I think in the future, the main value of going to college will be socializing, networking, and learning "life" skills through interactions with others, dorm mates, etc. The teaching part will be already taken care of by AI.
I don't know, maybe I'm just a old person yelling at clouds, but I just find it crazy to use AI for learning anything. Maybe one day.
I feel like I've learned a ton of new things from GPT 4 in terms of software development recently, while also feeling I've been stagnating in my job with nobody to learn from. It's just so easy to have it explore alternative approaches or have it structure things in ways you may not be comfortable with yet (and would thus otherwise avoid) but would be better in the long run. It has the breadth to show you all that's possible while reducing the entry effort for learning to near zero.
Human beings are incredibly incredibly expensive to "make" into any useful adult thing. I have spent more money just this week just on a single one of the humans who are dependent on me than it would cost me to buy a fully packaged GPU in a box at best buy (and I think that box would actually have multiple GPUs packaged together in it). And I'll do that week after week for many more years. And then it will still be like four more years after that before they're capable of being a teacher.
It was harder to make the first GPU than to make one marginal unit of human teacher, but it's vastly easier to make a marginal unit of GPU.
I'm honestly curious what your mental model is, where you seem to think human labor is cheaper than computer hardware...
19-20=You receive the enlightenment you were asking for, more or less instantly.
3-18=You get what amounts to a Socratic conversation with Wikipedia. Which, unless you're fortunate enough to have access to expert personal mentorship, is better than what you had before.
1-2=You get a load of highly-plausible bullshit. You end up worse off intellectually, possibly much worse.
All in all, I'm OK with these odds, especially at this early stage of the LLM game.
And just as I switched to a teaching career. FML... :-D
Based on a recent experience, I agree.
I'm not a professional software engineer or architect, but I have a web app used by a few thousand people a month and recently decided to rewrite it using modern web technologies — Vue 3, Vite, Pinia, TypeScript, and serverless functions. I was familiar with these, but hadn't used them for a real project. During the rewrite, I leaned hard on GPT-4/Phind/Copilot as teachers/pair programmers. It's hard to overstate how helpful these tools were.
For the questions I had, search engines were hit-or-miss. Within a few days it became clear that the pre-2023 "search engine" is dead, and that post-2023 search engines will look like these new LLM-powered tools. The future of topic-specific search engines is well represented by Phind, which leverages GPT-4 but is also trained with current technical documentation and includes references in answers.
This is really something that has to be experienced to be understood. I have a friend who's a professional software engineer, and he had to watch me for a couple hours before it really clicked. I recommend trying this if you haven't already.
I find that prompting chatgpt with book excerpts keeps it grounded in reality.
If you just have one very specific question, it's often easier to ask ChatGPT and then fact-check its output.
I haven’t tested this, but I would imagine the type of information you’re requesting dictates the quality of response you’ll get. In my case I use it mainly as interactive documentation for different tooling. Asking it to explain the process for synthesizing new hypothetical polymers likely will not yield useful results.
It’s worth noting that my experiences are with GPT 4.
If someone is already building something like this, I'd love to hear about it :)
It also seems to me that it's gotten a lot better about hallucinating. When I first started using it it would often be wildly wrong, but not it seems like it hallucinates about as much as the average person I talk to.