alt Hacker News> 2024 called and wants its talking points back.
It's a classic example of the kinds of questions LLMs get wrong. There's plenty of others. Not sure your point here. We can easily find things a 4-9 year old will talk about that an LLM will get wrong, hallucinate, etc.
> a child tutored by a good quality state-of-the-art LLM with a good teaching-focused harness could have better learning outcomes than a child without it.
There's a lot of work being done in 'could'. And it's entirely ignoring the dangers.
I'm not saying "no LLMs in education". I'm a technical educator and I give students LLM prompts and agent skills that I've built to help them learn.
This isn't that. We're talking about giving an LLM to a 4-9 year old and saying "this is your teacher".
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> lot of work being done in 'could'
if my aunt had wheels, she'd be a bicycle.
> It's a classic example of the kinds of questions LLMs get wrong. There's plenty of others. Not sure your point here. We can easily find things a 4-9 year old will talk about that an LLM will get wrong, hallucinate, etc.
I'm not participating in the debate, but fyi I have just asked haiku, sonnet, opus and fable that question and they all got it right. Tried with the letter s in portuguese word "sussuarana" (mountain lion) too - same thing.
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> It's a classic example of the kinds of questions LLMs get wrong. There's plenty of others. Not sure your point here. We can easily find things a 4-9 year old will talk about that an LLM will get wrong, hallucinate, etc.
My point is that the hallucination rate of modern LLMs, while not zero, is so low that this is no longer an issue in practice.
> There's a lot of work being done in 'could'. And it's entirely ignoring the dangers.
I agree that there are some risks. But for many children, the alternative is not human teacher, but no teacher at all. This considerably changes the risk-benefit calculus, IMHO.