341–350 of 418 posts
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Sounds like it's mostly air unless you can point to an LLM that doesn't confabulate.
No need to set impossible standards here, the correct thing to ask is whether the guardrailed LLM confabulates less than its competitors. That sounds like a useful job to have.
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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…
Keep it up. We are cheering for you.
The fact is, Khan Academy was so useful to me in school precisely because it was NOT a resampling of a Wikipedia page, of every uninspired textbook I was ever forced to read. It was a smart, real life human being who understood the nuances of how actual human beings understood concepts. Sal didn't just break down complex mathematical subjects for me such that I was able to solve linear equations in echelon form, there was also a particular way he emphasised the words he spoke so I understood why something was important. The human factor is so important, and we're fucking over our next generation for market hype.
A few years ago, I was bullish on online learning. But no-one with common sense is as the helm. I am incredibly concerned that Microsoft is believing its hype at the cost of something that was at one point incredibly valuable to society.
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when you visit or live among people or parts of society that that essentially never "modernized" in any meaningful way, the only thing they really need is better healthcare. the rest is a load of crap that is just solving problems created by industrialization and modernization
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.
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That might be true outside the US; I believe that the standard of living has gone down in the US, due in large part to the pandemic, followed by rampant inflation. The shift away from manufacturing jobs to service jobs also played a role, along with the population boom in major cities. The cities/countries with the highest standards of living all seemingly exist in Europe. EDIT To Add: look at the revolting against M…
This kind of comparison always neglects to consider the fact that any given European country is much smaller and much more homogeneous than the US. Which US state are you comparing to? Using the Human Development Index (HDI) as a passable proxy for standard of living: Mississippi has an HDI of 0.866, about the same as Portugal and somewhat higher than Bulgaria (the lowest HDI in the EU) at 0.799. Massachusetts has an…
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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…
Nah, we live in a great world where most people recognize that absolute life quality matters more than relative life quality. Online commenters all go to therapy and are miserable, and their bosses are idiots, and everyone is spying on them, and so on and so on. But most people are better off than their parents and knowing this, they’re generally happy.
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…
There is, but you usually have to rely on the gov't being the buyer, and not regular customers. I worked for a EdTech startup (catered to universities) so all our contracts were multi-year affairs paid basically by the government with the unis as an intermediary.
But also keep in mind that the people even getting involved in EdTech generally don't do it for the money, as is the case with Khan. The money my old company was making was pretty crazy, but basically all of it went to various funds and charities and what-not relating to education, because the CEO didn't care about making a buck and likewise with anyone working there.
I wholeheartedly agree with your points about AI though, outside of generating generic quiz questions and stuff like that I think it's a massive net negative on the entire educational system, though I suppose the cat is out of the bag now.
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…
I had the same thing, I relearned all my mathematics from grade school to calculus when I was in my 30s so I could go get a degree. Khan literally changed my life for the better. I also think his take is the correct one. AI's future in custom education is beyond anything else. It can teach it to you using the concepts you have available.
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, hea…
> [Doug] said, though, that he found it “increasingly worrisome that these models [LLMs] train on CONVINCINGNESS rather than CORRECTNESS”
That's quite a neat encapsulation of the difference between CYC (or what I understand of it from that article) and today's GPTs.
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…
Well, that's great. Now in Europe, we fund the government through taxes so that the public education system can do for EVERYONE what Sal Khan did for YOU So then you no longer have to worry about what your children can do in their lives
My situation was not a failure of our education system. I was just not in a situation that was stable and conducive to learning when I was young. Part of that was my parent’s fault, but they were doing the best they could; part of that was my fault, there are many things I could’ve approached differently.
Although we were poor by US standards at the time, I actually was on the edge of a great school district for most of my early education.
A school system was not going to fix the problems, both situational and self inflicted, that lead to my situation.
And there is no equivalent to what Khan Academy is doing that I am aware of. Part of the value is it has zero marginal cost, so anyone can use it. That’s actually the point. You don’t have to be in the EU to get a great education. You can be in Mauritania, as long as you have internet, you have a shot at receiving an education.