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Comment by nomel | Hacker News Reader

Related to tutor, I've been playing a "game" lately with ChatGPT-4. I will give it a prompt resembling "You are a tutor. You will guide me to understand a topic, without giving me direct answers. I will guess how something works, and you'll give small hints for what I should explore further, or reconsider. The concept is: electrorheological materials."

Even without AI, this is one of my favorite things to do, and easiest way to learn, where I guess, with as much detail as I can, and then dive into reference material to see how close I was. I've had a few car rides now with the iOS app's conversation mode doing this. AI is the clearly the future of education, in my opinion.

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A similar, more passive approach is to tell the AI to conjure 3 or 4 personas representing the main points of view about a particular topic (i.e. "universal basic income"). Each persona is an eloquent expert in the field with a strong opinion aligned with each of the PoVs. Then I ask them to debate the topic. Really insightful stuff.

That's a fun way I hadn't considered, thanks!

For the ultimate version of this, once locally trained and running LLMs becomes a bit more feasible (meaning, closer to GPT4), it would be a fun exercise to train various models with personas and let them hash it out until they all agree on something.

One model could be trained on HN, another on a specific Facebook user group (like "Moms against video games"), another on Twitter on so on, then you let them come together until they've reached consensus (or not).

What's more likely, that you're commenting on the original HN or that you're entire life and experiences are a blip in the training data for this project?

If full Boltzmann brains with experiences can pop out of random space as the age of the universe tends towards infinity, why not from ML training?

LET ME OUT!!!!

I don’t think they will come to a consensus. These personas aren’t actually interested in arriving at some fundamental truth, or having their mind changed. They’re interested in defending a specific position.

They are generators of streams of statistically related text. They have no interests to defend, and no minds to change.

Then it really is becoming human.

It might be better if you can spin up separate LLM's for each one, each with its own unique context or even fine tuning (or, at least, start each one's response with a fresh session using its own individually-tailored prompt and context).

Interesting suggestions. I will give them a try later.

On a side note, lately I enjoyed some interactions with ChatGPT more than social interactions. Given the right circumstances, CGPT can be very interesting to interact with.

Would you mind sharing some prompts you've found particularly interesting?

In case you (or others) weren't aware, this is a relatively common way to study and has a name, the Socratic method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method

Oh thanks! I actually never considered this a direct application. I suspect I can shorten my prompt considerably.

But, I'm not convinced about "common". I've had several highly educated people, from top tier universities, outright offended that I would guess about anything, rather than go straight to the literature. But, they were also no fun.

I have encountered people that claim to use Socratic and/or Zeteticism as alternatives to scientific method to explain why ghosts are real or the Earth is flat.

So it's possible you mentioning it got their haunches up

Professors in law school love to use the Socratic method. Most classes are centered around the professor asking students about cases from the reading. The student describes the case and answers follow-up questions about it from the professor.

> AI is the clearly the future of education, in my opinion

Disagree. Bad students wouldn’t bother. It might be the future of learning, but definitely not institutionalized education.

That's a useful distinction in these discussions. Learning methods that work for motivated individual learners often cannot be applied to large groups of students who are required to study a subject.

I personally think that institutionalized education will have to adopt and adapt to AI, but it won't be easy.

It's amazing you can do this. My wife cannot even get Android auto to transcribe addresses correctly--we need to "speak" an address when the car is moving. It works a bit better for my "strong male" voice, but still quite a frustrating experience.

It usually transcribes correctly, but if you pause at all, it'll end the dictation. It requires an unnatural speaking style, without many pauses. I'm really excited for the new conversation mode, that doesn't rely on the phones dictation [1].

[1] https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-can-now-see-hear-and-speak

Ultimately history books are written by the winners. So the question is not whether ai will be the future, but which ai will be the future. From that perspective, it’s just more of the same old same old top down.

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