a really crappy gamble back in the day. Oftentimes the results of your efforts were mediocre or just flat out sucked because you tripped over every gotcha possible.
Thanks to the pandemic and WFH, I was able to spend hours every week on Youtube watching master craftspeople from around the world teach me skills I've always wanted to learn. It's unbelievable how accessible learning a new skill is compared to even a decade ago.
The people for whom personalized learning works well, can do it with any technology, even books. I recently learnt a new programming language from an O'Reilly book just fine, then did some exercises in a (non-AI) online REPL/tutorial tool, then went off to code a project of my own.
On the flip side, I've absolutely never been able to pick up a new programming language from a book.
Most of the languages I've learned I started with YouTube video tutorials, but most recently when I wanted to learn Rust do you know what worked really well for me? GitHub Copilot. I started a new project, and when I didn't know what syntax to use I made a comment and examined the output. By the time the project was done I'd learned how Rust worked and could write code without help.
Before making sweeping pronouncements about what does or doesn't work for learning, it would be worth considering that people vary widely in which learning strategies work well for them. You might just be projecting your own preferred learning style out on the world.
Note that when Bill Gates praises GPT-4o, he is at least partially "talking his book": he retains large amounts of equity in Microsoft, and has been intimately involved in MS's big bet on OA - in 2019, when Kevin Scott was lobbying a big investment in OA (https://gwern.net/doc/reinforcement-learning/openai/2019-sco...), Bill Gates was CCed, Gates invested in Inflection (recently rolled up into MS), and Sam Altman & Greg Brockman personally demoed GPT-4 to Gates at his mansion (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/03/technology/ai-openai-musk...) to show that GPT-4 could solve the AP Biology test that Gates had said would convince him LLMs were real. And I'm sure his involvement now goes well beyond just those few instances I've happened to note.
> When Brian and Ben reached the lab, the computer was running but the tree-robot was folded and motionless. “Robin, activate.” ...
> “There now exists a procedural model for the behavior of a human individual, based on the prototype human described in section 6.001 of the CYC-9 knowledge base. Now customizing parameters on the basis of the example person Brian Delaney described in the employment, health, and security records of Megalobe Corporation.”
> A brief silence ensued. Then the voice continued.
> “The Delaney model is judged as incomplete as compared to those of other persons such as President Abraham Lincoln, who has 3596.6 megabytes of descriptive text, or Commander James Bond, who has 16.9 megabytes.”
That's an interesting "what-if" though... How would a future generation be affected if they have a parasocial relationship with Lincoln? Or any historical figure? Or a currently running politician?
I feel sci-fi authors have their work cut out for them...
I sort of feel he's impressed by the size of his investment in a technology that has mostly failed to live up to it's promises. The rest is an attempt to spin himself out of this negative value position.
There has always been a split between students who are there to learn and those who are there to get a diploma. AI will simply make this divide wider. Students who actually want to acquire knowledge and skills will benefit enormously, while students who are trying to skate through with minimal effort will find themselves hitting the job market with literally no skills or knowledge beyond copying-and-pasting in and out of chat windows.
I'm as excited about the potential as anyone. I would love to give my child an AI tutor like The Primer.
But nothing like that exists today, as far as I know. I was disappointed with Khanmigo when I tried it back in August. Although I have a year's subscription to it, I've not asked my child to try it. It seemed too boring and told me my answer (to a problem it had given me) was wrong, even though I was right.
I'm optimistic, but I think there's work to do. I've not seen an AI system that can apply the pedagogy of George Polya: give the student a small hint by asking a question that could have occured to the student themselves.
> told me my answer (to a problem it had given me) was wrong, even though I was right.
This is a fatal flaw. It absolutely cannot make mistakes like this if it's going to succeed because that will undermine the confidence that teachers and students have in the system.
Khanmigo is a surprisingly naive product, but this isn't a particularly hard problem:
1. It's not necessary to invent all these problems from scratch. At least for any "normal" math problem the world doesn't need new problems on demand, you just have to fetch one. Khan Academy has a perfectly good bank of problems.
2. If you have a baked problem you should hang onto knowledge about the correct answer. Khanmigo just seems to put it in the chat history where it is easily forgotten.
3. If you want customized problems you might need to invent problems instead of reading problems from a bank. In that case you might want to create a more "formal" problem and an "informal" problem, where the formal problem is expressed clearly and solvable (e.g., by Wolfram or SageMath or something), and therefore can be verified. Translating the formal problem into a word problem is generally much more reliable than inventing a problem and correct solution.
That said, "right answers" aren't IMHO that interesting. Helping the student attack a problem in the right way, or adapt their knowledge to be able to apply it to a problem, is more interesting and helpful.
Aside from the wrong answer, I also didn't like the fact that it just told me to multiply the numbers, instead of giving me a smaller hint that might allow me to realize this for myself.
Amazing that it made such a basic mistake, so many times. I thought they wrapped the AI in enough layers of meta-cognition that it wouldn't make mistakes like this. Maybe AI in education really is like FSD, as another commenter said (so close, yet so far).
> a time-honored internet tradition: pointing out that the science fictional reference point a tech founder put forward was not an aspirational one, but, in fact, a dystopia containing a warning meant to be heeded, not emulated.
Generative AI works by selecting the most likely next words.
But students misunderstand in many different ways. How would it be tailored instead of another way of delivering lesson plans?
Even assuming you already had the topology of the problem space, you'd have to interrogate the student with all possible ways for each question to determine what's missing for them.
But part of the problem is impedance matching: failing students get little positive feedback because they have to correct many mistakes before they start getting things right. Interrogation makes the impedance-matching problem much, much worse (no matter how sweet and enticing the voice).
Sure, I believe in success patterns and strong leaders. But I'd need to see a sketch of how Khan understands and addresses the problems before I'd invest or rely on this as anything other than a stop-gap that continues the under-funding of mass education.
As someone coming from a Tech background and has become deeply involved in education recently, I cannot agree more. There is just so much difference in terms of understanding education among people who have worked with children and people who have not.
For majority of the time the active 'response' from the student is 'no response'. Teachers are amazing at understanding silence and building conversation on silence.
Knowing the social background of the a student, and hence knowing realities of their hardships is the begining point of starting to enable a student who is laggning behind.
AI-tutors are(potentially) great, much like how videos are way better than reading books from a childs perspective, but it is far from innovation in education that few influencers are trying it to be.
> As you work through a challenging set of fraction problems, it won’t just give you the answer—it breaks each problem down into digestible steps. When you get stuck, it gives you easy-to-understand explanations and a gentle nudge in the right direction. When you finally get the answer, it generates targeted practice questions that help build your understanding and confidence.
You don't need an LLM for this. Since the topic is specifically math, consider what that actually entails, especially for K-12 math education. The example is fractions. The rules for fraction problems are well-defined, we don't need an LLM to guess at the steps, we can literally write a simple program that encodes all the individual steps and prompts the student when they make a mistake to step back and walk through each small step (instead of taking big steps, like going from 1/2+1/4 to an answer have the student fill out each step like how to make the denominators the same and then adding the numerators and then, if applicable, simplifying).
Generating problems is also not something an LLM needs to be involved in. Such a strange and wasteful use of these tools.
So then what if the generative LLM is simply the "UI", tailored to the student, but working from a topological map of the subject matter in the form of quizzes? And if it were able to present questions targeted at student gaps, broken down to be challenging but achievable, i.e., to build success patterns?
Wouldn't that work for any subject matter - not just math?
This has seemed like the next logical step in education for a while now.
I recently used ChatGPT to help me understand some Kubernetes and Terraform configuration. It was able to talk to me about the configuration and also help me understand some of the larger context- how information flows between the systems, what the terms mean, etc.
It provided direct explanations, and metaphors when I needed it, and let me ask clarifying questions.
This kind of learning system would be especially useful for people like myself who have Learning Disabilities, where once I understand a topic, I can speed ahead, but sometimes I'll just get "stuck", sometimes for days/weeks. Having a tutor can help, but there's a lot of embarrassment and that can lead to anxiety, which can in turn make it harder to learn.
Obviously such a system will need some safeguards around it, but having a system like this be able to both explain and point to primary sources could be a complete game changer for students.
having used his videos more than a decade ago, i recognize that he has been a trailblazer in his field. i appreciate how he applied emerging tech in the past for improving access to education.
at the same time, i see the limitations with this project in terms of what it wants to achieve.
tech alone is not the answer, AI or not. i had very positive experiences with teachers only using blackboards or whiteboards, and forgettable moments with those with the newest smartboards. to me, it is the teacher that brings out the value of these tools.
today's LLMs, no matter how large and expensive to run, do not capture the personal ingenuity that can replace teachers. this is not an old man shouting at the clouds opinion or any arrogance about humans being superior. critical thinking is a rare idea taught in schools, at least when i was growing up. these systems do not give an opportunity to do that.
i am happy to be proved wrong in the future but while i get the costs associated with researching and running the service, i feel it is unethical for them to be the ones charging for its access. it seems against the foundation's goals.
AI is like the promise of back when consumer internet was just popping off.
You can have all the knowledge at your fingertips!
What actually happened: ads shoved down our throats and way more distractions (porn, games, etc.)
Meanwhile math and reading levels continue to plummet.
So I don’t have high hopes. Those of us who use tools to succeed will continue to do so. Others who can’t control themselves will keep complaining. Nothing new.
AI will give us an answer with ads shoved into it with companies bidding to show their ad with the answer. People will do degenerate shit with AI, and gaming addiction will continue. People will still keep blaming the system and wondering why they can’t get ahead while spending most of their free time wasting it on gambling, porn, and games instead of learning.
The world will be split unevenly into people who research to contribute to AI knowledge base, and people who simply consume AI content.
The question is. How will we (the enlightened ones lol) make money off it?
Having been through a few technology cycles now, I am also skeptical. We're in the honeymoon phase where anything seems possible and everything is cheap or free (VC/company subsidized). What will AI look like when it comes time to pay the piper? More ads? Perpetual subscriptions?
The consumer internet is a blessing and a curse. Without consumers the internet doesn't have much economic benefit. To use the internet to sell things you need the normies- so you pull all the non-technical people onto the internet where they are scammed, hacked, and manipulated at scale.
Disclaimer I'm talking about the US, but I believe it applies at least somewhat to most of the modern education system everywhere.
The problem of education isn't the lack of resources it's the lack of purpose. The internet is all the resources you will ever need. Sure AI could augment this a little. Maybe it could re-explain something you can't quite wrap your head around. The problem is that kids know that the education system isn't even kind of preparing them for what's to come. Knowledge work and trades couldn't be further from what public school prepares you for. Having a teacher for every kid wouldn't change this. The problem is so fundamental, and the solution is so destructive that we can't just tack on one more thing to "fix" education.
Learning comes from doing, augmented with reflection. Public Schools don't ever do either of those things. The closest you ever get to doing anything that another human could want is building something in shop class. The closest thing you get to reflection is a grade that can only be negative feedback or the lack of feedback, plus there's no time for building on that reflection, just move onto the next thing.
> Knowledge work and trades couldn't be further from what public school prepares you for.
Amen!
K-12 in the US needs a massive overhaul, but there are (at least) two problems:
1. Deeply entrenched administrators.
2. Parents who put high value on the child care component of school (regardless of whether learning is happening), which became extremely obvious during Covid, and they don’t want to risk losing that.
Is your comment based on recent experience? I have two young school age kids, and my experience with them does not align with your assessment.
Their schooling is vastly different from the "Sit still, do what you're told" model that was used to train the an upcoming generation of factory workers.
> Their schooling is vastly different from the "Sit still, do what you're told" model that was used to train the an upcoming generation of factory workers.
Not op, but this is an area I know a bit about.
1. You’re right that instruction methods have evolved over time to be less teacher-centered. This might be considered an improvement. That said, good teachers who implement these methods well are mostly in good school districts (no surprise).
2. The issue comes more in secondary ed, imho. The issue is with the curriculum. In 1900, only about 4% of HS-aged kids went to HS. These folks were the elite, and the HS education was preparing them for a 2-year or 4-year program after HS (again, mainly for elites). The curriculum that existed then is largely the same one we have today, and it’s completely absurd. We get odds things like lower level math (non-calculus track) basically being re-heated middle school math. We get four required years of “English” that focuses on grammar (often taught in a dubious, prescriptive manner) and literature largely written by dead people (when there is plenty of good modern lit and poetry to learn about/through). We have science education that largely does not train students to engage scientific thinking (again, except maybe for the honors classes at good schools). To summarize, we have a curriculum designed for college-bound elites that has been ungracefully shoe-horned into a one-size-fits-all train wreck.
All of the curricular issues are solvable, but it there will need to be a critical mass of support in local communities to be able to implement change through the inertia of the existing system of education administrators and (to some extent) teachers.
Until this happens, imho it’s best to look at secondary ed as very expensive child care for the vast majority of students, with the exception being in better school districts (usually where the elites or elite-ambitious live).
Primary ed is ok… the main learning outcomes that folks need are the three Rs. Some folks, especially on HN, seem to think scientific thinking should be included. They’re not wrong, but that only flies in schools/communities of elites.
I never found the Kahn academy videos good. His teaching style was just totally off. I found some videos by a company called The Teaching Company. Really old school, very early 2000s or late 90s. Incredibly high quality truly gifted teachers—-just less well known online.
I used to checkout their "The Great Courses" dvds from the local library (in the USA) long time ago. They were a set of presentations each a full lecture length and delivered by respected professors in their fields. No flashy animations/music/narrative distractions but sedate multimedia in support of the lecture. I am not sure how it has changed nowadays but people should definitely check it out; there is a lot of good content there.
My son is a second grader who is behind on his english reading and writing. He's smart, able to understand and convey complex ideas, and can solve math problems beyond his grade level.
He is classified as learning disabled, and has IEP through the school district which gives him accommodations including access to assistive technologies--such as an OCR reader that will read the words on a page to him to allow him to answer questions.
At the very least, AI for ed-tech is the next evolution of those technologies, which may even be allowed without the need of a 504 or IEP (e.g. each student in his class has a school issued laptop).
I'm also curious what subjects would be made obsolete because of the power of AI assistants. I certainly was not taught Latin, and my kids will never need to learn cursive writing.
All the articles I've read about AI improving education make the same assumption: AI will help students learn that same things as we teach them now easier.
If AI will be so revolutionary to me that first mean a complete overhaul of what students should learn? We haven't even properly done this reevaluation of the curriculum even for being constantly connected to the internet.
Students really need to learn a lot fewer things on average, but the fundamentals matter even more now. Honestly, 90% of the population doesn't need more than elementary math, but they really need to understand how percentages or pro-rata work.
In the end, looks like a puff piece by Bill Gates is still a puff piece.
I studied engineering in university, and as part of that I took enough calculus, numerical methods, statistics, and logic courses to earn a math degree along side my engineering one.
I spent hundreds of hours poring over 1500 page textbooks and being given the driest lectures imaginable by people who were delivering them on autopilot.
I would estimate that one hour of khan academy was roughly equivalent to a weeks coursework, which was 3 lectures and probably an extra 2 hours of self study per lecture. It was undoubtedly the only reason I succeeded in the way I did.
If you're in the bay area he has an upcoming event tomorrow, at Kepler books [1], where he would be talking about AI in education and his new book Brave New Words [2].
With teaching now (even via videos), there's no way to present material for 30 students when they vary widely in background understanding and attention span, so only the high middle gets targeted. This creates a vicious cycle where the spread only gets larger as students age.
If slow kids can be tutored to catch up, they'll be much more motivated as part of the class, instead of the losers. If fast kids are given a taste of how ignorant they remain, they might have more sympathy for others, and might try to help instead of compete.
I would argue there's a very human element to tutoring that AI does not provide.
Having been a tutor and also having been tutored myself, the personal relationship is very important. To know some other human is taking their very human time to help you is a powerful motivating factor that an AI can't simulate. To see another human performing some task that you can't activates some kind of primal desire to emulate them. AI can't simulate that.
I'll admit I haven't read the book mentioned in the article. But I can't help but feel this is just dreaming about "AI" as a magical intelligence that we can perfectly instruct and trust, instead of having an actual plan for how current SotA AI could deliver that experience. I personally wouldn't trust any current LLM to train my child, without having to go over all of its content and see if it was actually trustworthy or not.
If 3 delicious cans of Pepsi: The Taste of a Generation cost six dollars, how much does each thirst quencing soda can cost individually? We solve this by...
I began a Journey in my mid-20s that I'm still on. (38) I took math classes, starting at middle-school grade. Did most of the Khan material. Moved on to MitX classes in further math, and sciences. Now I am working on an ab-initio atom/molecule simulating for funsies.
Khan academy is an invaluable resource. When I have kids, it will be a core part of their curriculum!
Has anyone played with Khanmigo yet? Is it basically Khan Academy with a chatbot to help with questions, or does it differ completely from Khan Academy?
About ten years ago I was thinking of returning to university and was required to pass a high school level math exam to prove I still could do math as an adult (I couldn't, really!). Khan Academy was a pretty incredible resource. I was in a time crunch so I also hired a tutor for two hours a week and the combination worked really well for me. I could see swapping out a real life tutor with an LLM being pretty amazing and much more affordable!
I didn't end up returning to school, but now I've gotten the AI bug and need to upgrade my math skills, and I'm thinking that using a LLM to help learn about foundational math that applies to LLMs would be pretty neat.
> Chapter by chapter, Sal takes readers through his predictions—some have already come true since the book was written—for AI’s many applications in education. His main argument: AI will radically improve both student outcomes and teacher experiences, and help usher in a future where everyone has access to a world-class education.
I'd argue that the very thing that made Khan Academy successful in the first place was not "accessible education" or "cost prohibitive" practices, but Sal's human attention to the students needs and all the amazing content he created.
Thousands of people will pick up from this article that AI is the solution to the education, while in reality it is people like Sal who are the actual solution, with YouTube, AI and other tech just being the tools to help scaling human talent.
I agree that the LLMs of today 100% work for education. It's how I use them anyways, constantly have it open when I'm reading or doing a learning activity and throwing questions at it, or generating summaries, and it is extremely enriching as a layer on top of that self directed work. I'm sure people like Sal Khan will continue to innovate ways to make them more useful for guided curriculum and other capabilities without needing any real fundamental technology research. I think to play devils advocate though, there is a ceiling on learning placed by how much the student cares, can focus, and is motivated. That will still exist, we can just make the motivated students path easier.
I am currently using ChatGPT 4.0o to help me learn Japanese. If you have learned Japanese in the past, you know that the Genki textbooks are invaluable learning resources. The problem is that it's hard to find the motivation to work through a textbook and workbook alone.
I am navigating through a textbook with the audio feature. I take photos of the pages with my phone, then use ChatGPT as my language partner to work through the problem sets. When i switch to the notebook, i complete the work and then take another photo of it and have ChatGPT verify my work.
I agree with Gates here -- if you are motivated this changes the education game.
I work in academia and look forward to embracing AI tools. Students motivated to learn will do great with it. Others will need AI to really push them to learn, and it's not clear to me how that will work. Many students just want to know what they have to submit to get a grade. Spending 20 minutes chatting with AI about a topic might be a good learning activity, but incentivizing that with grading will be tricky.
I've sometimes wondered when I'll get called to the Dean's office because a student died in class because breathing wasn't specifically listed as a grading requirement on the syllabus.
There's always been an economic contradiction in a common education. The skills that a typical high school education will teach you are not very valuable, because they are oversupplied. No one is going to pay you to solve AP calculus problems or write an essay about the French Revolution; not because these are easy tasks, but because the world is full of people who can perform them.
AI education will continue this trend. AI can certainly teach you all kinds of remarkable skills. But the value of those skills will now plummet, because these are exactly the kinds of jobs that will be automated by AI!
Don’t think so. When my daughter needed the AI-powered Khan tutoring service last year for assistance with math, it was at a time when I had lost my job and depleted the family savings supporting the family. I pleaded for a waiver of the subscription, which was flatly and repeatedly denied. The result, my daughter’s math grades fell to the low 20 percent, and at no point did the teacher notify us. We’ve been repairing the damage ever since. I wonder if Sal Khan approves of abandoning low-income families, because his staff are stuffing families bad.
the article makes it as if the solution to education is "a dedicated tutor to every student". I do not think that's the case. The problem is that not every student has the motivation, and having a tutor on call 24-7 doesn't change it.
the article goes on to describe how such an AI tutor might work:
"As you work through a challenging set of fraction problems, it won’t just give you the answer—it breaks each problem down into digestible steps. When you get stuck, it gives you easy-to-understand explanations and a gentle nudge in the right direction. When you finally get the answer, it generates targeted practice questions that help build your understanding and confidence."
reading it, and watching the demo of gpt-4o tutoring math (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBrdd7xg-dg), I felt the opposite -- that if I had such a tutor, whatever motivation I had would have been stripped away by such a tutor. I really needed the quiet struggle with a problem, and feeling that I conquered it on my own, instead of being guided through a paint-by-number kit. I acknowledge that I might have an unusual learning style, or that I simply belonged to a generation that grew up without such tools, hence the aversion, much like my parents grew up without digital calculators (although they don't harbor any aversion to the use of calculators).
Yeah that's not an unusual learning style. No one can learn without struggle. There has to be some reason for your brain to remember something. If the AI is right there ready to do it for you, then why would you remember anything?
If the AI is at the stage of understanding these topics, debatable as that is, then why would you learn them as you can't compete against the computer, it can work 24/7 with no sleep.
If the AI doesn't understand then you are just learning a script you are being fed.
Some automation is obviously useful for transmitting information about various topics but the way this is being framed would seem to undermine the very need to learn in the first place.
LLMs are famously bad at math. It's one of the prototypical examples of problems they can't solve. Yet it's the prime example presented here.
So I am curious, is Gates suggesting that we will overcome the fundamental issues here or is he saying that (which is kind of interesting in itself) it's plausible to have a technology that is fundamentally bad at something, be an effective teacher of that thing to others?
This is a lot of words for not saying that students keep sending essays entirely written by ChatGPT and never proof-read by their “author.” Never having to do homework is affecting students dramatically, according to many teachers.
What Gates and Kahn describe is interesting, but it’s a little bit like talking about color theory and how the fact that a baseball bat is purple affected you after you just got whacked in the head with it.
A problem with AI assistants offering answers or reducing work in an education context is they harm cognitive labor (are "cheating") needed for learning by thinking and doing that leads to mastery. AI assistants in a learning context could instead be used ask context-sensitive quiz questions and point to other examples and learning resources.
The environmental cost of AI is cost prohibitive when each prompt is equivalent to dumping a 16oz bottle of water on the ground. The only ethical usage of AI is revolution, including the revolution to stop AI. And only then if it's used immediately and effectively for it, not a few years down the line.
(Khan Academy is excellent. Over a decade ago, my home-schooled daughter [we were not living in the US at the time] used Khan Academy throughout high school, scoring 2300 on the SAT and getting a full scholarship to a prestigious US college to study engineering.)
AI in education will be the FSD in driving. Everyone thinks we are very close and the tech is just about there. 10 years later we will have made some progress but nowhere near the utopia promised.
Bill Gates has been a long-time fan of Sal Khan. In fact, I first learned about Sal Khan over a decade ago when online publications reported that Bill Gates was using Sal's videos to teach his kids.
The article made me smile by how much disconnected to reality it is:
- kids give their assignments to AI so that it solves it for them, not for getting a hint.
- it has long been demonstrated human interaction is required to learn difficult things (such as reading/writing), otherwise kids would learn those skills on video.
- learning is about practicing difficult stuff. AI is about having the computer doing difficult stuff for you.
"Employees who can use AI effectively will be far more valuable than those who can’t."
The point of AI is that there is absolutely nothing to do for it to digest your problem. Show me someone who can't use AI? Must be illiterate?
"jobs of the future—which will become more enjoyable and fulfilling"
... finding and fixing the errors the AI made.
My parents are much better at counting with no calculator than my kids. Mental calculation is no more seen as a valuable skill now that everybody effectively has a calculator in his pocket (smartphone). AI will make some skills once valuable obsolete. The question is not how are we going to teach with AI but WHAT are we going to teach?
As someone who loves Khan Academy, who was taught math from it when my High School teachers couldn't, it really saddens me this is the emphasis Khan Academy chooses, instead of creating more material.
The fact is, Khan Academy was so useful to me in school precisely because it was NOT a resampling of a Wikipedia page, of every uninspired textbook I was ever forced to read. It was a smart, real life human being who understood the nuances of how actual human beings understood concepts. Sal didn't just break down complex mathematical subjects for me such that I was able to solve linear equations in echelon form, there was also a particular way he emphasised the words he spoke so I understood why something was important. The human factor is so important, and we're fucking over our next generation for market hype.
A few years ago, I was bullish on online learning. But no-one with common sense is as the helm. I am incredibly concerned that Microsoft is believing its hype at the cost of something that was at one point incredibly valuable to society.
Both Bill Gates and Sal Khan (and, for good measure, Mark Zuckerberg too) have tried revolutionizing education with technology before. If we look at exactly how and where past attempts went wrong, we might find some challenges for this one too.
I remember when MOOCs were the future of education, as students across the world would have free access to the best lectures from the best teachers and could watch them over and over again at their own pace. That ... didn't result in the second coming of Christ, to put it politely.
> AI tools and tutors never can and never should replace teachers.
This part confused me on several levels.
Let's break it down.
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1. Tutors (human) can not replace teachers on a mass scale
True, and the article touches on this: human tutors simply don't scale!
2. Tutors (human) should not replace teachers
False. Bloom's 2-sigma problem [0] states that on average, 1-1 tutored students outperform 98% of classroom-educated students. (!!!)
Therefore, if we could replace 1:30 education with 1:1 education, the evidence very strongly says that we should.
In other words, the only reason we have teachers, instead of tutors, is because we don't have enough tutors. If we had enough tutors, we would simply 1-1 tutor everyone -- assuming our goal is educational achievement.
3. AI tutors can never replace human tutors
This is a strange claim. It seems to imply that all technological progress will suddenly cease after today -- not just in AI, but human-computer interfaces, robotics, etc.? (Note: the article doesn't make this specific claim, so perhaps I'm straw-manning here.)
I don't expect convincingly human androids for a while. But are androids really necessary for teaching math? GPT-4o seems to do fine! [1]
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As far as the tech goes, I think the only thing missing is memory and personalization. Currently GPT doesn't know what I know, and what I don't know. What is the dependency graph of knowledge? (KhanAcademy had one, but they've taken it down...) Where in that graph are there gaps in my understanding? What are my specific goals and interests?
Can we present the most relevant learning materials to me in alignment with all these parameters? Or else, can we generate them on the fly? It's all a solvable engineering problem.
I hate edutech with a passion. It just saps away resources from the teachers and invests it into tech that is both expensive and ineffective. It’s mostly just a giant pathway for grift
If you have some form of financial independence in your life, some form of the grid backup, you know what is all this about. Did you think the richest of the elite will give their kids this form of education? Seriously? My kids learn in a classical way. No aid, no electronic devices, no "modern" bullshit. Critical thinking is a must in a world of corporations greed and digital dystopia. The school mandatory program is just a form of training ground. They learn how to see the real problems around and how to adapt to ever-changing hypocrisy.
Never trusted a word coming from the corporate monster Microsoft. Never looked at Bill Gates as more than a greedy manipulator and sociopath.
Downvotes don't change the reality:)
The elite will give their kids this education when it is better than what a team of dedicated humans can provide. We are no where near that stage though.
Greed is contagious. But looking at Closed AI and seeing Azure all over it is not easy to ignore. Looking at hostile takeover of FOSS at GitHub to train commercial product Copilot is another thing. We all knew the strategy when they bought it, and we all complied with the move. They have power because we refuse to challenge the lack of intervention from authorities. It is all a big scam.
I dunno, I've found ChatGPT (and its clones) have been immensely useful as a learning tool for me. Having it summarize stuff in different ways and being able to immediately ask clarifying questions has been sort of a game-changing learning tool, at least for me.
I don't think they should allow use of AI during tests because yeah, it'd just do all the work for them and they wouldn't learn anything, but I absolutely think there's value in being able to use it as a 24/7 instant tutor, particularly since ChatGPT can be coerced into explaining things in basically any style that you'd like.
Something I've found fun and bizarrely useful is having ChatGPT explain stuff in terms of scripts from King of the Hill. It's fun to hear Hank Hill compare ZF Set Theory to something as reliable and efficient as propane while Dale goes into tirades about how the government imposed the axiom of choice to distract away from System F.
Incredibly depressing to read this comment when I have tested GPT-4 extensively on simple finite group theory, and it could not reliably distinguish associativity from commutativity, either in prose or in computations, even for very small groups where I gave the multiplication table. The only simple abstract algebra problems it could solve were cliches it almost certainly memorized. I would never use an LLM for learning undergraduate mathematics.
It is overwhelmingly likely that you are learning incorrect facts about mathematics from ChatGPT, especially with the distracting gimmick of using cartoon characters.
I think most LLM codegen successes is due to their translation abilities, which is what transformers were designed to do in the first place. Software developers usually solve problems in human language (or maybe a sketch) with general “white collar reasoning abilities” that most of us honed in college, regardless of our major. The translation to Python or whatever is often quite routine. A human developer’s software-specific problem-solving skills are needed for questions involving state, unfamiliar algorithms, “simple” quantitative reasoning, newer programming languages, etc... all of which LLM codegen is pretty bad at.
First, just because there's issues with some misinformation with ChatGPT right now doesn't imply that it will always be there.
Second, I know what fuck I'm doing, and I'm sorry to "depress" you, but having a high level summary of something in terms of a cartoon is generally reasonably accurate, and generally any information I learn is also mechanically checked with Isabelle. I agree that it shouldn't be the be-all-end all of everything but if you're a student who's already frustrated with math, having a high-level description of stuff in terms of something you understand can be valuable.
Yeah, and I actually think that there can be some value in students being challenged to find some misinformation.
I maintain that one of the very best teachers I ever had was my 9th grade biology teacher, purely because she understood absolutely nothing about biology and appeared to just be making shit up. You could argue that in a vacuum this might be benign, but part of the issue is that she would use tests provided by the textbook, written by competent biologists. As a result of this, I had to learn to ignore most of what my teacher said, and sometimes argue back with her, and I feel like ironically I learned biology better than most people in that class; if nothing else I did get an A on all the "real" tests from the textbooks.
I think that arguing is actually a really underrated tool in education. Looking for and correcting bullshit is something that extraordinarily enlightening, at least for me, and I think AIs even in their current state can be useful for that.
A friend of mine who taught high school said he would tell his class each year that there would be one day when all he would spew would be made up baloney. But he wouldn't tell them which day that would be. It was up to them to discover it.
Yeah, I think priming people to look for bullshit is a good way to get them to pay attention.
While I do obviously hope that ChatGPT is able to curve against the misinformation problem, I actually do think there's been a lot of value for me personally in trying to figure out where it's getting things subtly wrong. Since I'm taking everything it says with huge grain of salt, the I am kind of forced to dissect every sentence a bit more thoroughly than I might with a textbook where I know everything is gonna be correct.
> Yeah, and I actually think that there can be some value in students being challenged to find some misinformation.
The future generations do not have the same background as we do.
For them it is very difficult to teach what is "misinformation", or have a thinking model like that, unless we make them read proper books and compare the content for the output of the AI.
But if the AI is soon correct enough, they don't get it, and they don't feel it important, and they just take the output from AI as fact.
I agree with all that, and that's why I think we should still keep using traditional books for the foreseeable future. I think that AI can be a terrific supplement, particularly if the students are told to challenge it a bit.
I think that just like human teachers, it'll be impossible to completely solve the misinformation problem, but I do think it'll get asymptotically close to being solved.
finding misinformation is a critical skill, but you need a basis to suss out bullshit. diving into the LLM plausibility deepend is not the best way for most people to distinguish the two.
I mentioned in a sibling thread that I am absolutely not suggesting we throw away textbooks or anything like that. I think we should still have and verified work that can referenced as a source of truth, and I think those should be the primary source of learning.
What I think is valuable is trying to figure out stuff where ChatGPT contradicts the "established" stuff, and having students figure it out.
I've never really had it do exercises in set theory, so tough to say. Usually the thing I like about it most is getting it summarize stuff at a high level, and then giving me keywords than I can independently search for and play around with in Isabelle. Like, for me I think part of the value to ChatGPT is simply figuring out some of what I don't know that I don't know.
When I was a lecturer I would use ChatGPT to generate Java homework assignment. It would do "ok" with that, but it usually required three or four iterations to get something that actually made sense, and usually it would require a bit of editing on my end to get results I was happy with. It still saved me a boatload of time though, particularly since it was even able to give me the assignment in pandoc-compatible markdown.
In my case, that's why I usually try and figure out something to do in Isabelle. Trying to prove some kind of property based on something I learned from ChatGPT. I also will occasionally grab exercises from "real" textbooks once I know the keywords to search in Kagi.
You're not wrong, but such is the way with nearly anything autodidactic. Learning how to find exercises that are challenging enough to actually learn something is a skill that I'm not going to pretend that I've mastered, but I would like to think I've gotten reasonably good with.
I was a college dropout for quite awhile but was still working as a software engineer, and while that's definitely not something I would recommend to anyone (it makes stuff way harder), it did have the advantage of making me pretty decent at teaching myself stuff, simply because my career depended on me being able to play with the "big boys" on an intellectual level.
For software it's comparatively easier though, because you can just have a project to do X, and if it's complicated enough you'll likely touch on a lot of CS concepts, even some you didn't directly self-select. Math (particularly more abstract math) is harder simply because it's much harder to practice; there aren't a ton of tangible "math projects" that you can hack on.
The closest way I've been able to practice it is by using Isabelle. I didn't use ChatGPT to learn that initially, since I learned how to use it before ChatGPT was released; I read through the "Concrete Semantics" free book and did those examples, so I guess that of proves your point more than mine.
> I don't think they should allow use of AI during tests because yeah, it'd just do all the work for them and they wouldn't learn anything, but I absolutely think there's value in being able to use it as a 24/7 instant tutor, particularly since ChatGPT can be coerced into explaining things in basically any style that you'd like.
For any test where there's an AI good enough to cheat with and cheap enough students can afford it, the test itself is no longer important — it is as pointless as testing how well students can use fountain pens when everyone uses a keyboard for actual work. Or how well they can play chess.
I'm not sure the exact shape of what each model can and can't do, but I am confident that this means they're never be an important "cheating" risk, not even when they're technically capable of it.
Well, no, I absolutely and fundamentally disagree with that.
We didn't just stop teaching children how to read the second that text-to-speech stuff came about, and we didn't stop teaching basic arithmetic the second that calculators were invented, and we didn't stop teaching algebra the second that Wolfram Alpha was released.
There is value in learning the fundamentals of things. If you never actually learn algebra, then it becomes effectively impossible to do the more advanced stuff.
> We didn't just stop teaching children how to read the second that text-to-speech stuff came about
TTS from visual input isn't good enough to be an example of that yet. It's good, but not that good.
> we didn't stop teaching basic arithmetic the second that calculators were invented and we didn't stop teaching algebra the second that Wolfram Alpha was released.
And yet, my A-level exams 22 years ago required me to have a graphic calculator.
> TTS from visual input isn't good enough to be an example of that yet. It's good, but not that good.
Even if TTS were absolutely perfect, then I'd still maintain my point.
> And yet, my A-level exams 22 years ago required me to have a graphic calculator.
Doesn't that sort of prove my point? Calculators existed and were obviously useful, but they didn't just stop teaching you algebra, despite knowing you had a calculator.
I see, so you're claiming that if AI can be utilized to solve the problem, and it's determined to be useful, then it should be allowed to be on a test as a result, in the same way that a graphing calculator is no longer considered cheating?
I think the disagreement I have is that I think part of the reason calculators are allowed on calculus tests is because they're actually not that useful for a lot of what they teach you in calculus. I had a graphing calculator in my math and physics classes in high school, but most of my work was still done with a pen and paper. The calculator was of course useful for the arithmetic stuff, and it could be useful to sanity-check your work (e.g. to see if the roots you calculated were correct), but I still had to do most of the actual calculus by hand.
Even when I got a calculator with a CAS built in (HP 50G), I would still have to do most of the algebra by hand, and honestly if my teachers had known that my calculator had a CAS I suspect they wouldn't have allowed me to use it to begin with.
I used to agree with this point, but I actually changed my stance.
Once you hit a problem that an AI cannot solve, it's good to be at least aware of what's going on in the field. You don't necessarily have to remember every formula and every fact off the top of your head, but having an intuition on what facts and formulas there are and where they can be used is immensely helpful.
Imagine you're writing a program in an esoteric scripting language that Copilot doesn't understand, and you need to put a large array of events in order from oldest to newest. If you had to learn this sort of think before, you'll immediately have an intuition that this is called sorting, there are slow (n^2) sorting algorithms and faster (n log n) sorting algorithms and you want the latter, and that quicksort is probably a good candidate to start with. You don't necessarily have to be able to write quicksort by hand, you can look up an implementation online and port it to your weird proprietary language, but the intuition is important.
That sounds like a different thing than I'm saying, and I agree with what I think you're saying.
So, if an AI can answer "what's a fast sort function" with "quicksort, here's some pseudocode: …", that's a related but different question to "write quicksort in [this brand new language you've never encountered before]".
Is like how AI won't take our jobs, but it will take over for each individual task that our jobs are made from.
Fountain pens are easier to use than most ball point pens. If you need to think deeply about a problem there are few better things than a binder of a3 paper and a fountain pen to think.
That said the uselessness of education is the point. It's a signal that you're willing to do pointless work for future rewards. We may as well replace it with counting beans and it would be just as effective.
and then the AI explains how it was solved, step by step. You can repeatedly ask it to clarify, and it has endless patience and won't get bored or sick of you.
Eventually, you understand how the equation is solved. No human teacher would be able to achieve this.
This immediately reminds me of the scene in Terminator 2 where Sarah Connor is reflecting on how the terminator, reprogrammed to aid John Connor, is the best father figure he’s ever had.
“It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him. Never shout at him or get drunk and hit him or say he was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there, and it would die to protect him.”
That requires a young student who is really self-motivated to keep asking it to clarify things. Plenty of teachers, parents, and tutors are willing to keep trying new ways of explaining things to kids until they understand it. The kid giving up is way more common than the adult without someone pushing him to keep trying or coming back to it regularly. Obviously, not every child has someone in his life that cares enough to do that, but I can't see AI as anything other than a subpar substitute.
I guess the difference is that there is a social dynamic at play between a student and an instructor. The student may tire of some aspect of the relationship before they tire of learning the material.
For example, unless the instructor has some kind of Jedi master level self control they may begin to show frustration at being asked the same question repeatedly or with minor variations.
Exactly. In school I couldn't understand the Heine-Borel theorem and a professor actually got annoyed at me asking about it even though it was just one time. When ChatGPT was first released one of the first things I did was ask it to explain it to me. Even the 3.0 model was pretty good at it!
I must admit, I am quite envious of students with these tools. I wish I had this during my studies.
Certainly as my parent's generation must have been with the internet and computers for me.
I'm not sure what to do with this envy. Though, it has made me want to have a child even more, just to see first hand how they could develop so much faster and smarter than me.
What I also love is that you can ask it to explain with varying degrees of simplicity.
You can say, ELI5 (like the Explain Like I'm 5 years old Subreddit), or explain it like a child, or explain it in very simple English (which is like Simple English wikipedia).
It is actually going to be the greatest learning tool, but only for people that genuinely want to learn.
A human teacher can see the problem from the students perspective and understand the error they make and why they make it. No current ai would be able to achieve this.
But alas, few human teachers can or will take the time to do this per student. Infinite time and patience really are the ai's superpower here IMO.
Neither can you easily notice that when a human teacher/tutor does that. At least with math, you're able to try it yourself and see if it works. I've had many cases where following through on a misleading explanation by a teacher/book actually ended up leading to me better retaining the topic.
That's absolutely a bug that needs to be fixed, but I think it's possible. Maybe have the network which generates the answer be moderated by another network that assesses the truthiness of it.
It's just a matter of priorities for the company designing the models.
Especially in a limited domain like grade school math, it seems entirely plausible that we can have models in very short order that ~never hallucinate. There's no external dependencies and the problem space is extremely well-defined and constrained. Much, much, much easier than making something like Chat-GPT never hallucinate
They would, but only if you were rich enough to afford a personal tutor. There's plenty of scientific evidence that students who have one learn a lot faster than those stuck in a classroom. With AI, you can probably get most of the benefits of a personal tutor for a fraction of the price.
There are already multiple websites that will solve math problems that the user submits and then walk through the individual steps one by one. I'm pretty sure the solutions are based on mathematics and not a trained AI.
I have coworkers who already stop to type things into a GPT before using any part of their mind to think about things. At this point I assume its inevitable that for large segments of people, who are not actively trying to maintain the independence of their mind, will allow these computers to do their thinking and decision making for them.
Calculators keep us from having to practice a certain skill and we accept whatever consequences of that, we've survived it. But yeah, imagine if the skill we no longer had to practice was critical thinking period.
The issue is that AI is not at least yet accurate enough for that.
You need think on your own and be expert to spot all the inaccuracies. But then again, we are talking about how students can learn based on that...
There is an important point here; the curriculum needs to change, a lot.
There is little point in writing essays any more. We’ll need to find other ways of testing knowledge acquisition.
But also, we’ll need other menus of skills/knowledge to acquire. It seems to me that rote memorization of facts is even less useful than it was 5 years ago. However being able to synthesize facts and ideas, this is where the human edge will be concentrated.
With AI to do the grunt work, maybe we can have our kids actually building meaningful things much earlier than they would otherwise be capable of.
People who find the tool to do the work for them will be fine. I remember “learning” to use Mathematica so I could easily complete copious calculus assignments and homework in high school.
It didn’t keep me from learning the material - a lot of those assignments and problem sets were simply busy work — but did improve ho much free time I had to read and surf the net and learn new tech things.
The most of the students will not use it for improving their own text or iteration process, unless the penalties for cheating are very high. They instead copy-paste the instructions, add some adjustments, and then copy-paste the output. This will give them results in the shortest amount of time, if there are assignments where something needs to be returned. But how to detect cheaters?
Too many students do tasks as in "completion" oriented way, not in learning oriented way. I am mostly talking from college/university perspective.
Picture this: you're a high school junior struggling to understand simple free-body diagrams. You ask the AI tutor for help and it gives you a pile of bullshit. Unfortunately the bullshit is written in the exact same authoritative tone as your (correct) textbook, and the AI temporarily gaslights the actual human teacher into accepting a wrong answer, even though the teacher has a B.S. in physics.
(Source: a very smart science teacher I know and won't name. Keep in mind most high school science teachers have weak scientific backgrounds. This technology is poison.)
Solve one problem with the help of a LLM, then solve three problems of the same type without the help of a LLM. Might need a human teacher to explain to the student why this approach is necessary, though.
But does a typical teenager actually need to "keep up in math"? I would hazard a guess that only maybe 5% of people would need to ever utilize any math beyond basic algebra. Wouldn't it make more sense to leave these kids to do something else with their time, while offering personalized (possibly AI supported) math programs to those who actually intend to do something with it?
I think that number might be a bit higher if students had access to near-constant tutoring to answer any kind of questions that come up; I think a lot of kids get frustrated because they don't immediately get something and there isn't someone around to answer questions.
Sample size of one, and obviously there's a million confounding variables here, but I think that my love of math stems from the fact that both my parents, and especially my dad, really loved math (and physics), and so whenever I had any questions about any aspect of math (at least up to calculus and differential equations), I could ask one of them for help pretty much whenever I wanted, and they would enthusiastically help me immediately, and eventually I grew to love it myself.
Eventually I did well enough in math to where they gave me a test in school and I was able to skip two grades in it (going from 7th grade to 9th grade level). I ended up getting much more into discrete math and surpassed my parents in the more "pure" math. Even if my genetics were completely unaltered, I am quite convinced that if my parents weren't there to provide constant help then that wouldn't have happened.
I think AI has the possibility of providing a comparable experience to what I had. It can patiently explain every aspect of math that any middle or high school student is likely to come across, and I think it has power to "de-frustrate" them as a result.
I teach people who thought this way, and later decided to enter a career that requires basic data analysis literacy. They struggle with things like order of operations, which is incredibly frustrating. Teaching math up to the high school/introductory college level is about building foundational skills that can be applied in different directions. Will they need to apply trig identities? Probably not, but the process of getting there in high school is good for their minds and foundational abilities.
So yes, I'd personally say we should expect people to "keep up in math".
Those 5% go on to make an upper-class salary sitting in an air-conditioned office instead of a lower-class salary turning wrenches and stacking boxes. What makes more sense than enabling everyone who can to attain that life?
(Plus every one of them who gets out makes life better for the rest at least by reducing downward pressure on wages, and hopefully also by creating new business opportunities that raise wages further by increasing supply. Rigorous education is almost always a win-win: https://matiane.wordpress.com/2021/09/15/democratic-educatio... )
Speaking of AI, I wouldn't be surprised if, in the next decade, jobs that involve turning wrenches would pay significantly more than most jobs that can be done fully on a computer.
Perhaps, but only because most jobs done on computers today are by people who also have little if any math or programming ability. Change that and it's a different world to make those predictions in.
I mean wouldn't those blue collar jobs get more and more saturated then if office jobs get less and less pay so people start moving to those? Personally I very much respect people who do those jobs, but I could never do them because of my disability so my only good choice is pretty much computer related jobs or then it's back to some sort of government benefits.
There is a reason why we just don't give calculators for kids in elementary school. They need to know the basics first. Calculators have been around for quite long time. Why AI suddenly changes that?
It's amazing how many people here know more about education than Sal Khan. /s
Not that Sal Khan is infallible but he is a good-egg. You're gonna have to give me more than, "this'll never work because of <cynical dime-a-dozen take>."
What else would you call Khanacademy if not a pioneer of innovation in education? You can learn all kinds of subjects using their platform in an incremental way on a massive scale. The platform includes little tests to test your understanding after you watched the videos that explain the concept.
Sal Khan’s work changed my life and allowed me to build a foundation in not only math, but also finance and economics, that allowed me to feel confident enough to go to college. I did not have a support system or people in my life who could teach me these things, but I had the internet and patience, which meant I had opportunities that did not exist even a few years before (this was in 2014).
Now I work in AI and generally have a life I could not have dreamed of. Every time I go to the grocery store to buy something and don’t have to worry about my card being declined, it feels like magic. Even years later.
If I had been in that situation a few years earlier, my life would be very different.
I’m excited to live in a world where my daughters and countless others will have a tutor that can help them maximize their potential throughout their lives. I’m excited not only for them, but for society. What a time to be alive.