https://rocketdash.io/midjourney-and-the-progress-of-ai-in-2...
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.
People stand behind "Sure, AIs can write emails, but they won't know what to write emails about". But to me that doesn't make sense. The holy grail of AI, what we are racing towards at a breakneck pace, what every company really wants, is the AI that knows what to write the email about...
OpenAI, Meta, Google, homebrew. None of them are trying to build a calculator. They are all trying to build a calculator user. It's a very big difference and their progress has been nothing short of remarkable and unexpectedly fast.
I don't think AI is going to excel in language education, either: I get bored chatting with a bot very quickly. Language education is all about keeping students engaged and communicating about tasks they actually care about. I don't see chatbots like ChatGPT doing that.
Reading this, not sure about anyone else's experience but very little written here reflects how any of those subjects were actually approached and you know just the assumption that because you have something called a "teacher" in a class called "x" means that the "teacher" actually taught "x", because yeah from my experience a lot of it was just about regurgitating facts, no creativity was never really taught and was often punished, actual speaking and actual communication was never really taught only judged, and no way did "learn from what came before us and how the world around us works" ever occur within the walls of any classroom I was unfortunate enough to sit within.
Wouldn't ever risk my kids future by throwing them into that system, honestly feel extremely lucky it didn't completely screw mine up.
However, we're still choosing as a society to send kids to school. The fact that school systems suck in so much of the world doesn't stop it from being the right idea in theory, and if you ask almost anyone on the street "should kids learn to read" or "should kids be taught about their history" you'll almost unanimously get answers of absolutely. (We can debate what "their history" means, but most people agree something should be taught, they just disagree on what)
When we're talking about multimodal ML systems, the core is generally a transformer-based LLM with no diffusion component.