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Khan Academy integrates GPT-4 as every student’s customized tutor

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Re: Khan Academy integrates GPT-4 as every student’s customized tutor

#201

Post by kbelder »

davesque wrote: post #169
sebzim4500 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Just because humans make mistakes (or even as many or more mistakes than machines) doesn't mean the nature or consequences of the mistakes are the same. True, but this shouldn't be hard to measure. It's not like we will go from these AIs will go from teaching no one to replacing all teachers overnight. Give a random sample of classes access to a GPT-n powered tutor, and see if they do better or worse over the next f…

> this shouldn't be hard to measure > see if they do better or worse over the next few years This doesn't strike me as entirely ethical. Also, it may be hard to gauge the long term effects of subtle misinformation generated by these models.

I remember CS Lewis in "That Hideous Strength" talking about schools; he observed that no parent would let an organization experiment on their children, but that they can easily be convinced to send their kids to an experimental school, which in effect is the same.

That said, you have to compare results from different strategies, or else you'll never improve or react to changing circumstances. I think it's like medical trials; you experiment, but be willing to stop the moment you get good evidence that one option is worse than another.

Re: Khan Academy integrates GPT-4 as every student’s customized tutor

#202

Post by robbintt »

itronitron wrote: post #89
shawnjan8 wrote: post #6

Just to be clear: it's not for every student (at least not yet!). We are in a research phase sharing it with a limited subset of users. More details about our approach to the responsible development of AI: https://blog.khanacademy.org/aiguidelines/

It better not be for every student. I am very familiar with Khan Academy as I am currently guiding a student through several AP courses on khanacademy. In my opinion, khan academy's time would be better spent fixing the UI for teachers, and improving the organization of the physics curriculum. I would prefer that khan academy not be dragged into some PR fluff piece for some AI shill.

This argument has a pretty standard counterargument: organizations can and should do more than 1 thing at a time. It's a non-profit so you're probably better off contributing your ideas to them.

Re: Khan Academy integrates GPT-4 as every student’s customized tutor

#203

Post by zild3d »

lajamerr wrote: post #149
Buttons840 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My daughter is in 2nd grade and math is her favorite subject. I liked math too. I've looked forward to helping her learn more advance math through the years, but a doubt has entered my mind; will I have any reason to help her?

AI can efficiently teach your daughter how to solve math problems, but as a human, you can provide her with the context and understanding of why and what she's learning. AI is great at handling the technical aspects, freeing us to focus on cultivating our uniquely human qualities of empathy, creativity, and critical thinking. Letting the AI teach the how and the human teach the why and what can lead to a more holisti…

I'd like to agree, but it does seem like AI is getting better rapidly at providing the context and the "why" too (as well as creativity and critical thinking)

the language models can tell you how to do a fourier transform, and then you can have a conversation about what it all means, why it's important, the discovery, etc

    [me] why are fourier transforms relevant to learn? what is the history behind them

    [bing] Fourier transforms are relevant to learn because they are used in many fields such as signal processing, physics, and engineering. They are used to convert a function from the time domain to the frequency domain, which can help to identify the frequencies present in a signal and in what proportions. The Fourier transform was first introduced by Joseph Fourier in 1822 as a way to solve the heat equation. Would you like more information on the history of Fourier transforms or its applications?

Re: Khan Academy integrates GPT-4 as every student’s customized tutor

#204

Post by zild3d »

WASDx wrote: post #144
Buttons840 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My daughter is in 2nd grade and math is her favorite subject. I liked math too. I've looked forward to helping her learn more advance math through the years, but a doubt has entered my mind; will I have any reason to help her?

This sounds like an argument from when calculators were invented. We will keep getting more powerful technologies, and you will need to understand them. What we should be learning will continue to gradually shift.

Absolutely. With mobile internet/search engines, knowing how and where to find information became a more important skill than having to memorize that information

Re: Khan Academy integrates GPT-4 as every student’s customized tutor

#205

Post by terribleperson »

dopeboy wrote: post #103
mullingitover wrote: post #39

I wonder if this kind of intelligent tutoring could be the answer to Bloom's Two Sigma Problem. The limiting factor with that problem was that not everyone can afford a personal tutor. Having an AI tutor that can breeze through the SAT seems like it should give every student a major boost.

Circa late 2015, early 2016, my cofounder and I spent ~6 month attempting to build exactly this. Our hypothesis was that students self studying for the SAT used books (eg Kaplan) but the solutions in the back were poor in explaining how they arrived to the solution because they usually just cut to the chase rather than explaining the approach & helping you arrive to the solution. So we took each practice SAT math que…

The weird thing is how rarely approaches like the one you describe here are applied. It's not exactly a secret that simply providing the answer to math questions is great if someone gets them all correct, but nearly useless when someone gets them wrong. It's a problem that's been solved before - in a classroom, the traditional answer is working through the problem on the board and hopefully students are following along. Accompanying books with videos that work through the problems has been done at least since we had VHS.

So why are there still so many bad study books?

Re: Khan Academy integrates GPT-4 as every student’s customized tutor

#206

Post by asdff »

mullingitover wrote: post #39

I wonder if this kind of intelligent tutoring could be the answer to Bloom's Two Sigma Problem. The limiting factor with that problem was that not everyone can afford a personal tutor. Having an AI tutor that can breeze through the SAT seems like it should give every student a major boost.

On the other hand, I think it could also trigger an arms race, and might very well incentivize learning how to write a good prompt more than learning the concept well enough to succeed in a class. This reminds me in my era of the divide in success in my era, between students who were able to navigate the internet to the benefit of their academic success, and those that weren't able to do things like quickly paraphrase a wikipedia article on the subject and use the wikipedia citations as their own, find a relevant flashcard set someone else made and shared on quizlet, or even find pdfs of the teacher's solutions accompanying the textbook. Cheat codes are cheat codes. They will help in terms of your grade but usually hurt in terms of understanding.

Re: Khan Academy integrates GPT-4 as every student’s customized tutor

#207

Post by asdff »

alach11 wrote: post #200
recuter wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tutor doesn't just imply parents who can afford one but also who care enough to do so in the first place and see the value of an education. I think you'd find that even by the sat-prep age the actual limiting factor for many (most?) of the tutor-less is a fate-accompli attitude towards their path in life. Might as well turn on the chat bots at the cradle. Ah, and make sure everybody gets the same quality AI to pare…

Right... but the whole point Bloom's experiment is that if you give every kid a tutor, they perform (on average) at the 98th percentile. Not just the rich kids who can afford tutors. I do think there are valid concerns that this technology (like old-school human tutoring) could be disproportionately available to already-privileged children. This could potentially widen the achievement gap. But it seems way more likel…

Blooms experiment would probably more relevant here if he gave the kids the option of using a tutor, at their own liberty and pacing (not sure if he did in fact do so).

Everyone has chatgpt here but not everyone will use it. Just like how not everyone shows up to office hours or asks questions of their teacher.

Re: Khan Academy integrates GPT-4 as every student’s customized tutor

#208

Post by asdff »

tgv wrote: post #111
mullingitover wrote: post #39

I wonder if this kind of intelligent tutoring could be the answer to Bloom's Two Sigma Problem. The limiting factor with that problem was that not everyone can afford a personal tutor. Having an AI tutor that can breeze through the SAT seems like it should give every student a major boost.

It's not the tutoring alone. It's also the social effect. A machine simply does not exert that kind of influence, nor do online courses require the same amount of dedication and ambition. Compare MOOCs: they have incredibly high drop-out rates.

Chances are if you have a tutor you are paying good money for it, and have made appointments at regular intervals, that probably helps with motivation too. I think its possible that chatchpt and other learning ai will end up being like how office hours are used today in college. Like office hours, these tools are available for everyone, but for one reason or another not everyone will bother with them or use them to their fullest.

Re: Khan Academy integrates GPT-4 as every student’s customized tutor

#210

Post by mullingitover »

asdff wrote: post #206
mullingitover wrote: post #39

I wonder if this kind of intelligent tutoring could be the answer to Bloom's Two Sigma Problem. The limiting factor with that problem was that not everyone can afford a personal tutor. Having an AI tutor that can breeze through the SAT seems like it should give every student a major boost.

On the other hand, I think it could also trigger an arms race, and might very well incentivize learning how to write a good prompt more than learning the concept well enough to succeed in a class. This reminds me in my era of the divide in success in my era, between students who were able to navigate the internet to the benefit of their academic success, and those that weren't able to do things like quickly paraphras…

> On the other hand, I think it could also trigger an arms race, and might very well incentivize learning how to write a good prompt more than learning the concept well enough to succeed in a class.

I think general public having access to these AI tools is going to create a shift from scholastic aptitude testing to more performance testing. So no more homework, you use your time out of class to train so you can use the in-class time to perform based on the training you've been doing with your personal AI tutor.

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