41–50 of 244 posts
No one who understands ai can rely on it to help us learn. I provided one with 100 citations I wanted to standardize and it deleted 10 and made up 10 to replace them. Can’t imagine this being used to replace a textbook or even explain a textbook.
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> explain a textbook I've had very good luck using LLMs to do this. I paste the part of the book that I don't understand and ask questions about it.
But the problem is, you don't understand the passage, so therefore how will you vet the answers? Seems like hallucinations would be very very damaging in this use-case
Asking the right kind of questions is a genuine skill.
It applies to every domain of life where you are at the mercy of a "professional" or at the mercy of some knowledge differential. So you need to be a good judge of whether the answers you're getting are good answers or bad answers.
Steve Jobs was able to turn around Apple in such a fashion that they become even bigger by letting go of the PC market and going mobile.
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Seems legit, I'll have to try later. Just curious, why didn't you make this a commercial SaaS?
maybe because every LLM provider has an "attach file" feature so you can attach a paper and then ask questions about it? what's the value add of the wrapper that this person wrote at all?
All the people at the forefront of AI really loved and thrived in highly academic settings from kindergarden to PhDs, their own lived experience doesn't match up with this product at all. Why are they making it? EdTech has the worst returns of any industry in venture capital. Why? There are no teachers who say that technology has generally improved experiences in classrooms, even if some specific technology-driven ex…
If you have free weights, a bench, and a place to run, you are already 98% of the way to being a healthy fit human. There is ample information available on how to use those tools.
You don't need a trainer, a $10,000 gym machine, and a $5,000 stationary bike.
Education has gotten so insane with per-student spend, and the results are the same as the kids who had pencils and 10 year old text books.
I’m not sure this approach is the right one, but the problem resonates with me. I vividly remember hitting some blocker (7th grade chem, 4th grade reading, 2nd grade dinosaurs), where I had a question that the teacher dismissed. My mind was stuck (blocked) as it couldn’t get past the question I had, and in a public school setting, it wasn’t worth the time for the teacher to dive down the tangent (or they simply weren…
This was fantastic, because everything I learned about Laplace, Fourier, etc. had an immediate connection to another area of interest, which made the class much more engaging.
All the people at the forefront of AI really loved and thrived in highly academic settings from kindergarden to PhDs, their own lived experience doesn't match up with this product at all. Why are they making it? EdTech has the worst returns of any industry in venture capital. Why? There are no teachers who say that technology has generally improved experiences in classrooms, even if some specific technology-driven ex…
I think this one is fairly simple. Half of consumer spending comes from the top 10% of earners, whose kids we can assume have generally pretty decent educations already. The people who need education help the most don’t have money to spend on it.
The parents who do have money to spend want to invest in tailored education from a human teacher, not cheap, generic scalable technology. So margins will be low.
So if you want to make money, you need to focus on things like enrichment and test/college prep for the top 10%. Helping inner city kids who are 3 grades behind in reading doesn’t print money and VCs don’t want anything to do with that.
I'm a former physics teacher, and while I'm impressed by the technology, I think this is a low efficacy innovation. The real challenge in teaching Newton's laws of motion to teenagers is that they struggle to deal with the idea that friction isn't always there. When students enter the classroom, they arrive with an understanding of motion that they've intuited from watching things move all their lives, and that under…
My general experience with things like this from Google is to assume that this is at least one big step behind what they're doing now internally. Taking a position on how useful one finds this today effectively insulates from thinking more seriously about what could be done. If taken from a perspective of "what hints are laying around in this blog post or scientific articles about what's possible?" it's probably more…
What they are doing internally after launching something like this is patting themselves on the back, updating their resumes, and promptly forgetting it exists.