ChatGPT has entered the classroom: how LLMs could transform education

> And honestly, a classroom of students staring at screens talking to AI bots sounds like a dystopia to me.

Would it be less dystopian if it were replaced with a hologram of a historical figure / scientist speaking as though an actual primary source on the matter but with the same LLM behind it?

> not one that requires them to sit quietly in a chair for 8 hours a day

Sounds like the public school I went to... Sit in your assigned chair, don't talk, little physical activity. Prison for kids.

I'll take the AI tutor that can be tailored to each kid and in any environment.

And yet, individual tutoring provides a two-sigma improvement in outcomes compared to a mass lecture. Besides, language generation can be just as helpful in group settings. It just becomes "let's see what the robot says and talk about it" instead of everyone talking to the robot on their own.

Well, then just have the class communicate with the chatbot in study groups, taking turns to type, if "social" is what you're after. The way class time is currently used reflects the need to keep that grade level engaged with appropriate activities, and only as you get to the older ages does it converge on that kind of solo self-study. But it has to, eventually. You don't do research without figuring out how to do it. The flaws in leaning on LLMs are just another form of "precision vs accuracy" - GPT is always precise and not always accurate, just in the verbal domain instead of the numeric one. But we do have many tools like that in the numeric domain. The limitations can be learned.

If the LLM gives a solid three-star "fast food" education, that is actually considerably better than letting it all fall on the shoulders of the babysitters that currently serve in many classrooms.

> I'm sure LLMs can augment learning in some settings, esp in higher ed

LLMs are great explainers of known theory. They can adapt to the level of the user and illustrate with concrete examples. They have infinite patience, there is no pressure.

One of my high school teachers had a quote she was fond of repeating:

"Education requires three things: a teacher, a student, and a stump. Unwilling to change the first, unable to change the second, educators spend all their money on the third."

Honestly, I think the primary problem in the US is parents completely offloading the responsibility of educating their kids onto the teacher. You need to have the appropriate push and environment at home for a successful education. You would never see that in South or East Asia.

You're right; but it should be noted that that is a design choice not an inherent property of the technology.

Currently, the design goal isn't to make LLMs feel "lifelike." It is likely that lifelike LLMs will be released in the future, which could result in sarcastic or dismissive replies to poor questions or missing information.

I disagree, I think very little of what is taught in school would be made unnecessary by LLMs.

We teach maths, but calculators didn't stop this. Even if LLMs can take a less structured question and call a calculator, it just means maths moves more high level, and to understand the goals students would still need a foundational understanding anyway.

We teach language for communication, and we'll still need to communicate. LLMs can write emails for us, but only if we can communicate what we want written. We need to be able to understand the output, decide what we want to change about it, and voice that back to the LLM. They're a time saver but don't really remove the necessity of the skills development in some sense.

We teach languages for communication with others. Translation apps haven't stopped this. Being able to speak to someone is still worth a lot. If this does get solved in the future it'll be by UX improvements not AI improvements.

We teach creative skills, but we know most students don't go into creative jobs. These skills are taught for pleasure, for cultural reasons, and to create well-rounded individuals.

We teach history, geography, and science, not so that students can regurgitate facts (even if that is what ultimately gets tested) but because we as a society believe it is important to understand and learn from what came before us and how the world around us works, and be able to ask the right questions about the world.

LLMs, if they continue to improve, might change how we assess students, and they might change the focus somewhat, just like the introduction of the ubiquitous home PC or the internet did, but I don't think they're going to eliminate most of what is taught in school.

This really could be a plot for "Idiocracy 2", showing humanity hundreds of years in future, where all education was given up in favour of LLMs and a bunch of undergrads/startups.

I'm not sure how this connects. Diffusion models are great for certain tasks, not for others. They have sort of a niche use in audio and are the SOTA for image generation, but there is a lot of education (almost all) that doesn't apply to those domains.

When we're talking about multimodal ML systems, the core is generally a transformer-based LLM with no diffusion component.

Why not hire an agentic multimodal instead? When they are developed.

> And what happens when these rates achieve parity?

Is there data to suggest that teachers are lowering their error rate enough to eventually reach parity? In particular out-pacing the technology which continues to lower its error rate.

I don't think error rate is a useful metric, otherwise we'd already be replacing teachers. There is much more to teaching than being hyper-accurate.

Error rate is not as relevant as patience, flexibility, and availability to answer questions