Could Google Bard Disrupt Universities? | Hacker News Reader

Could Google Bard Disrupt Universities?

5 pointsdaly8 comments

Step 1 Google collects a bunch of playlists. Bard classifies them as "networking", split by sub-topic (queueing theory, congestion handling, DNS, TCP/UDP, hardware types, wireless vs wired vs quantum, etc.)

Step 2 is for Bard to summarize each lecture and create a 1-page summary of the important points as well as a syllabus of each course.

Step 3 is a use the lectures as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) so Bard is able to interactively answer questions about networking before, during, and/or after the lectures.

Step 4 is for Bard to create (or find) github repositories related to the course as well as the whole subject of networking.

So now Bard IS the teacher.

Iterate by topic.

Step 5 is to have Bard create a "canonical version" of network lectures that it has self-generated, curated by experts in the field.

Now you've disrupted all the Universities.

I suspect that a small team could have most of this working within the next year or two using Bard doing voice recognition in lectures as well as Bard generated voice, video-from-text to illustrate the lectures, and even generate and correct homework problems unique to a particular user's weak areas of understanding based on interactions.

Bard could be adaptive enough so that when I don't remember Little's Law it can dynamically insert a quick tutorial at the point in question.

Companies could use such courses instead of resumes or interviews. You need to show a passing grade for a course in their problem area. People could easily transition from their current job to another job by taking Bard courses that target the employer. Everybody wins.

Having deep control of youtube puts Google ahead of OpenAI.

Skate where the puck is going, not where it has been. -- Wayne Gretzky

There's already nothing stopping from someone from learning great material online already, between YouTube and Wikipedia and OpenCourseWare and all that. And Google already offers a bunch of certifications that employers could use. I've never known a single developer who has one, or a company that's asked for one.

IMO the main purpose of universities isn't really even education anymore, but gatekeeping. The commercial sector often uses them as a first-pass filter to get candidates who have shown they can abide by the rules for 4-ish years and put in the grunt work. If it were actually a matter of skill and knowledge, you would be able to placement test your way straight to a diploma... that's not the case. They want you to go through the rigamarole of showing up every day for attendance, turning in all the repetitive homework, etc. It's also training for the industrialized model of work that we have.

Sure, some specialist degrees and post-grad programs have actually relevant training for specific fields, but a lot of people don't really work in the field of their undergrads. The diploma is proof that you can check boxes and be a good cog in the machine, not that you're exceptionally skilled or brilliant or anything.

What you're suggesting sounds like an AI-powered University of Phoenix, which is already considered kinda worthless. I suspect such a certification from Google would be worth even less.

The printing press didn't do it, the telephone didn't do it, television didn't do it, the internet didn't do it, moocs didn't do it, why would we think ai would do it?

    I suspect that a small team could have most of this
    working within the next year or two

Each of steps 2-5 would be an impressive achievement advancing the state-of-the-art. Big "draw the rest of the fucking owl" energy here.

You can just try using ChatGPT/Bard as a college professor yourself today and report results here. My guess is you'll have to adjust your enthusiasm.

Thankfully there is an easy answer to your question:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

I'd be interested in arguments against the idea rather than immediate dismissals.

Sure.

AI has no intelligence. It has no capability to reason. It cannot answer questions that don't quite understand the topic the asker is attempting to learn. It lies or unknowingly tells falsehoods. AI can't give you an accredited degree that employers, universities, research labs, and so forth care about. AI can't grade the science fair poster.

We could go on. AI in its current form is unsuitable for the task you're asking it to do.

Let me make a start - and others can weigh in... I guess, that's my first point - a 'good' answer requires more nuance than the question provides. We're only a short evolutionary distance from our hunter-gatherer past, learning is still social, even 'academic' learning - why else ask these things on HN? A little while ago,I was turned down for a training course - offered to all, our CEO said 'you could learn that from a book' - true, but; I wanted an on-ramp to an unfamiliar area (felt I didn't know what I didn't know). I think the bard scenario provides an alluring step forward but misses some of the complexity of learning (especially for this audience who have internalized it). Short answer, I think it's a useful idea, we (bard) is not there - yet - will be a useful research assistant, has a way to go before being a tutor, I'm not sure our (human) side would benefit from replacing good lecturers - the best I've known could steer my curiosity in a way (social) that I don't see emerging from LLMs - yet...

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