Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again • Hacker News Board

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#241

Post by couchdb_ouchdb » Wed, May 22, 2024, 7:13 PM UTC

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.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#242

Post by nopinsight » Wed, May 22, 2024, 7:16 PM UTC

camdenreslink wrote: post #222

nopinsight wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean GPT-3.5 (free) or GPT-4 (paid)? Their performance and hallucination rates are very different. GPT-4o (the best current model) is now becoming available to free, registered users now. What do you think of it? Unless your domain is very specialized, I think GPT-4T, GPT-4o, and Claude 3 Opus for example are quite good.

I use GPT 4, and it still constantly invents things and presents them to me with authority. I haven’t tried GPT-4o yet.

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.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#243

Post by mulmen » Wed, May 22, 2024, 7:27 PM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #179

delfinom wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Suicide rates are not at all-time highs, they were much higher during the World Wars and Great Depression. Nah we already exceeded WW2. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/mental-health/cdc-data-finds-... > but available data suggests suicides are more common in the U.S. than at any time since the dawn of World War II. >U.S. suicides steadily rose from the early 2000s until 2018, when the national rate hit its highest l…

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…

I edit a lot so I set the delay in my profile to give me 10 minutes to do so.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#244

Post by llm_trw » Wed, May 22, 2024, 7:27 PM UTC

Pulcinella wrote: post #70

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…

> or they don't even know what to ask because they are basically 4 grades behind in math

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

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

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#245

Post by csa » Wed, May 22, 2024, 7:28 PM UTC

from-nibly wrote: post #157

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 educa…

> 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.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#246

Post by llm_trw » Wed, May 22, 2024, 7:34 PM UTC

nicce wrote: post #124

babl-yc wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

>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.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#247

Post by andai » Wed, May 22, 2024, 7:41 PM UTC

> AI tools and tutors never can and never should replace teachers.

This part confused me on several levels.

Let's break it down.

---

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]

---

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.

---

[0] https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/

[1] Math Problems with GPT-4o [video]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40347320

[1] Math Problems with GPT-4o: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nSmkyDNulk

See also: One study predicted human-level AI tutors by 2025

[2] Achieving Bloom's Two-Sigma Goal Using Intelligent Tutoring Systems (2020) - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339246677_Achieving...

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#248

Post by nutanc » Wed, May 22, 2024, 7:42 PM UTC

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.

Education has a lot more edge cases than driving.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#249

Post by gcanyon » Wed, May 22, 2024, 7:44 PM UTC

diddypiddy wrote: post #105

doctoboggan wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, misinfor…

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 t…

“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.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#250

Post by xhkkffbf » Wed, May 22, 2024, 7:45 PM UTC

tombert wrote: post #107

xhkkffbf wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another way to look at it is to recognize that all teachers have limitations. Humans often convey misinformation too.

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 provide…

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.

A clever guy he was.