alt Hacker NewsThis has fabulous potential if implemented right.
To all the detractors, I would like to point out that your opinion of kids needing a good human teacher is overfit to your experience of having had some of those growing up.
In third world countries like mine, we grow up with absolutely unqualified teachers who were unable to muster anything but a learnt-by-rote understanding of key concepts.
In hindsight these were just desperate adults trying to eek a living for themselves and their family in an impoverished country and resorting to any means by which to do it: gaming the school system or calling in favours to join school faculty. I bear them no ill will. But we as kids were much worse off for it.
I can assure you that no matter what concerns you may have about hallucinations in LLMs, I can bet everything I have that a reasonably modern model (and I'm thinking in the range of gemini-flash, not Fable) in a well designed harness geared towards tutoring would handily and repeatedly outperform every single teacher I had all throughout my schooling.
Don't let a quest for the perfect ruin what is likely already way better than status quo.
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>I can assure you that no matter what concerns you may have about hallucinations in LLMs, I can bet everything I have that a reasonably modern model (and I'm thinking in the range of gemini-flash, not Fable) in a well designed harness geared towards tutoring would handily and repeatedly outperform every single teacher I had all throughout my schooling.
What are the *social* ramifications of an education system where children learn increasingly from AI tutors, while staring at a screen in a classroom for multiple hours a day?
Children need to spend time interacting with other children, as well as with adults. We have a mountain worth of data that children have become addicted to their devices, why are we doubling down on this by including MORE screen time at such an early age?
>If implemented right
This same argument could be applied to any technology, or policy that has ever been created. But we don't live in a world where people can do things the right way because of any number of externalities that muddies the actual implementation.
> your opinion of kids needing a good human teacher is overfit to your experience of having those growing up
None of the AI stuff has been proven to be safe or effective for kids going thru an extremely important growth time for personality development and relational attachment. Your experience of having bad teachers doesn’t negate that the best way we know to enrich kids lives is to have effective and empathetic human teachers.
> if implemented right
is doing some heavy lifting.
The problem is that this is an experiment with a ten year horizon.
Yes, it's easy to forget context. Especially the time component. Several 100 k children will be born tomorrow. 100+ M in the coming year. Then in six years, almost all of them will hit schools. Schools which are, pervasively, really really bad.
What can we do to help them? Better teacher training? Better new teachers? Better new teacher colleges? Consider the latencies. A decade cohort is 1+ B kids.
So refining intervention safety and efficacy is nice. Especially for development problems. Less so for an acute humanitarian disaster. For maximizing the golden hour in crisis mass-casualty triage. In some literate and numerate sense, most of this last decade's 1+ B kids did not survive our collective care.