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Comment by makach | Hacker News Reader

I completely agree. The power of LLM and conversational AI will give each student their own private tutor, ofc. there are issues today, but the future will be wonderful for whoever is able to embrace this technology.

I already used GPT to help me tutor my kids, and for my kids to use it when they get stuck. They get unstuck faster. They are critical but also more willing to accept response as fact, we discuss this regularly and they seem to be getting the point.

so many kids get left behind because a teacher is unable to spend time with them, how amazing will it not be for each student to have their own supporting teacher?

hopefully, we will be able to harness AI for the better and good.

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I find it draining to have to be on the lookout constantly for hallucinations, or omissions a person wouldn't make. I imagine as long as I'm walking well known paths -- well known to many but not me -- I'm safe, but the moment I need nuances I can expect that one of those nuances is completely and convincingly made up, except I don't know which one.

> be on the lookout constantly for hallucinations, or omissions a person wouldn't make.

--- Why is the sky red at dawn?

The angels are baking, honey! ---

You give a lot of credit to people

LLMs are especially fit for teaching students to formulate good questions. As LLMs have an endless patience, bad and boring questions anymore won't exist anymore.

I think this is an absolutely critical point. From my own tutoring experience insight with troubled students usually comes only _after_ engaging many "bad" questions in a row. Usually I find that students struggle because they do not understand, or are not aware of, some fundamental fact about the topic they are studying. Once you answer the last "dumb" question, they quickly learn all the other stuff they didn't know, because they have a sure footing.

In the future I expect AI tutors to ask more questions of students to quickly identify where their knowledge gaps are (so they won't even have to formulate the "bad" questions themselves).

I’d think that the most efficient exchange would be 50/50 with both student and AI answering and asking questions. My opinion is that the only problem with “bad questions” is emotional. They’re actually an incredibly efficient vehicle for identifying weaknesses.

I think as long as they also learn to stay somewhat skeptical and question things, this is great! Even for adult learning, this is a great approach.

the future will be wonderful for whoever is able to embrace this technology

I'd change that to "the future will be wonderful for whoever is able to afford this technology." AI has the power to give some people a massive competitive advantage over others, and some people will be willing to spend a lot to keep that to themselves. It'll be democratized to an extent but you can be absolutely certain "AI tutors" will be a market, and people at lower incomes won't be able to afford the best ones (which is fine, it's just like human tutors. That's capitalism.).

I disagree here : there is a noticeable marginal cost to having additional human tutors. It’s quite different with chatbots.

Also I personally think you are under a misconception. Commoditised high quality AI tutors would increase variance/inequality of outcomes, not decrease it. As it would increase the learning rate of gifted individuals even more drastically than the one of the general population.

The more edtech improves and becomes cheaper, the more the limits of individuals will be set by their biological constraints. Which are mostly genetics

Education is already low quality as it is - we want to it even less quality using procedural text generators?

This; its really hard to discern nuance when you do not understand a specific field. The value of procedural text generators is higher when you as an individual with the knowledge, understand when the AI is hallucinating or spewing nonsense versus when you are rubber duckying your way into solutions.

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