lol, I agree that it came out of nowhere, but it has been affecting student's learning IMO - not sure if it's been for better or worse.
It seems to spill into all areas of your life.
There so many ways this revolutionizes learning for erudite people.
1. Knowing things lets you know more things faster and they stick: associative memories are very durable because they are mostly groups of references to existing objects in memory. Much less novel information that needs to be encoded. Repetition and memorization matters.
2. Look up latency: Same problem as computer cache misses and L1 vs RAM lookup times. You will take 100x longer to achieve the same result by looking up reference material all the time. Also important questions typically have answers from many different problem domains (social, scientific, philosophical, ethical) and its important to have a lot of knowledge memorized to see a solution to a novel problem holistically.
I try to impress upon him too that some things take hundreds of hours of explanation before you know enough for it to be functionally useful to you, so you can't always just Google everything. You have to learn things and build your foundations up. Alas he hates the idea of learning anything.
ChatGPT is quite popular on HN and other similar tech-savvy spheres, but is still far from enjoying mainstream success. Maybe like 1% of students have used it yet, and for a month at most, so it's quite the hyperbole to say that it's been "affecting" them already. Or, conversely, if this kind of thing worries you today, you're in for a wild ride ...
Absolutely! And I honestly think it will be a net positive, after all.
As others have pointed, with or without calculators, GPT or whatever, slackers gonna slack and those who take it seriously will have another great tool in their hands to do great things with it.
And the fact openAI is still struggling to handle the load in peak hours 2 months after launch tells me they must be seeing pretty big user growth.
I've used ChatGPT maybe 3 times since launch and 2 out of 3 attempts resulted in a "come back later" type message. It would make sense to see which accounts are the heavy users and throttle them in favor of lightly used accounts but I guess they didn't think of that or decided against it for some reason?
This changes how easy it is to scale.