from Hacker News

Sal Khan: How AI could save (not destroy) education [video]

by vanilla-almond on 8/27/23, 2:43 PM with 72 comments

• by routerl on 8/27/23, 4:12 PM

  So, Khan Academy is experimenting with providing every student with (what they call) a "personal tutor".

  Examples given are: in coding and math, identifying potential mistakes in partial solutions, and suggesting how the student might get unstuck; in literature, an AI impersonates characters in a novel so the student can ask them questions (e.g. "Mr. Gatsby, why do you keep staring at that green light?"); in writing, the AI writes with the student, rather than for students.

  The flip side is teachers saving time on lesson planning, grading, etc, all the work that's adjacent to actually teaching.

  A lot of this is a feature preview for Khan Academy, and a big part of it is just the ReACT pattern[1] (have people settled on this name?).

  To me, even all of the above is just an efficiency increase, which means workloads will increase to fill the available time, and we might see student to teacher ratios in the order of tens of thousands to one. How much of a future teacher's career will be about maintaining their AI systems? How much of learning will be like that too?

  [1] https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/python-react-pattern

• by logicchains on 8/27/23, 4:00 PM

  One of the biggest factors impacting education outcomes is students per teacher. Students tutored one-on-one learn better than students in small classes, and students in small classes learn better than students in large classes. Because if there are fewer students per teacher, the teacher can devote more time and attention to each student. AI promises to put a decent one-on-one tutor in the hands of every student for a fraction of the cost of human tuition, potentially bringing about a huge leap in educational attainment. No longer will private tutors be restricted to the rich only.

• by dtnewman on 8/27/23, 6:53 PM

  Maybe AI is going to save education, but the next few years are going to be very rough. I built a plugin for Chrome that helps detect cheating [1] so I've been talking to a bunch of teachers lately and pretty much everyone acknowledges that ChatGPT is a game changer for how schools will need to run. Plagiarism, tutors and parent help have been around for a while, but they still required most students to put in some effort. Now, any student can have chatGPT generate a book report for Lord of the Flies in less than 5 minutes. The common theme I hear from teachers is that the education model will need to flip, where students do more writing in class and more learning outside of class. It sounds simple, but it's actually a massive change to implement and things are gonna be very tricky over the next few years until the dust settles more.

  [1] https://www.revisionhistory.com, which I originally thought would be most useful for cheating, but interestingly, many teachers are more interested in using it to help students work through revisions. I've gotten feedback from teachers that they plan to have students use ChatGPT to start their assignments and then task them with updating, modifying and annotating them, so I'm trying to figure out which features to build to support that.

• by akasakahakada on 8/27/23, 3:22 PM

  Current education system is broken. You can't learn anything. Learning need feedback loop, but this do not exist.

  In school, you hand in your homework, get the feedback only after Christmas. Because human cannot evaluate 100 students' homework efficiently.

  Majority of academic textbook are trash. Some author even say "we have 300 new exercises in this edition" proudly, while the solution is often either nonexistent, or at the end of the book. Why at the end, not next to that problem? Or next page? Why wasting my time to flip pages back and forth?

  If the content of exercise is important, why not include that into the text?

  If instructor is needed, why not making every concepts into Q&A as they had already been explained in office hour or email somewhere else? Why zero effort being put into knowledge accumulation?

  Human failed at education. ChatGPT obviously is a more knowledgeable entity, personally I prefer that more than human instructor.

• by TimPC on 8/27/23, 6:41 PM

  The AI I want in education generates a test and then based on my responses to questions figures out the exact content I need from a huge library. Imagine asking a student 15 math questions with adaptive difficulty in a dynamic test to figure out the next content they need to learn from complete videos of JK-Uni mathematics? Instead of teaching to an age, we give students exactly the content they need right now.

• by shartstorm92 on 8/28/23, 7:33 PM

  This is gross posturing and indicates future rent seeking behaviour. Imagine getting in front of people and telling them that some corporation trained the font of wisdom, and that you'd be happy to charge fuckin' admission! What absolute dogshit. All that future rent seeking for a glorified DAN prompt. This is the digital equivalent to making everyone do bullshit jobs because we never figured out how to deal with increased worker productivity from manufacturing.

• by L_226 on 8/27/23, 7:12 PM

  I really see the potential here (if it is not already happening) for fine-tuned LLMs to start generating bespoke defence and economic policies. Think about the amount of data you could feed a system about orthodox management strategies, current supply chains, demographics etc.

  Probably at least 50% of current global governments / bureaucracy could be wholesale replaced by a single decent LLM, and the economic and social outcomes would be far better.

• by akasakahakada on 8/27/23, 5:42 PM

  I think teachers should probably use ChatGPT for a couple days before starting this conversation. It is the common ground. Not knowing what ChatGPT is able to do hinder valuable debate.

• by asfgioanio on 8/27/23, 3:19 PM

  I don't see any reason to listen to Sal Khan. As far as I can tell, he became a major figure in education, with ample resources and real power, because he is good at explaining things. Why would I assume he knows anything about how education works in general because people liked his approach to one very small part of it?

  At the gym, people assume anyone with big muscles must be an expert in medicine. Let's not make the same mistake here.