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Just to be clear: it's not for every student (at least not yet!). We are in a research phase sharing it with a limited subset of users. More details about our approach to the responsible development of AI: https://blog.khanacademy.org/aiguidelines/
It better not be for every student. I am very familiar with Khan Academy as I am currently guiding a student through several AP courses on khanacademy. In my opinion, khan academy's time would be better spent fixing the UI for teachers, and improving the organization of the physics curriculum.
I would prefer that khan academy not be dragged into some PR fluff piece for some AI shill.
Do you know if/how someone can get involved with this at the research phase? I have a daughter who will be entering 1st grade next year and I'd be interested in having her try this out if there was a way of signing up.
I was a high school English teacher for about ten years before transitioning into tech last July. Has KA explored assistive assessment tools for in-person instruction?
>it's not for every student (at least not yet!)
>Donation required after chosen from waitlist
So, it's for rich ones?
Am I the only one somewhat alarmed that we are choosing to rely on AIs that are vulnerable to hallucinations so much?
Personally I rather have a more limited but reliable tool than a more powerful but unreliable one.
Are the tolerances in education really that tight?
How many terrible teachers are allowed to continue to teach after decades of disastrous results?
How many ideologues with no interest in teaching, but every interest in indoctrinating young minds, are tolerated because the alternative is "no teacher" and the class wouldn't run?
How many teachers who would fail state exams, teach, despite relying on answer sheets to be "competent"?
I agree with you that on the top end of education, this is no replacement and at best a supplementary tool. For the poor kid in a bad neighbourhood whose teacher is more interested in "de-colonizing" mathematics than teaching mathematics, this is a Godsend.
Its more troubling because its being used in a role as an educational resource. the audience is learning and significantly less able to realize that.
Chatgpt is already more accurate than a lot of my high school teachers.
Firstly, the unreliability may not be permanent, and we may improve the AI accuracy in the future.
Secondly, we need to figure out what works and what not, and we're in the middle of such phase.
Finally, there is no need to be alarmed, even with hallucinations, the amount of advanced (and reliable) knowledge provided by the AI vastly counterbalances the small mistakes. The elitist mindset needs to die, let's give access to advanced knowledge to everybody and stop putting it behind some unreachable walls.
Without providing context or examples, GPT-4 is already better at answering questions than the average teacher, with the unlimited patience that only a computer can provide.
With context, which Khan academy has in abundance due to their lesson plans and transcripts, accuracy will be higher than even the best teachers and tutors.
Once you give context and known-true facts to best-in-class LLMs like GPT-4, the output is shockingly good.
If you don't know how they are using GPT-4 it's not fair to say it will hallucinate.
As far as I understand the preferred way to use LLMs nowadays for domain specific information retrieval is through embeddings that insert the related context in the prompt. GPT-4 is specially good for this since they increased the prompt size almost by an order of magnitude.
This means that the model can be given a very specific task: to extract information from the context or avoid providing an answer at all.
The answer doesn't rely on the neural memory of the model, since it doesn't need to store information, just understand the task, and they are really good at that.
They're saying that they have reduced hallucinations. But RLHF seems to undo some of the improvements (figure 8 in the paper).
There are two indicators that this is PR bullshit produced by whoever is trying to capitalize their investment, 1) is the use of the marketing term 'AI' or 'AI-powered' and 2) use of the 'think of the children' trope.
I mean that is but one thing to worry about, we've gone about nowhere with the alignment problem, and we're screaming ahead at full speed with making these things more powerful.
I wonder if this kind of intelligent tutoring could be the answer to Bloom's Two Sigma Problem. The limiting factor with that problem was that not everyone can afford a personal tutor. Having an AI tutor that can breeze through the SAT seems like it should give every student a major boost.
GPT-4 definitely seems to be doing better on a lot of benchmarks and that's impressive. But it still hallucinates facts and I don't think anyone really has a good understanding of when and how that happens. Given that, is it really a good idea to be positioning this model as some kind of factual authority figure?
I've tutored people at times. A good tutor needs to understand the subject very well, so they can not only understand the right answer but also figure out why the student is coming to the wrong answer.
I personally think that assigning GPT as a "tutor" is devaluing the real skill involved in tutoring and I doubt it will work out.
Highly recommend the Neal Stephenson book The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, for an interesting exploration of a custom AI tutor for each student.
In that book, students have a "magic book" that teaches them lessons in a story form while encouraging certain life paths. It's pretty fascinating to consider the implications and whether that's something we'll want, bc it may soon be possible.
I’m sitting on the couch with my new grandson. He’s six months old. What is school going to look like for him over the course of his education? Should be interesting.
Reminds me of that science fiction story by Ray Bradbury called the veldt... Computers raise the kids
The cynic in me wonders if "AI" has realized that the most efficient way to take over the world is to teach the next generation to be dependent on it for learning.
So untested and using kids as guinea pigs again. Well done. Keep it up. Just a never ending mindless need to make big claims constantly.
StackOverflow.com banned Chat-GPT answers 3 months ago and their traffic is down.
https://techcabal.com/2023/01/31/stack-overflow-chat-gpt/
But on the plus side, this news means there will be fewer do-my-homework-for-me questions.
A lot of what GPT-4 can return is ideas based on assumptions and beliefs. Who chooses what of these to train the system? Those subtle ideas will then lead students who are mostly children.
This reminds me of CGP Grey’s “Digital Aristotle”, which actually references both Khan Academy and A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
I wonder if the students can direct the AI to give them questions similar to what would show up in the tests. Do the teachers use the same AI as the students?
Would love to see "Ender's game" type AI which can train the students with custom questions and answers.
> "It's important that you learn how to do this yourself!"
I find this response by the AI tutor to be unbearably ironic - if there's an AI that could do it better than me, and well enough to teach me, then it seems quite unimportant that I learn to do it myself. While of course I see a benefit to some people learning mathematics from scratch, for advanced research and continuity purposes, at this point I think that saying that it's important for "everyone" to learn math (at least beyond the very basics) is almost equivalent to saying that it's important that everyone learn how to grow grain, weave fabric and mix cement.
Can Khan Academy replace school at this point? If not, what are they missing?
Given ChatGPT’s ideological bias, is it wise to promote it to children?
let's just hope a student doesn't ask an arithmetic problem!
Its not there yet. Im testing out a teaching assistant and it doesn't catch wrong answers (eg question was whats 2 + 4, answer given was 4). I think its good for explaining concepts but not yet structuring the lesson or basic reasoning (this is 1st grade)
Just when many education systems are struggling, this comes up. It's gonna be interesting to see if it helps self organizing and self learning (removing the negative side effects of group learning in school settings) or if it will just add noise and chaos.
How do you monitor for ai correctness on these topics?
For gpt-3, that's been the user, but a student roughly has to take the ai at face value.
Some secondary ai double checking the output? What's the loop like for saying oops to the student?
Commented just prior: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35155529
The responses are interesting.
This is why it doesn't matter if AI lets students cheat on essays: Essays will soon be obsolete — not just for students, but for everyone.
The two main purposes of an essay are to teach others about something in your head, and to develop and refine such ideas in the first place.
Very soon, it'll be much faster, easier, and more prolific to spread an idea by conversing with an AI about it and letting it go off and talk to others about it. If some of those people have interesting feedback, questions, or find a flaw, the AI can distill it all down to a time-efficient debriefing it can come back to you with. And an advanced AI makes for a great partner to bounce new ideas off and chew them over with.
At this point I won't be surprised if over the next few weeks and months hacker news is going to be full {insert org here} integrates GPT-4.
What is the point of teaching children these topics, when they'll be obsolete by the time they're old enough to enter the job market?
Finally, we have hit on how to teach AIs patience.
What kind of prompt(s) would yield these results?
Given that learning will probably soon not be required anymore to live a successful life (AIs will do everything better than you), I guess such learning-as-a-hobby apps will be the remaining niche to entertain the humans on basic income.
I wonder how many people will actually make use of it, though, and how many are instead content with being wireheaded by the various AI-based content apps that will appear, full with virtual partners (see Replika etc.).
TeachGPT when?
This seems like a no-brainer next step for OpenAI, to derive an AI instructor from GPT-4 without a partner like Khan Academy. I suppose that may require a "truer" multimodality of ChatGPT being able to generate images or visual patterns. Imagine being able to onboard new employees via such an agent or learning about complex subjects.
This is extremely powerful. I wish this existed when I was a kid.
Why do these tech giants receive GPT-4 access much earlier than regular seed startups? Is it fair?!
can't wait for a GPT4 history teacher talking about darwin.