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Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

independent.co.uk

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Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#101

Post by David_SQOX »

c7b wrote: post #98
userbinator wrote: post #3

Professor Malan said students would be warned of the pitfalls of the AI, saying they should “always think critically” when presented with information. I want to believe that this will actually happen, but my experience with people blindly trusting what a tool (not even an AI-based one) says, including but not limited to students, suggests that's not going to happen.

In some sense, for a class like CS50, experiencing first-hand that current LLMs are often confidently wrong could be seen as part of the educational mission. If you asked me what the first thing that a young user should know about today's tech is, then it's probably that.

Humans love taking the path of least resistance. It's tempting to trust whatever ChatGPT says, especially if you are a young student. Getting burned and learning the hard way is how most students are going to learn this lesson, just like any other lesson in life.

Being efficient and being lazy are rubbing up against each other with LLMs. A lot of blurred cognitive lines with this budding technology.

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#102

Post by andrewclunn »

If I can watch the lectures for free and get help from a chatbot... why pay for the piece of paper again? Oh right, social signaling. The real struggle of the education system: they need to innovate, but any such innovation will show just how useless (as an institution) they've become.

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#103

Post by nyberg »

vanviegen wrote: post #29
tjpnz wrote: post #7

I assume that the savings will be passed on to students?

We're considering doing something similar in my department. Based on some back-of-a-napkin math, it won't (yet) be cheap though, at about $0.40 per query. This is assuming the use of gpt-4 (chatgpt would be a lot cheaper, but it doesn't follow system level instructions very consistently, often spilling answers instead of replying with feedback, hints and leading questions). Also, projected costs per query are high be…

So the course changes to a game of prompt injection for students aware of the state of LLMs

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#104

Post by Claude_Shannon »

local_crmdgeon wrote: post #53
lr1970 wrote: post #47

Should Harvard reduce their exuberant tuition fees? After all, a chatbot does not need salary to feed its family, right?

Harvard only charges tuition to those who can afford it. You don't pay a dime if your parents make under $85k. https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/how-aid-works

I still don't like that solution.

What if your parents earn they much but don't want to pay for college for whatever reason, let's say just not getting together? Why be punished for what is not your fault? (Okay, in this case it could be if you're the reason parents don't want to talk to you, but you get the case)

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#105

Post by RyanAdamas »

joker_minmax wrote: post #99
RyanAdamas wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How something starts and is intended to be used becomes corrupted for the purposes of power and control; its clockwork and it absolutely happened with Latin. We could say the same thing about Medicine and Law today. All those technical terms in Latin are just for cohesion, right? Just coincidence they happen to be for the two largest union based professions in the west? I don't think so. Perhaps, they started out ori…

I see what you're saying about Latin usage being a barrier to understanding "legalese". However, in medicine it's absolutely justified, because it allows us to be more specific than using English alone. A lot of the English words for body parts are loanwords from Latin that mean something else because English does not have its own word for it. Cervix, for example, means "neck". English took the Latin word to describe…

That's fair, there are legitimate reasons for much of the complexities we deal with today. How far can that body of knowledge grow before a human can't actually understand it? Similar to maths, at what point do they advance so much that no one person, without bionic assistance, can learn it all? Consider the fact we call small pants "shorts" and current events "news"; the sophistication of our language is indeed lacking - jumping ship to a completely different language is inappropriate considering we have the ability to create whole new words and taxonomies to deal with that complexity.

Oddly enough, AI is great solution to this problem, but it is currently being gutted in favor of established institutions of power. Highlighting the actual problem - control and elitism.

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#106

Post by Kon-Peki »

eesmith wrote: post #69
vanviegen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reading is that this class just has a huge number of students, each bringing in a bit of funding. This allows for relatively large investments in the quality of the teaching materials, but teacher/student ratios will probably not be great. Hiring capable teachers is hard, especially at scale.

I must be missing something. Harvard has 7,153 undergrads says Wikipedia. At most that's 1,790 students per year taking the class each year. But surely not everyone is taking the course? So why does it need to scale? Harvard tuition is $54,269, says https://registrar.fas.harvard.edu/tuition-and-fees . Assuming it's a 3 hour class with a 120 credit hours to graduate, that's 30 hours per year, so each student pays abou…

> At most that's 1,790 students per year taking the class each year

Anyone in the world can take CS50 for credit via Harvard Extension [1], and if you happen to be in the Boston area you are welcome to come to campus and attend lectures, sections, office hours, etc (but they also have everything you need fully online).

Like other large classes at Harvard (Stat 110, etc), these operate just like the weed-out courses at the big state schools. Unlike the state schools the deadline to drop a course without it showing up on your transcript or affecting your GPA is really, really late in the semester. So it's not uncommon for 50+% of the kids to be gone by the final exam/project.

[1] https://cs50.harvard.edu/extension/2023/fall/

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#107

Post by copperx »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #34
PeterStuer wrote: post #20

"Our own hope is that, through AI, we can eventually approximate a 1:1 teacher:student ratio for every student in CS50" Would this not be a 0:1 ratio? Not against LLM's for some coding assistance, I use it daily. , but equating a teacher with an LLM solution feels like calling a youtube video a 1 on 1 tutoring session. Well at least a semester at Harvard isn't costing you much ...

I would say that an LLM could count as a "teacher" of sorts, so it would be more than a 0:1 ratio. But, if we're comparing LLM-teacher to human-teacher, I don't think it reaches full 1:1. I dunno, I'd say maybe 0.5:1 or 0.25:1 would be more accurate, given that the thing doesn't even produce correct information a certain percentage of the time? Based on my experience with ChatGPT, it does really well as a "rubber duc…

It sounds like an artificial hurdle to pass to get to the genuine article to reduce support/teaching costs.

The only difference is that this hurdle is actually helpful some of the time.

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#108

Post by civilized »

danuker wrote: post #59
quickthrower2 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube + textbook + good discord (slack or IRC etc.) can replace an undergrad CS course pretty well IMO for at least the practical skills. AI can help but is a minor piece, at least right now.

Whatever a student encounters in a field probably has search results on the web. I find it hard NOT to find the same question on sites like StackOverflow, Quora, or Reddit.

My last contact with the educational system as a learner was around 2009, so I missed pretty much the whole YouTube / Khan Academy revolution. It would be very interesting to see what it's like to learn today, what resources I'd find most effective.

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#109

Post by GuB-42 »

carlossouza wrote: post #74
thumbuddy wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine going to an ivy League school and paying 10,000$ for a chat bot to teach you. What a racket

I think most people do not pay for teachers' quality. People pay for the diploma's brand. (Which is a proxy of the probability of landing a good job after graduation.) For that use case, as long as the chatbot teachers don't degrade the university's brand name, I think most people won't care. They might even actually prefer it. (I graduated from the top engineering university in my country and I'd certainly prefer Ch…

It is not just the brand, there is also the environment.

A good university will be full of smart people, student and teachers alike. You essentially learn by contact. There are also rich and influential people, who can provide you with great job opportunities.

It all goes hand in hand: the brand, teachers quality, student quality, the infrastructures,...

Worse teacher may affect the brand negatively, the smartest students may want to go elsewhere, the rich, who want to be with the smart will leave too, which will affect funding, meaning less infrastructure and be less attractive to the best teachers and researchers. It is all connected.

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#110

Post by copperx »

danuker wrote: post #55
hourago wrote: post #50

> “Our own hope is that, through AI, we can eventually approximate a 1:1 teacher:student ratio for every student in CS50, as by providing them with software-based tools that, 24/7, can support their learning at a pace and in a style that works best for them individually,” Is the goal to improve students learning or to reduce cost? The article does not even mention it. And I think that it is important to state the goa…

Clearly the goal of this particular technology at this point in time is to reduce cost. AIs scale very cheaply. I believe that, for now, AI teaches worse than human teachers. But we are rapidly reaching human level, and might surpass it quite soon (a few years). At that point, AIs will dominate in both cost and quality.

> AI teaches worse than human teachers.

As a teacher, I wouldn't say dare say that. There are many teachers who are abysmal, and even if you get a brilliant one, you don't get to take them home so they can help you understand a concept while studying at 1 am.

Just yesterday, I was reading a history of mathematics textbook for fun where I had trouble with an explanation that wasn't worded too clearly in a book. I got my questions answered in a few minutes with GPT4.

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