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Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

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Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#281
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].

[1] https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/salman-khan

[2] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/740806/brave-new-wo...

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#282
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?

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#283
post #37

> 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 prohi…

> people don't really want to learn.

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”.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#284
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

b-b-but ... 2000 lb bombs, ar-15s, drones, guided missiles, f-15s, heavy artillery are more romantic!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-15_Eagle

next up, a total lovefest, icbms firing thermonuclear bombs?

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#285
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.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#286
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.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#287

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 intern…

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.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#288

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 op…

> 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.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for all the detail, it’s inspiring! How did the learning lead to your first job in tech/AI?

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#290

Really depressing that Bill Gates is impressed by the idea of "chatting with lincoln". Is this what we were missing in school? Our teachers dressing up with a tophat and bullshitting that they're lincoln and making stuff up?

> June 19, 2024

> 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.”

Quoted from https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/09/remembering-doug... see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37402925 . June 19, 2024 - looks like we're right on schedule, or thereabouts.

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