Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again
gatesnotes.com
gatesnotes.com
Sal Khan’s work changed my life and allowed me to build a foundation in not only math, but also finance and economics, that allowed me to feel confident enough to go to college. I did not have a support system or people in my life who could teach me these things, but I had the internet and patience, which meant I had opportunities that did not exist even a few years before (this was in 2014).
Now I work in AI and generally have a life I could not have dreamed of. Every time I go to the grocery store to buy something and don’t have to worry about my card being declined, it feels like magic. Even years later.
If I had been in that situation a few years earlier, my life would be very different.
I’m excited to live in a world where my daughters and countless others will have a tutor that can help them maximize their potential throughout their lives. I’m excited not only for them, but for society. What a time to be alive.
I don’t doubt that it’s true in OC’s case. But I don’t think it’s representative of the impact of technology. It’s the example that will get Bill Gates’ attention and end up on the stage at TED, but it might not be representative of 90% of how people are affected by technology. It might, and the story of how videos will change how people relate to each other (what made Chris Anderson buy TED, what Salman Khan has built, what Grant Sanderson a.k.a, 3blue1brown has done). It is true, anecdotally. It is a fantastic, compelling, clear story. I love that story: video is the easiest way to share any practice; people watch, learn, practice, and get good at something no one in their village knew was possible. Hurray.
But when I trained as a statistician, i.e., epistemologically someone working for the state, I was told I was the opposite of a journalist: my job is not to tell stories that explain what a problem is. My job is to tell the boss how common that story really is. A story tells all the details to pull your emotions, and journalists (at the time, at least) were telling fact-check, double-verified stories. “Truth” wasn’t our goal. It is too easy to get numbers that argue for any position. Representative was what we were told we should be aiming for—so that the government makes the right decision.
I’m not seeing a lot of “representative” here.
Your concerns are very correct but while you are willing to give him/her the benefit of the doubt, I am very very skeptical of their story; it sounds "too pat" and made up. If you look at their other replies there are too many incongruities and "movie plot tropes".
I have a better chance of winning the lottery than "learning mathematics starting from long division and progressing to a good job in the current hot market of AI/ML while working at Home Depot, sleeping on a air mattress, with almost no money and a dysfunctional family, studying at coffee shops and rising through a bunch of roles starting from lowly corporate IT into high-paying data science/ML and leading teams". It is all just a bit too much and beggars belief.
Also speaking from my own experience, early in my career for about 3-4 years i lived alone, working a software engineer job by day and attending a computer science course/labs in evening/weekends. The lack of proper sleep/rest/nutrition, constant stress due to work and studies almost broke me. Thankfully i managed to get through that (mainly due to my robust health) but it made me realize that if you don't have a supporting family, proper nutrition/sleep and some sort of support system (i.e. family/friends) to encourage/emphathize/push/pull you as needed there is no way for an average person to overcome all hurdles particularly when they come at you all at once. There is a reason it is impossible to get out of poverty just based on your own efforts without somebody external actively lending you a helping hand via money/opportunity etc.
As the saying goes; "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_claims_require_e...
I went to college but I resent the implication that the only way to make it into one of these fields is through college. It is incredibly difficult to learn advanced math outside of an academic setting, but it is absolutely possible.
Where I work we have invested in programs that take people just like me and give them an opportunity to go through a pretty rigorous 6 month program that teaches them how to develop software, work in a corporate environment, etc.
There are people FAR more impressive than me who have done more with less, and when they have come out of that program many have been able to go toe to toe with our college grads.
We’ve got a LOT of people who have similar stories, and we’re doing the same thing in accounting now. And it works.
This is just a generic platitude and means nothing. Lots of people have overcome hurdles yes but not a whole lot of hurdles all at the same and over long periods of time which is what i gathered from your posts. Also as i point out it is quite hard to overcome all hurdles just by one's own efforts but you generally need some outside help whether intentional or luck.
> I went to college but I resent the implication that the only way to make it into one of these fields is through college.
You had mentioned that you were a high-school dropout earlier but are here stating that you went to college? That is a huge discrepancy and if true proves my point.
>It is incredibly difficult to learn advanced math outside of an academic setting, but it is absolutely possible.
That depends on where you are starting from, your support environment and your definition of "advanced math". For some levels you have to go to academia and study. Not everything is possible in the real world.
> Where I work we have invested in programs that take people just like me and give them an opportunity to go through a pretty rigorous 6 month program that teaches them how to develop software, work in a corporate environment, etc.
This just proves my point that you generally need outside support/help/luck to overcome really difficult hurdles. You are providing them with a break.
> There are people FAR more impressive than me who have done more with less, and when they have come out of that program many have been able to go toe to toe with our college grads.
That depends on the nature of the work itself. If it is just a matter of simple programming then maybe so but if the work needs advanced mathematics/statistical knowledge there is no way this can happen. There is a reason Colleges/Universities exist.
You didn’t bother to read it before commenting because you were too busy dumping on something that didn’t match your bias, which is wrong and incredibly depressing, by the way.
And of course you need outside help/luck/support, but you’re pretending their is some binary threshold and then cherry picking from an imaginary slate of deceptions that you’ve accused me of, to imply I was too lucky or received too much encouragement. Those factors are a continuum and I received more than some and less than others; of course I’m lucky.
I’m sorry that you do not have faith in people to succeed, but I have plenty of examples. I am sitting across from an architect I work with who is also a dropout (who finds this amusing) and work with plenty of others who made the leap. I’m also sorry that you feel you have to try and tear others down to reaffirm your depressing world view.
Anyway I wouldn't waste your time too much with GP. They won't believe anything you say without you actually providing physical proof of some sort - and even then I'm sure they'd try and poke holes in it.
Oh well. I for one am glad to hear how much better things are for you, and wish you luck in the future :)
I actually went and got my college transcripts and requested my highschool ones but it’s not worth it. I’ll probably just use them if I make a blog post or something.
I sincerely appreciate your encouragement and wish you luck as well!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40462419
> You didn’t bother to read it before commenting because you were too busy dumping on something that didn’t match your bias, which is wrong and incredibly depressing, by the way.
I don't have a depressing world view but a realistic one because of overcoming some hurdles in my own life and coming from a country where people overcoming hurdles is rather common (India with its huge population, economic mobility necessity etc.). But in every case (including mine) there is always one or more factors which made or broke them. Thus for example, a poor farmer's child becomes a ceo/doctor/engineer/etc. because the family sold the land to fund the child's education while the father/mother became daily wage labourers to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. The child's achievement while impressive would be impossible without the family's sacrifice. Should he/she omit it from the narrative of their achievements?
> And of course you need outside help/luck/support, but you’re pretending their is some binary threshold and then cherry picking from an imaginary slate of deceptions that you’ve accused me of, to imply I was too lucky or received too much encouragement. Those factors are a continuum and I received more than some and less than others; of course I’m lucky.
No man makes opportunity or luck or can overcome all adverse circumstances. The best he can do is be well prepared by his own efforts (and with some external help) to recognize opportunity when it comes and grab it with both hands. While opportunity can be binary sometimes you can backtrack and get a second-chance. There are plenty of people who never got the opportunity and hence could never make it. The external factor is not an addon, it is essential to success/failure and should never be discounted.
> Im sorry that you do not have faith in people to succeed, but I have plenty of examples. I am sitting across from an architect I work with who is also a dropout (who finds this amusing) and work with plenty of others who made the leap. I’m also sorry that you feel you have to try and tear others down to reaffirm your depressing world view.
You started this conversation with me and hence i am defending my views and not trying to tear you down or anybody else. I just dislike "toxic positivity"/"false advertisements" which is rampant in our society to the detriment of helping deserving people. In the context of this thread, your posts came across as "i did Khan Academy while overcoming a lot of hurdles by myself which led me to what i am today" which is of course untenable IMO.
PS: I highly recommend you watch the documentary Waging a Living here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIXFyLXSBuo
PPS: These reviews give you an synopsis of the above documentary - https://emro.libraries.psu.edu/record/index.php?id=2184 and https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0455834/
What exactly is the discrepancy here? One can drop out of highschool, then years later, take the necessary tests, then go to college. Again, many people have done that. Is that really so hard for you to believe?
You have conveniently glossed over events in those missing years. Did they get proper stable environment to live in, did they get enough food to eat, did they have somebody encouraging them to go to college etc. Events in those intervening years are what breaks you down or builds you up enabling you to go to college or not. In a sequence of events you cannot omit some and highlight some according to your disposition. That is called "false advertisement".
I may post my transcripts and khan academy badges to twitter later. My LinkedIn is pretty easy to find. I’ve still got my Home Depot aprons too.
Maybe if they believe this is possible they will believe it is worth spending time investing in others. My story is not unique.
Sadly, I threw away the air mattress long ago, so won’t be able to post that.
100% what you said about being young with nothing to lose. I had been part of a "start up" so I had equity on paper, but debt in real life. That equity ended up being worth exactly what I had paid for it ($0). I worked at Home Depot (which was a great company) and basically anything was better than making $15/hr and treading water.
For what it is worth, at the time I (24) felt really old because I saw so many 21 year olds who would come in to the store and had houses and everything that I didn't. I felt like I had missed the boat. It's been over 10 years and I realize how young I was, and frankly still am.
My point is that it's never too late to try something different, especially if you are starting from a position of strength (a good career in a field that requires strong problem solving skills, like software engineering).
So this is universal!
Knowing that whatever you put in, you’ve definitely got enough for it, is such a relief (once you break the habit). Maybe favor things on sale, sure, but no going “oh I can’t get a second package of chicken”.
I am also excited for society. However I am worried as well. While an AI tutor who is able to understand the child's current knowledge and gear the lessons toward what will make the most sense will be very powerful, it could also be used for brainwashing, propaganda, misinformation, etc. While we've invented a better way to transfer knowledge, we haven't removed the human desire to control information.
the rest is a load of crap that is just solving problems created by industrialization and modernization
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-15_Eagle
next up, a total lovefest, icbms firing thermonuclear bombs?
google Gandhi Western civilization good idea
1. Completely misrepresent someone else's perspective
2. Always use an industrialized western perspective as a synonym for what is unequivocally good, without any inspection or consideration. Disregard anything else.
3. Worship at the altar of the information technology industry
Who do you think has driven modern medicine and how do you get advanced healthcare without industrialization?
The shift away from manufacturing jobs to service jobs also played a role, along with the population boom in major cities.
The cities/countries with the highest standards of living all seemingly exist in Europe.
EDIT To Add: look at the revolting against McDonald's to see my point. Taking your family to mcdonalds used to be something you didn't really need to think about. Not anymore.
Cultural attitudes certainly, particularly around work vs leisure. Also mass transit systems, and social supports for people working in the service industry.
The criticisms for europe are that it takes a lot of tax revenue to support those things, bureaucracy, strikes, etc.
Im not saying one system is better than the other--just that in the US, despite our massive economic might, our standard of living sucks.
It's just that the USA has accumulated a number of unfair advantages.
Using the Human Development Index (HDI) as a passable proxy for standard of living:
Mississippi has an HDI of 0.866, about the same as Portugal and somewhat higher than Bulgaria (the lowest HDI in the EU) at 0.799.
Massachusetts has an HDI of 0.949, which is about the same as Germany and only a tiny bit lower than #1 Switzerland's 0.967.
In other words: both Europe and the US span a wide range of HDI scores, but the European Union has a wider range in both directions. Europe is both better and worse than the US, depending on where in Europe and where in the US you're talking about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
I'm aware of the criticism of Apples to Oranges. I assume given such a basic level of criticism on any comparison between the US and Europe that it's no longer remotely relevant because to any study ranking would clearly account for that.
Oxford Economics just released their 1000 cities index, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-21/new-york-...
The US dominated in the economic advantage, and europe dominated in the quality of life index.
Nah we already exceeded WW2.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/mental-health/cdc-data-finds-...
> but available data suggests suicides are more common in the U.S. than at any time since the dawn of World War II.
>U.S. suicides steadily rose from the early 2000s until 2018, when the national rate hit its highest level since 1941.
I guess we still haven't exceeded the Great Depression rates but it's really not that hard of a target
EDIT: The comment I replied to has been edited in multiple ways since I replied, so the text in quotes above is no longer present. The comment previously indicated that we had already exceeded "the world wars" (not just WW2) and that we were "really not that far off" from the rates of the Great Depression.
Slight meta tangent: OP, in general it's considered good form to reply to people who reply to you rather than just modifying your comment. Calling out edits explicitly (like I've done here) after you've received replies is also considered good form.
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2023/11/29/2022-suic...
Open source models will give a lot of people lots of chances. Period.
Other things we’ll see, doomers were never quite right - so far
But most people are better off than their parents and knowing this, they’re generally happy.
It's probably one of the dumbest things we do as a society, although that might be a fairly California centric perspective.
The other issues are of course critically important, but are caused by more than the wealth gap.
This misses the point of expensive clothing entirely.
Many people would disagree that his house is not 100 times nicer than yours.
He doesn’t use computers and phones like you do. He uses people who use technology that is 100kx your computer and phone.
You’re talking about the essential function of an object. When things become expensive they take on additional functions that your items lack entirely.
His house is bigger. He can only occupy one room at a time. I know where his house is: I lived across Lake Washington from him. I've seen the houses across the lake from his, with the exact same view, and they are worth 1/30th of his house because they are 1/30th as big. But again: he can only be in one room at a time. I'm not saying there's no difference; I'm saying there's nothing like 30x difference.
I'm not sure I comprehend your point about hiring people to do work. 100,000 people using 100,000 iPhones are not 100,000 times as capable of doing most things.
In short, no: expensive things don't take on (many) additional functions. That was exactly my point, and I don't think you've disproven it.
You can’t seriously believe that you can outperform 100,000 people, but that wasn’t my point. He has teams of people using among other things HPC to perform calculations that are both conceptually and computationally beyond an individual’s reach.
Just because you haven’t witnessed it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, and doesn’t easily 100x your own value.
Bill Gates can have other billionaires over to his house. That is not true for your house. That in itself is worth many multiples of your functional viewpoint.
When Bill Gates wants to have pizza for dinner, 100,000 people can’t deliver it in a fraction of a second. HA! Now, having typed that, I’m thinking of Bill Gates having… let’s say 1,000 chefs, who each night cook 1,000 meals, all so that there is a high probability that whatever he asks for will be ready the moment he asks for it.
To your point, of course there are tasks where 100k people can make a difference. But again, I didn’t say that wasn’t true.
I’m not sure why you think I can’t have billionaires over to my house? I’m pretty sure Warren Buffett has had Bill Gates over to his house, and Warren Buffett’s house is (comparatively) extremely modest.
Finally, of course I understand that my value system is unique. So is everyone’s. How does that change the fact that for the vast majority of people, if you ask them how well their smart phone works for them, they will not reply, “Well, my phone is okay I guess, but have you seen Bill Gates’s phone? That thing is amazing!”
What would they do with it that other people cannot do for them, faster and more cost effectively?
The limitation on personal productivity is not the pocket computer, it is access to computing resources. Right now the closest thing we have to a competent human, which can be easily had for $50k/year or $2M/working life, costs around 500 times that, lasts 1/10th as long, doesn’t work unless I’m talking to it, and isn’t nearly as capable.
> all of this AI crap is mostly in the hands of the powerful
too funny when the subject of the article is the Khan Academy which is hardly a hate-target.
that is a huge problem; but it's not one solved by technology
So it goes.
I’m mostly asking to learn how the US system (assuming you’re in the US) supports folks taking this path.
At the time I was leveraging Khan Academy I was around 24, had distanced myself from the people I had grown up with who were not on a positive track. I also don't know how, but somehow I got it in my head that finance was the universal language and that learning more about finance was the key to understanding more about the world. So I was very focused on that. I had no clue what economics was at the time, but once I learned about that, I was addicted. Finding topics like that deeply interesting is a HUGE advantage.
At that time, I was living on my own and had a stable job managing a department at Home Depot. I slept on an air mattress and didn't have any money to speak of, but I had enough time on my hands that I could spend time at a coffee shop after work and on my days off working my way through the knowledge map on KA, starting with long division (which was humiliating) and learning how to do everything by hand, and then progressing from topic to topic. My goal was to not have to take a remedial math class at the local junior college (2 year colleges in the US). I spent months mastering basic math and worked my way to more advanced topics (1 million energy points on KA, not sure if that's a lot but I'm still proud of it).
One last advantage I had was that I genuinely enjoyed learning and talking to people, and it showed. And I was young. So people were willing to take the risk. Many people were willing to give me a chance, encouragement, and their time as I was making my way through school. If I had a question or was interested in a career or topic, I would just ask someone if I could call them or shadow them, and most the time they would say yes. I had nothing to lose by asking, and was always amazed how often it worked.
I try to share this with others who were in my position so they know it is possible.
Thank you for asking.
It was mostly dismissed at the time, because Alexa and Siri were what people thought of, but when ChatGPT got released I was in a great position and was able to quickly ship. Now I lead that capability for one of our relatively large subsidiaries.
For me, what lead me here was mostly a fascination with the decreasing marginal cost of knowledge work. There is something about building these types of products that is just very fun and feels like cheating, I love it.
When I was a year in to my career I sat down with one of our senior execs and asked if I should get an MBA, and he said “don’t waste your time, you are already in a university and we will teach you everything you need to know”. And that has been true.
Make no mistake, it is definitely a disadvantage but I got lucky.
Keep it up. We are cheering for you.
Needless to say, I spend a lot of time on math with my oldest (who just turned four!). She does not need to be great, she just needs to not be intimidated and understand she can learn anything.
100% with you here! Grew up in poverty, fought for myself and clawed my way out into a wonderful career as a software engineer.
This one still hits every time, even for me, over a decade later.
The other one for me is petty cash. I looked in my wallet the other day and I had $100 in it. That is still wild to me to walk around with $100 dollars without even really consciously realizing its there. I use to rush to put all unused cash into my bank account to make sure my balance was always as high as it could be just in case. Went through a can collection phase too. Sometimes it was the only way I'd eat.
Here's to better life circumstances! And may it continue for us from here on out.
But I grew up before YouTube or even broadband, and I had very limited access to quality math resources. Otoh, we had a pretty nicely stocked library at home and I could read all the literature I ever wanted to read.
I ended up majoring in English. Although I now work in the tech field, I’m not deeply technical and my math knowledge is effectively stuck at freshmen college level.
I wonder what my life trajectory would have been like if I had access to teachers like Sal Khan - or even YouTube - back then.
Young people today are blessed. They can learn from the best, often for free.
I blame shitty recommendation system of Youtube for not making it easily available. They have high engagement sections like Gaming etc but not Education. Just goes on to show their priorities.
Pay cash: it's much more privacy-conscious - and you don't have to worry about your card being declined. :-)
I also think his take is the correct one. AI's future in custom education is beyond anything else. It can teach it to you using the concepts you have available.
Now in Europe, we fund the government through taxes so that the public education system can do for EVERYONE what Sal Khan did for YOU
So then you no longer have to worry about what your children can do in their lives
My situation was not a failure of our education system. I was just not in a situation that was stable and conducive to learning when I was young. Part of that was my parent’s fault, but they were doing the best they could; part of that was my fault, there are many things I could’ve approached differently.
Although we were poor by US standards at the time, I actually was on the edge of a great school district for most of my early education.
A school system was not going to fix the problems, both situational and self inflicted, that lead to my situation.
And there is no equivalent to what Khan Academy is doing that I am aware of. Part of the value is it has zero marginal cost, so anyone can use it. That’s actually the point. You don’t have to be in the EU to get a great education. You can be in Mauritania, as long as you have internet, you have a shot at receiving an education.
Honestly i wrote as many notes as I could in a way that someone else could pick up and understand and the main thing I stuck to was never using a calculator until I absolutely had to, even if it was slower, so I could build a stronger foundation. I’m not sure I ever looked at the notes though.
And then I was just very disciplined about spending a few hours a day, every day, for a few months, drilling course by course, and didn’t skip anything in the knowledge map (at the time).
I still make time every weekend to learn something new or work on a challenging project for a couple hours a day while my little girls are napping.
Almost all other high paying professions are locked away.
I was very lucky to have a professor who pulled me aside and steered toward IS. Once I got my first post-degree job, the company I worked for was happy to help me develop technical competency.
This will never take off. One, there is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. What little money there is goes to the obvious stuff like student records databases. Anything that requires an ongoing subscription fee is dead in the water. The only reason those stupid smartboards took off is because they make school boards look cool, they are a one time cost, and can be paid for with bonds (because they are a one time cost). Teachers don't want them (projectors and document cameras are good, though). Ed.Tech is a wasteland of failed startups. Part of the problem is also that classic "the people with the purchasing power are not the people who will be using the product" problem.
Two, everyone outside of education thinks "well has anyone just tried sitting down with the kids and talking to them/explaining it to them?" Yes, obviously. The problem isn't that they are lazy, snot-nosed kids (that's a problem well within an experienced teacher's skill set to solve). The problem is what is the AI going to do with the kid says "fuck you" to the AI because they haven't eaten since lunch the previous day (school is the only place they get regular meals), or they don't even know what to ask because they are basically 4 grades behind in math, or the wifi is dead for the 8th time that month because the school board will never pay for infrastructure.
Three, what if the AI is just wrong and starts confusing the student? Even GPT-4 fabricates things all the time. Sure it can generally put words in grammatically correct order and is passible for writing no one is going to read anyway (like marketing emails). But the moment it requires actual domain knowledge all these AI models completely fall down because, again, they don't actually understand anything, they just are really good at guessing what word comes next.
I know college kids are using edtech, but they don’t like it much. And there was one-time purchasing during the quarantine.
And obviously Khan academy must be doing okay.
Students don't want to pay for Google but every student still uses it.
Some students will want to waste time if given access to more tools like AI agents, but the motivated ones will use it to their advantage. Even if it's wrong sometimes, it's right a lot, perfect for rubber ducking, and almost always gives answers that are at least interesting or point you in a useful direction.
As for "GPT-4" fabricating things, I remember in school how I wrote essays and was given A's despite citing NYT and Wikipedia. Fabrications exist all over the place. If anything, hallucinations might give more examples as to how to be skeptical of any source and look for direct sources as much as possible.
In college I went to office hours and there was 30 minute line to talk to the TAs. AI agents respond instantly. These things are going to overall transform education for the better.
"Actually it's good that AI sucks because it will teach people to be more skeptical" is not a very compelling argument.
At least you wrote it by yourself? Copy-paste from GPT-4 removes the whole thinking process and need for basic skills. It is extremely difficult to prove that someone just copied the text without doing any own work. If it is difficult to detect and punish, then certainly almost everyone will do that, if they get an advantage.
What is the future of proving that I know something myself?
Right now, education focuses on getting people through the system so they can attain a credential. It teaches us, primarily, how to get one over on the system, how to look for loopholes and shortcuts. It creates a culture of corruption, of looking for approval from institutions in order to move up in life.
What does a world where anyone can learn anything they like for free very easily look like? Well undoubtedly it looks like a place where a lot of people don't learn much, because they have no interest in learning. But it also looks like a place where people who are interested in learning can and do learn endlessly if they like, the opportunity for anyone to get educated to a degree reserved for elites that most of us could only dream of even two decades ago is upon us. Writing the paper won't be about proving you wrote the paper to some authority figure, because it's no longer proof that you wrote it. Writing the paper will become about helping yourself understand something you want to understand.
So to your question, what is the future of proving that I know something, the future is you can't prove you know something, there's nobody to prove it to and you know things because you want to know things, because you recognize the value on knowing them beyond "this piece of paper qualifies me for a job." The future is the truth that we have been pretending isn't true for a century: that no matter what you try to do, those that want to learn will learn and those that don't won't, and their lives will be what they are on their own merit and of their own volition.
If you want to call yourself educated, the only person you need to be proving that to is yourself. We have entered a world of information post scarcity, which necessarily comes with post scarcity of noise, distraction and disinformation. The competition to understand things and the benefit that comes with understanding things will get stiffer, but access to that competition will become egalitarian. There will be a great divide among people: those that follow the noise of the day and those that continue to learn freely of their own volition.
That feels like a very uni-dimensional view
What is the point of knowing something yourself?
This is just a reheated version of the argument against literacy by Socrates:
>You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing.
For parents who want to use it with their children, $4/month (for your entire family!) is very small compared to anything out there that you want to use to supplement your kids education (other than Khan Academy itself, which is free). Is it affordable to poor families in Bangladesh? No, but the barrier to sponsorship is low: "for $50K a year you could sponsor it for 1000 families in Bangladesh" is not a difficult sell.
Also, I expect Sal to raise funding to give it for free to those who can't afford it (just as he did with Khan Academy). At least it's not some VC-backed venture that we know is going to be look for a 10~100x return, so we can be thankful for that.
https://www.khanmigo.ai/pricing
Yes, teachers can use it with students if they pay for it. One day it might be free for students, but it presently is not. Which is what I was pointing out to the person I originally replied to. This discussion is about Khanmigo, a subset of what Khan Academy provides, and it is not free for students (though, yes, that cost is not exorbitant). But it does make it difficult to claim that Khan Academy is free when the specific feature being discussed is not.
If anyone doubts this, just take a look at what Khan Academy currently offers for a fresh perspective. Make an account and click around (https://www.khanacademy.org/signup); it should be easy to see that a ton of effort went into making this and, as far as I can tell, they run purely on donations. I wouldn't be surprised if the current cost of operating Khanmigo is just being passed along by Khan Academy at no markup, or even a slight loss.
Many of us are frequently using it to obtain answers requiring domain knowledge; the evidence that this works is that the answers it gives are often found to be correct, and yet things we did not know. So your description is simply contradicting the experience of many people. Perhaps you're using it in a different domain, or not writing clear prompts, but it's well worth experiencing what people are talking about.
At this point, ChatGPT is good enough that I can tell what authoritative source I should go look at for the answer, which is great, but I’m not going to believe any statements it makes without checking. I think people suffer a bit of Gell-Mann amnesia when dealing with ChatGPT.
I actually do get a lot of value from ChatGPT as a self-motivated learner with a specific goal in mind, but that’s not the scenario we’re talking about.
Now imagine you're a kid who's still learning reading comprehension and hasn't yet developed a functional BS detector. You're not going to have much of an ability to separate truth from fiction, but you're likely going to trust this thing that sounds authoritative.
But that's OK. A teacher's knowledge doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be better than the student's.
If ChatGPT explains Chinese history in a way that is 80% accurate, to a student whose understanding of Chinese history is 10% accurate, the student will walk away with a better understanding of Chinese history.
ChatGPT makes mistakes literally every time I use it (in a domain that I'm knowledgable in). How is that the same thing? Being given incorrect information is worse than not having the knowledge at all IMO.
GPT-4o (the best current model) is now becoming available to free, registered users now. What do you think of it?
Unless your domain is very specialized, I think GPT-4T, GPT-4o, and Claude 3 Opus for example are quite good.
A different architecture or an additional component might be needed for them to generalize better for out-of-training-distribution questions.
Most school wifi isn't that bad anymore - the bigger problem for us is web filters that break things in interesting ways.
Children look to adults as role models for what to learn and why. We already know that children respond better to role models who have similar ethnicities and backgrounds to them, let alone being the same species.
AI cannot and will never be able to provide this motivation to learn, which is what kids actually need, because it is not human.
We hear all the time about digital addiction, gamification, FB, Tiktok, etc. Addiction is arguably more difficult to achieve than motivation. AI will be able to motivate people just fine
I am about a month away from finishing my teaching degree (math). My experience so far AND the best research is extremely clear on the following:
Kids learn best by working in small groups with other kids.
These groups need to be gently guided by adults, but they should mostly be left to do a lot of independent exploration and discussion amongst themselves. The teacher is there to prod discussion in productive directions, provide feedback, answer questions, give hints and encouragement where needed. Admittedly, AI could do certain part of the teachers job, but it can never replace a peer group.
My parents spent almost nothing on my education, just a couple of $ per year to buy a notebook or two. I used the same pens for almost ten years. I participated in zero sports, had zero tutors... I did ok but I had peers with even less resources and not all of them did good.
The clothes were fine: good condition, clean, etc. Just old from the perspective of kids who didn't understand they came from money or that their parents were bad with money and headed toward disaster.
/u/raisedbyninjas was hopefully kinder than those kids even though it sounds like they were in the same cohort by how small $20/month sounds to them.
Elite parents (read: the ones with discretionary money for schooling) do not see education in this way. They see it as an endless arms race to optimize every possible advantage they can for their child. From the moment the child was born, everything about their life was structured to optimize future earnings, which requires admission to an elite school, which requires exceptional learning tools.
It was bad enough when the text was wrong because of shoddy editing.
First, clearly you had a crappy experience. And that sucks. There are probably many others with bad stories as well. I'm deeply involved with my kids education and can only imagine how much that sucked.
Second, we can't solve everything at once. Hungry kids, bad parenting, all that will take time, and may never be resolved. I wish it could be, but honestly, it will take time - probably a long, long time.
Third, he's building for the future. Richer schools (both private and public) will get this first, typical schools will get it next, and poor schools (both administratively poor and monetarily poor) will get it eventually. This is where that great quote applies - "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" - and boy will it apply to education. So much so that some parents will feel like they are left in the stone age by comparison.
Fourth, an anecdote. I do volunteer work for an education-related non profit. I learned during covid that HISD (Houston school district) couldn't easily move to online learning because 30% of their students did not have internet access at home. Thirty percent!!! I was blown away. Still am. But it's gotten much better, and we've evolved. Does it still suck? Yes, undoubtedly (HISD was taken over by the state, if that tells you how big their problems are). So I know this will not be evenly distributed because of this experience.
Bonds take a one-time cost and turn it into a recurring cost (like a subscription) that is paid in installments over time. It's baffling that that it's easier to do that than just having a subscription in the first place.
I see this as Khan Academy x10. It'll be a great tool for those for whom Khan Academy itself was a good tool. If it's free (or for a nominal free), then parents will use it at home with their kids as a supplement to school. Teachers might use it on a case by case basis with students who want to accelerate or who are behind. It will highly accelerate learning for those who want to and are able to learn. The problems you describe, which are very real and important, are social problems, not educational problems per se or problems solved with technology.
You misunderstand the buyers in this market. In my town, I'm in a good sized minority spending up on this stuff, despite being otherwise careful with money.
Then they start by asking "What is this" and just keep asking questions.
Teachers seriously underestimate how much damage they do to students ability to learn by sneering at questions that they think should be obvious.
Let’s say you want to purchase a math tutoring platform. The cost is $30 per student per year. CA schools get about $5 per student per year in lottery funds to purchase instructional materials (shared across all materials). General fund is pretty much all spent on staff/teachers or facilities. One time covid funds are running out. Schools can purchase textbooks at ~$100 per unit and use them for years without subscriptions.
In short, there is no money in public education for these tools.
These platforms look great, but the price is prohibitive. Maybe some basic aid district could pick them up, but those are usually small (I.e., it won’t keep a start up in business).
Note. This is an observation from California. Other states might find education better.
Smartboards and 3d printers etc. got popular because they came from a DIFFERENT budget - these were capital expenses.
My personal experience (ed-tech reaching ~15% of school districts) is that it is impossible to sell a solution to a district _without_ support of the teaching and learning team - i.e. teachers. And if you do, it’s impossible to get a renewal.
Lastly, 9 out of 10 startups fail. It’s not just ed-tech.
There is no money in EdTech for pupils. Better go for continuing education for adults. There potentially is money.
There is, but you usually have to rely on the gov't being the buyer, and not regular customers. I worked for a EdTech startup (catered to universities) so all our contracts were multi-year affairs paid basically by the government with the unis as an intermediary.
But also keep in mind that the people even getting involved in EdTech generally don't do it for the money, as is the case with Khan. The money my old company was making was pretty crazy, but basically all of it went to various funds and charities and what-not relating to education, because the CEO didn't care about making a buck and likewise with anyone working there.
I wholeheartedly agree with your points about AI though, outside of generating generic quiz questions and stuff like that I think it's a massive net negative on the entire educational system, though I suppose the cat is out of the bag now.
To me this post shares a future where kids coming from good households will have the ability to learn more efficiently than before. It is not to replace the teacher but perhaps it will replace the tutor.
Lastly, I am not sure why but I genuinely believe that folks focus too much on "hallucinations" and "fabrications" by LLM. Does it happen, yes but I think its one of those things you can actually tune for and it get down to low to no errors in a walled environment. It is definitely something to consider but not a blocker.
Personalisation fails for a simple reason - people don't really want to learn.
Classes work because the teacher can inspire (or at least push), and there's peer pressure to learn (or at least keep up with the herd). I'm sure there's a dozen or so self-taught Python or Rust programmers here who will loudly refute what I'm saying, and point out that they were perfectly capable of learning something they were very interested in, but I bet a lot of them would also like to learn a foreign language or quantum physics and haven't gotten that done.
AI will fail for the same reason Youtube, DVDs, video cassettes, radio lessons, and phonographs all failed to be a revolution. If you want to learn something, and have the motivation, then reading the textbook is easily good enough (for theoretical subjects) and for less theoretical subjects you barely need a textbook, just lots of practice.
Yes, you can probably learn a little tiny bit faster with AI, if you (or someone staring over your shoulder) have the motivation to play some AI learning game rather than a more fun-optimised game that's purely about having fun, but it's a small optimisation.
The people for whom personalized learning works well, can do it with any technology, even books. I recently learnt a new programming language from an O'Reilly book just fine, then did some exercises in a (non-AI) online REPL/tutorial tool, then went off to code a project of my own.
Most of the languages I've learned I started with YouTube video tutorials, but most recently when I wanted to learn Rust do you know what worked really well for me? GitHub Copilot. I started a new project, and when I didn't know what syntax to use I made a comment and examined the output. By the time the project was done I'd learned how Rust worked and could write code without help.
Before making sweeping pronouncements about what does or doesn't work for learning, it would be worth considering that people vary widely in which learning strategies work well for them. You might just be projecting your own preferred learning style out on the world.
Anecdotally, I found it dramatically easier to learn math through Khan academy than from textbooks. For one, I have terrible handwriting which makes the pen and paper part messy and hard to read, and for two, Khan's lessons were broken down into much smaller, more digestible steps.
I took discrete math at Uni and had to learn it from the same Rosen textbook that many on this thread probably did themselves. If I had the same thing in an online version analogous to Khan Academy, I think I would've had a much better time. Now obviously, some of the harder problems and proofs in that book are much harder to grade automatically the way Khan does for grade school math, but that seems like something LLMs are trending towards being able to do
Students/people who are interested in learning a particular subject are doing just fine learning it from already available material, be it books, videos, MOOCs, etc. They may or may not use AI, but AI won't make a huge difference for these type of people.
For people who are not interested in learning, AI won't do sh*t. Because the problem is not that they don't have a tutor available to them; the problem is that they don't have motivation to learn. I am not being judgemental here: it is perfectly understandable, for example, why a poor kid may not have motivation to learn.
A few years ago, MOOCs were touted as the next best thing to democratize education and make it available to underserved populations around the world. This did not happen. Some research shows that MOOCs are mostly used by an already-educated group of people who are interested in further learning. I think learning with the help of an AI tutor would be no different: its users will not be the intended ones.
What each of these (including the latest wave of "AI" approaches) has overlooked is that humans learn from humans, because learning is only accomplished via motivation. Creating and sustaining motivation for years is not within the scope of a program you use on a computer -- it comes from a teacher who knows how to inspire, from a classroom and home environment that reinforces the importance of learning, and from peers who also care and reinforce this culture.
I'll quote Kentaro Toyama:
"Quality primary and secondary education is a multi-year commitment whose single bottleneck is the sustained motivation of the student to climb an intellectual Everest".
Don't believe me? Look at those school tutorials on Youtube. Look at all the math videos, science videos and other topics. And I'm not talking about people who build cool DIY stuff and explain it at the surface level. I'm talking about people going through a school curriculum. There are kids who actually watch this, believe it or not, and it's wonderful.
This counters your statement which is "people don't want to learn". That's simply untrue. Everyday we are learning something new. You may not want to learn whatever they're teaching in school, but you will want to learn other things. And I think a personal tutor, especially a cheaper one, like Khan's AI tutor, will help a lot.
Learn a foreign language from school? How much do I know of the German/French/Spanish (it was one of them, one of the options) that I studied for years in school? None.
For some subjects, something being taught in school seems like a magnet for making a topic or subject boring and uninteresting. Like if it wasn’t taught at all people would at least not be actively biased against it and might pick it up by happenstance.
Which makes me doubt all of those “no one knows X; therefore we should teach it in school”. I don’t think that follows.
> Personalisation fails for a simple reason - people don't really want to learn.
What does (do? Lack of school English) everyone have in common? Schooling.
Turns out, what I actually want to know is just that small subset of things I need to know to get by, plus maybe a little extra for variety. And I consider myself intellectually curious. I have multiple college degrees, one of which I got purely for the fun of it.
So if I can't bring myself to get AI to teach me things, I can't believe that those less intrinsically motivated will be able to either.
This may be true for the average student, but I don't absorb content from written text very well at all. The single biggest reason why I got A's through college was being able to listen to video lectures (YouTube, Khan Academy, and occasionally the professors themselves) at 2x speed. I absorb and retain information that way extremely easily, but put me in front of a textbook and I can't focus on it.
YouTube may not have been an education revolution for you, but it's definitely changed my life.
This is the most nonsensical statement I’ve ever heard. I don’t know how someone could actually believe this.
As someone who loves to learn, I’ve already been using AI to learn things I never had the patience for in school. I HATED classes. Learning at my own pace, in my own way with AI has been an incredible experience. It’s far from a “small optimization”.
We used to go to our IT teacher after school to help us find programming exercises because access was so hard. It's not some sort of exception either, kids would actively reach out for more learning but providing this opportunity is super hard.
Now with AI it's right there! I'm increadibly jealous to the point where OP's statements are making me actively angry.
I agree with you. Investing hundreds or thousands of hours of your own time into the slog of theoretical learning is statistically pretty rare. Most of the counterexamples come from people who found a way to finesse their own neural latticework into ardor for the subject, even though to the rest of mankind it's about as interesting as watching paint dry. It's very rare to meet someone who became a self made master of something they only did for the money, etc.
You will have an AI friend soon to push/inspire you soon :)
AI like all other technologies that were supposed to revolutionize teaching and failed are a dead end to educate a country, even if they can be potentially useful for some people.
On the topic of AI tutors will change the education, it reminds of this book i recently read (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546065/teaching-machines/). People have been trying to sell similar ideas, in different packaging(technology) for decades now. Video technology had the same pitch for how schools suck, teachers dont want to teach and we will revolutionise the access and personalisation to education. While videos, Sal's or YT in general, have done a great job(specially at accessibility), our education stats are continuously deteriorating. Before the onset of LLMs we created an instant-tutoring service(https://askfilo.com/) that could very much connect students to teachers in real time. Thousands of tutoring session laters we are still learning what students want/need from a teacher, 'they want to learn' but not everything or every subject, 'they are very much capable of learning' but our assessment are built very rigidly.....learning to test well is a learning on it own. There is so much understanding we lack in terms of mass education and it is not because of lack of good content or tooling.
Hard disagree. Young people may never know the struggle, but using an old book to teach you how to build your first {$project} was a really crappy gamble back in the day. Oftentimes the results of your efforts were mediocre or just flat out sucked because you tripped over every gotcha possible.
Thanks to the pandemic and WFH, I was able to spend hours every week on Youtube watching master craftspeople from around the world teach me skills I've always wanted to learn. It's unbelievable how accessible learning a new skill is compared to even a decade ago.
Is this what we were missing in school? Our teachers dressing up with a tophat and bullshitting that they're lincoln and making stuff up?
I feel sci-fi authors have their work cut out for them...
> When Brian and Ben reached the lab, the computer was running but the tree-robot was folded and motionless. “Robin, activate.” ...
> “There now exists a procedural model for the behavior of a human individual, based on the prototype human described in section 6.001 of the CYC-9 knowledge base. Now customizing parameters on the basis of the example person Brian Delaney described in the employment, health, and security records of Megalobe Corporation.”
> A brief silence ensued. Then the voice continued.
> “The Delaney model is judged as incomplete as compared to those of other persons such as President Abraham Lincoln, who has 3596.6 megabytes of descriptive text, or Commander James Bond, who has 16.9 megabytes.”
Quoted from https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/09/remembering-doug... see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37402925 . June 19, 2024 - looks like we're right on schedule, or thereabouts.
> [Doug] said, though, that he found it “increasingly worrisome that these models [LLMs] train on CONVINCINGNESS rather than CORRECTNESS”
That's quite a neat encapsulation of the difference between CYC (or what I understand of it from that article) and today's GPTs.
But nothing like that exists today, as far as I know. I was disappointed with Khanmigo when I tried it back in August. Although I have a year's subscription to it, I've not asked my child to try it. It seemed too boring and told me my answer (to a problem it had given me) was wrong, even though I was right.
I'm optimistic, but I think there's work to do. I've not seen an AI system that can apply the pedagogy of George Polya: give the student a small hint by asking a question that could have occured to the student themselves.
This is a fatal flaw. It absolutely cannot make mistakes like this if it's going to succeed because that will undermine the confidence that teachers and students have in the system.
Aside from the wrong answer, I also didn't like the fact that it just told me to multiply the numbers, instead of giving me a smaller hint that might allow me to realize this for myself.
1. It's not necessary to invent all these problems from scratch. At least for any "normal" math problem the world doesn't need new problems on demand, you just have to fetch one. Khan Academy has a perfectly good bank of problems.
2. If you have a baked problem you should hang onto knowledge about the correct answer. Khanmigo just seems to put it in the chat history where it is easily forgotten.
3. If you want customized problems you might need to invent problems instead of reading problems from a bank. In that case you might want to create a more "formal" problem and an "informal" problem, where the formal problem is expressed clearly and solvable (e.g., by Wolfram or SageMath or something), and therefore can be verified. Translating the formal problem into a word problem is generally much more reliable than inventing a problem and correct solution.
That said, "right answers" aren't IMHO that interesting. Helping the student attack a problem in the right way, or adapt their knowledge to be able to apply it to a problem, is more interesting and helpful.
It helps learners understand, plan, and then implement the plan.
"For tech CEOs, the dystopia is the point" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40371835
> a time-honored internet tradition: pointing out that the science fictional reference point a tech founder put forward was not an aspirational one, but, in fact, a dystopia containing a warning meant to be heeded, not emulated.
But students misunderstand in many different ways. How would it be tailored instead of another way of delivering lesson plans?
Even assuming you already had the topology of the problem space, you'd have to interrogate the student with all possible ways for each question to determine what's missing for them.
But part of the problem is impedance matching: failing students get little positive feedback because they have to correct many mistakes before they start getting things right. Interrogation makes the impedance-matching problem much, much worse (no matter how sweet and enticing the voice).
Sure, I believe in success patterns and strong leaders. But I'd need to see a sketch of how Khan understands and addresses the problems before I'd invest or rely on this as anything other than a stop-gap that continues the under-funding of mass education.
For majority of the time the active 'response' from the student is 'no response'. Teachers are amazing at understanding silence and building conversation on silence.
Knowing the social background of the a student, and hence knowing realities of their hardships is the begining point of starting to enable a student who is laggning behind.
AI-tutors are(potentially) great, much like how videos are way better than reading books from a childs perspective, but it is far from innovation in education that few influencers are trying it to be.
You don't need an LLM for this. Since the topic is specifically math, consider what that actually entails, especially for K-12 math education. The example is fractions. The rules for fraction problems are well-defined, we don't need an LLM to guess at the steps, we can literally write a simple program that encodes all the individual steps and prompts the student when they make a mistake to step back and walk through each small step (instead of taking big steps, like going from 1/2+1/4 to an answer have the student fill out each step like how to make the denominators the same and then adding the numerators and then, if applicable, simplifying).
Generating problems is also not something an LLM needs to be involved in. Such a strange and wasteful use of these tools.
Wouldn't that work for any subject matter - not just math?
I recently used ChatGPT to help me understand some Kubernetes and Terraform configuration. It was able to talk to me about the configuration and also help me understand some of the larger context- how information flows between the systems, what the terms mean, etc.
It provided direct explanations, and metaphors when I needed it, and let me ask clarifying questions.
This kind of learning system would be especially useful for people like myself who have Learning Disabilities, where once I understand a topic, I can speed ahead, but sometimes I'll just get "stuck", sometimes for days/weeks. Having a tutor can help, but there's a lot of embarrassment and that can lead to anxiety, which can in turn make it harder to learn.
Obviously such a system will need some safeguards around it, but having a system like this be able to both explain and point to primary sources could be a complete game changer for students.
at the same time, i see the limitations with this project in terms of what it wants to achieve.
tech alone is not the answer, AI or not. i had very positive experiences with teachers only using blackboards or whiteboards, and forgettable moments with those with the newest smartboards. to me, it is the teacher that brings out the value of these tools.
today's LLMs, no matter how large and expensive to run, do not capture the personal ingenuity that can replace teachers. this is not an old man shouting at the clouds opinion or any arrogance about humans being superior. critical thinking is a rare idea taught in schools, at least when i was growing up. these systems do not give an opportunity to do that.
i am happy to be proved wrong in the future but while i get the costs associated with researching and running the service, i feel it is unethical for them to be the ones charging for its access. it seems against the foundation's goals.
You can have all the knowledge at your fingertips!
What actually happened: ads shoved down our throats and way more distractions (porn, games, etc.)
Meanwhile math and reading levels continue to plummet.
So I don’t have high hopes. Those of us who use tools to succeed will continue to do so. Others who can’t control themselves will keep complaining. Nothing new.
AI will give us an answer with ads shoved into it with companies bidding to show their ad with the answer. People will do degenerate shit with AI, and gaming addiction will continue. People will still keep blaming the system and wondering why they can’t get ahead while spending most of their free time wasting it on gambling, porn, and games instead of learning.
The world will be split unevenly into people who research to contribute to AI knowledge base, and people who simply consume AI content.
The question is. How will we (the enlightened ones lol) make money off it?
The problem of education isn't the lack of resources it's the lack of purpose. The internet is all the resources you will ever need. Sure AI could augment this a little. Maybe it could re-explain something you can't quite wrap your head around. The problem is that kids know that the education system isn't even kind of preparing them for what's to come. Knowledge work and trades couldn't be further from what public school prepares you for. Having a teacher for every kid wouldn't change this. The problem is so fundamental, and the solution is so destructive that we can't just tack on one more thing to "fix" education.
Learning comes from doing, augmented with reflection. Public Schools don't ever do either of those things. The closest you ever get to doing anything that another human could want is building something in shop class. The closest thing you get to reflection is a grade that can only be negative feedback or the lack of feedback, plus there's no time for building on that reflection, just move onto the next thing.
Their schooling is vastly different from the "Sit still, do what you're told" model that was used to train the an upcoming generation of factory workers.
Not op, but this is an area I know a bit about.
1. You’re right that instruction methods have evolved over time to be less teacher-centered. This might be considered an improvement. That said, good teachers who implement these methods well are mostly in good school districts (no surprise).
2. The issue comes more in secondary ed, imho. The issue is with the curriculum. In 1900, only about 4% of HS-aged kids went to HS. These folks were the elite, and the HS education was preparing them for a 2-year or 4-year program after HS (again, mainly for elites). The curriculum that existed then is largely the same one we have today, and it’s completely absurd. We get odds things like lower level math (non-calculus track) basically being re-heated middle school math. We get four required years of “English” that focuses on grammar (often taught in a dubious, prescriptive manner) and literature largely written by dead people (when there is plenty of good modern lit and poetry to learn about/through). We have science education that largely does not train students to engage scientific thinking (again, except maybe for the honors classes at good schools). To summarize, we have a curriculum designed for college-bound elites that has been ungracefully shoe-horned into a one-size-fits-all train wreck.
All of the curricular issues are solvable, but it there will need to be a critical mass of support in local communities to be able to implement change through the inertia of the existing system of education administrators and (to some extent) teachers.
Until this happens, imho it’s best to look at secondary ed as very expensive child care for the vast majority of students, with the exception being in better school districts (usually where the elites or elite-ambitious live).
Primary ed is ok… the main learning outcomes that folks need are the three Rs. Some folks, especially on HN, seem to think scientific thinking should be included. They’re not wrong, but that only flies in schools/communities of elites.
Amen!
K-12 in the US needs a massive overhaul, but there are (at least) two problems:
1. Deeply entrenched administrators.
2. Parents who put high value on the child care component of school (regardless of whether learning is happening), which became extremely obvious during Covid, and they don’t want to risk losing that.
I used to checkout their "The Great Courses" dvds from the local library (in the USA) long time ago. They were a set of presentations each a full lecture length and delivered by respected professors in their fields. No flashy animations/music/narrative distractions but sedate multimedia in support of the lecture. I am not sure how it has changed nowadays but people should definitely check it out; there is a lot of good content there.
He is classified as learning disabled, and has IEP through the school district which gives him accommodations including access to assistive technologies--such as an OCR reader that will read the words on a page to him to allow him to answer questions.
At the very least, AI for ed-tech is the next evolution of those technologies, which may even be allowed without the need of a 504 or IEP (e.g. each student in his class has a school issued laptop).
I'm also curious what subjects would be made obsolete because of the power of AI assistants. I certainly was not taught Latin, and my kids will never need to learn cursive writing.
If AI will be so revolutionary to me that first mean a complete overhaul of what students should learn? We haven't even properly done this reevaluation of the curriculum even for being constantly connected to the internet.
Students really need to learn a lot fewer things on average, but the fundamentals matter even more now. Honestly, 90% of the population doesn't need more than elementary math, but they really need to understand how percentages or pro-rata work.
In the end, looks like a puff piece by Bill Gates is still a puff piece.
I spent hundreds of hours poring over 1500 page textbooks and being given the driest lectures imaginable by people who were delivering them on autopilot.
I would estimate that one hour of khan academy was roughly equivalent to a weeks coursework, which was 3 lectures and probably an extra 2 hours of self study per lecture. It was undoubtedly the only reason I succeeded in the way I did.
[1] https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/salman-khan
[2] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/740806/brave-new-wo...
Isn't this for lack of tutors, which AI solves?
With teaching now (even via videos), there's no way to present material for 30 students when they vary widely in background understanding and attention span, so only the high middle gets targeted. This creates a vicious cycle where the spread only gets larger as students age.
If slow kids can be tutored to catch up, they'll be much more motivated as part of the class, instead of the losers. If fast kids are given a taste of how ignorant they remain, they might have more sympathy for others, and might try to help instead of compete.
I would argue there's a very human element to tutoring that AI does not provide.
Having been a tutor and also having been tutored myself, the personal relationship is very important. To know some other human is taking their very human time to help you is a powerful motivating factor that an AI can't simulate. To see another human performing some task that you can't activates some kind of primal desire to emulate them. AI can't simulate that.
Khan academy is an invaluable resource. When I have kids, it will be a core part of their curriculum!
About ten years ago I was thinking of returning to university and was required to pass a high school level math exam to prove I still could do math as an adult (I couldn't, really!). Khan Academy was a pretty incredible resource. I was in a time crunch so I also hired a tutor for two hours a week and the combination worked really well for me. I could see swapping out a real life tutor with an LLM being pretty amazing and much more affordable!
I didn't end up returning to school, but now I've gotten the AI bug and need to upgrade my math skills, and I'm thinking that using a LLM to help learn about foundational math that applies to LLMs would be pretty neat.
> Chapter by chapter, Sal takes readers through his predictions—some have already come true since the book was written—for AI’s many applications in education. His main argument: AI will radically improve both student outcomes and teacher experiences, and help usher in a future where everyone has access to a world-class education.
Thousands of people will pick up from this article that AI is the solution to the education, while in reality it is people like Sal who are the actual solution, with YouTube, AI and other tech just being the tools to help scaling human talent.
I am navigating through a textbook with the audio feature. I take photos of the pages with my phone, then use ChatGPT as my language partner to work through the problem sets. When i switch to the notebook, i complete the work and then take another photo of it and have ChatGPT verify my work.
I agree with Gates here -- if you are motivated this changes the education game.
I've sometimes wondered when I'll get called to the Dean's office because a student died in class because breathing wasn't specifically listed as a grading requirement on the syllabus.
AI education will continue this trend. AI can certainly teach you all kinds of remarkable skills. But the value of those skills will now plummet, because these are exactly the kinds of jobs that will be automated by AI!
the article goes on to describe how such an AI tutor might work:
"As you work through a challenging set of fraction problems, it won’t just give you the answer—it breaks each problem down into digestible steps. When you get stuck, it gives you easy-to-understand explanations and a gentle nudge in the right direction. When you finally get the answer, it generates targeted practice questions that help build your understanding and confidence."
reading it, and watching the demo of gpt-4o tutoring math (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBrdd7xg-dg), I felt the opposite -- that if I had such a tutor, whatever motivation I had would have been stripped away by such a tutor. I really needed the quiet struggle with a problem, and feeling that I conquered it on my own, instead of being guided through a paint-by-number kit. I acknowledge that I might have an unusual learning style, or that I simply belonged to a generation that grew up without such tools, hence the aversion, much like my parents grew up without digital calculators (although they don't harbor any aversion to the use of calculators).
If the AI doesn't understand then you are just learning a script you are being fed.
Some automation is obviously useful for transmitting information about various topics but the way this is being framed would seem to undermine the very need to learn in the first place.
So I am curious, is Gates suggesting that we will overcome the fundamental issues here or is he saying that (which is kind of interesting in itself) it's plausible to have a technology that is fundamentally bad at something, be an effective teacher of that thing to others?
What Gates and Kahn describe is interesting, but it’s a little bit like talking about color theory and how the fact that a baseball bat is purple affected you after you just got whacked in the head with it.
(Khan Academy is excellent. Over a decade ago, my home-schooled daughter [we were not living in the US at the time] used Khan Academy throughout high school, scoring 2300 on the SAT and getting a full scholarship to a prestigious US college to study engineering.)
Education has a lot more edge cases than driving.
- kids give their assignments to AI so that it solves it for them, not for getting a hint.
- it has long been demonstrated human interaction is required to learn difficult things (such as reading/writing), otherwise kids would learn those skills on video.
- learning is about practicing difficult stuff. AI is about having the computer doing difficult stuff for you.
"Employees who can use AI effectively will be far more valuable than those who can’t."
The point of AI is that there is absolutely nothing to do for it to digest your problem. Show me someone who can't use AI? Must be illiterate?
"jobs of the future—which will become more enjoyable and fulfilling"
... finding and fixing the errors the AI made.
My parents are much better at counting with no calculator than my kids. Mental calculation is no more seen as a valuable skill now that everybody effectively has a calculator in his pocket (smartphone). AI will make some skills once valuable obsolete. The question is not how are we going to teach with AI but WHAT are we going to teach?
Google chatbot only serves google. Microsoft serves microsoft.
It will always cater to some agenda, it will have some biases. It will be nice, but it will play neatly their part in perpetuating corporatocracy.
As a unit you will have to play a long, or live in the woods without AI.
The fact is, Khan Academy was so useful to me in school precisely because it was NOT a resampling of a Wikipedia page, of every uninspired textbook I was ever forced to read. It was a smart, real life human being who understood the nuances of how actual human beings understood concepts. Sal didn't just break down complex mathematical subjects for me such that I was able to solve linear equations in echelon form, there was also a particular way he emphasised the words he spoke so I understood why something was important. The human factor is so important, and we're fucking over our next generation for market hype.
A few years ago, I was bullish on online learning. But no-one with common sense is as the helm. I am incredibly concerned that Microsoft is believing its hype at the cost of something that was at one point incredibly valuable to society.
I remember when MOOCs were the future of education, as students across the world would have free access to the best lectures from the best teachers and could watch them over and over again at their own pace. That ... didn't result in the second coming of Christ, to put it politely.
This part confused me on several levels.
Let's break it down.
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1. Tutors (human) can not replace teachers on a mass scale
True, and the article touches on this: human tutors simply don't scale!
2. Tutors (human) should not replace teachers
False. Bloom's 2-sigma problem [0] states that on average, 1-1 tutored students outperform 98% of classroom-educated students. (!!!)
Therefore, if we could replace 1:30 education with 1:1 education, the evidence very strongly says that we should.
In other words, the only reason we have teachers, instead of tutors, is because we don't have enough tutors. If we had enough tutors, we would simply 1-1 tutor everyone -- assuming our goal is educational achievement.
3. AI tutors can never replace human tutors
This is a strange claim. It seems to imply that all technological progress will suddenly cease after today -- not just in AI, but human-computer interfaces, robotics, etc.? (Note: the article doesn't make this specific claim, so perhaps I'm straw-manning here.)
I don't expect convincingly human androids for a while. But are androids really necessary for teaching math? GPT-4o seems to do fine! [1]
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As far as the tech goes, I think the only thing missing is memory and personalization. Currently GPT doesn't know what I know, and what I don't know. What is the dependency graph of knowledge? (KhanAcademy had one, but they've taken it down...) Where in that graph are there gaps in my understanding? What are my specific goals and interests?
Can we present the most relevant learning materials to me in alignment with all these parameters? Or else, can we generate them on the fly? It's all a solvable engineering problem.
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[0] https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/
[1] Math Problems with GPT-4o [video]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40347320
[1] Math Problems with GPT-4o: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nSmkyDNulk
See also: One study predicted human-level AI tutors by 2025
[2] Achieving Bloom's Two-Sigma Goal Using Intelligent Tutoring Systems (2020) - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339246677_Achieving...
But it's weird to make this about Microsoft when AI is being shoved down our throats from all directions. Like you said, it's a "world of" greed.
Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to solve the equations in math. But now you have an AI that solves it for you.
I bet that there will be more students of the later type than the former.
The issue is that AI is not at least yet accurate enough for that. You need think on your own and be expert to spot all the inaccuracies. But then again, we are talking about how students can learn based on that...
and then the AI explains how it was solved, step by step. You can repeatedly ask it to clarify, and it has endless patience and won't get bored or sick of you.
Eventually, you understand how the equation is solved. No human teacher would be able to achieve this.
It's just a matter of priorities for the company designing the models.
> Maybe have the network which generates the answer be moderated by another network that assesses the truthiness of it.
Like a GAN? Sometimes you can do that, but it seems not always.
If this was simple and obvious, they'd have done it as soon as the first one was interesting-but-wrong.
You can say, ELI5 (like the Explain Like I'm 5 years old Subreddit), or explain it like a child, or explain it in very simple English (which is like Simple English wikipedia).
It is actually going to be the greatest learning tool, but only for people that genuinely want to learn.
Certainly as my parent's generation must have been with the internet and computers for me.
I'm not sure what to do with this envy. Though, it has made me want to have a child even more, just to see first hand how they could develop so much faster and smarter than me.
This immediately reminds me of the scene in Terminator 2 where Sarah Connor is reflecting on how the terminator, reprogrammed to aid John Connor, is the best father figure he’s ever had.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tksN5Jaan9E
“It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him. Never shout at him or get drunk and hit him or say he was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there, and it would die to protect him.”
Amazing. what a beautiful scene, words, everything. And it's objectively true.
One of the things I have hugely enjoyed about LLMs is asking the same question again and again until I finally get why it is the way it is.
No human could deal with "I don't get it, try explaining it another way..." after the 10th time.
Not all teachers are able to see the POV of the student. In fact, i would argue that only exceptionally good teachers are able to.
Whether AI can achieve this level of understanding is still yet to be seen, but i would hope it is possible.
For example, unless the instructor has some kind of Jedi master level self control they may begin to show frustration at being asked the same question repeatedly or with minor variations.
If they choose to use an AI to "cheat" and not learn, then it is no different than them using any other methods to not learn (such as truancy).
Not true, but only available at great expense.
They would, but only if you were rich enough to afford a personal tutor. There's plenty of scientific evidence that students who have one learn a lot faster than those stuck in a classroom. With AI, you can probably get most of the benefits of a personal tutor for a fraction of the price.
But idea behind these AI tutors are to help and guide you through the process of asking questions until you understands.
Will it be perfect? hell no! Just another tool for teachers to either enhance and/or give extra help with almost no extra resources.
Hopefully this will pan out for the better then the worse
While I'm sure this is a typo, I also expect this is exactly how it will play out. For the better initially, then, for the worse a short time later.
The most of the students will not use it for improving their own text or iteration process, unless the penalties for cheating are very high. They instead copy-paste the instructions, add some adjustments, and then copy-paste the output. This will give them results in the shortest amount of time, if there are assignments where something needs to be returned. But how to detect cheaters?
Too many students do tasks as in "completion" oriented way, not in learning oriented way. I am mostly talking from college/university perspective.
I don't think they should allow use of AI during tests because yeah, it'd just do all the work for them and they wouldn't learn anything, but I absolutely think there's value in being able to use it as a 24/7 instant tutor, particularly since ChatGPT can be coerced into explaining things in basically any style that you'd like.
Something I've found fun and bizarrely useful is having ChatGPT explain stuff in terms of scripts from King of the Hill. It's fun to hear Hank Hill compare ZF Set Theory to something as reliable and efficient as propane while Dale goes into tirades about how the government imposed the axiom of choice to distract away from System F.
For any test where there's an AI good enough to cheat with and cheap enough students can afford it, the test itself is no longer important — it is as pointless as testing how well students can use fountain pens when everyone uses a keyboard for actual work. Or how well they can play chess.
I'm not sure the exact shape of what each model can and can't do, but I am confident that this means they're never be an important "cheating" risk, not even when they're technically capable of it.
We didn't just stop teaching children how to read the second that text-to-speech stuff came about, and we didn't stop teaching basic arithmetic the second that calculators were invented, and we didn't stop teaching algebra the second that Wolfram Alpha was released.
There is value in learning the fundamentals of things. If you never actually learn algebra, then it becomes effectively impossible to do the more advanced stuff.
TTS from visual input isn't good enough to be an example of that yet. It's good, but not that good.
> we didn't stop teaching basic arithmetic the second that calculators were invented and we didn't stop teaching algebra the second that Wolfram Alpha was released.
And yet, my A-level exams 22 years ago required me to have a graphic calculator.
Even if TTS were absolutely perfect, then I'd still maintain my point.
> And yet, my A-level exams 22 years ago required me to have a graphic calculator.
Doesn't that sort of prove my point? Calculators existed and were obviously useful, but they didn't just stop teaching you algebra, despite knowing you had a calculator.
Only if you missed mine about how it is no longer cheating to use one.
I think the disagreement I have is that I think part of the reason calculators are allowed on calculus tests is because they're actually not that useful for a lot of what they teach you in calculus. I had a graphing calculator in my math and physics classes in high school, but most of my work was still done with a pen and paper. The calculator was of course useful for the arithmetic stuff, and it could be useful to sanity-check your work (e.g. to see if the roots you calculated were correct), but I still had to do most of the actual calculus by hand.
Even when I got a calculator with a CAS built in (HP 50G), I would still have to do most of the algebra by hand, and honestly if my teachers had known that my calculator had a CAS I suspect they wouldn't have allowed me to use it to begin with.
That said the uselessness of education is the point. It's a signal that you're willing to do pointless work for future rewards. We may as well replace it with counting beans and it would be just as effective.
Well, unless I have another go at learning Arabic…
Once you hit a problem that an AI cannot solve, it's good to be at least aware of what's going on in the field. You don't necessarily have to remember every formula and every fact off the top of your head, but having an intuition on what facts and formulas there are and where they can be used is immensely helpful.
Imagine you're writing a program in an esoteric scripting language that Copilot doesn't understand, and you need to put a large array of events in order from oldest to newest. If you had to learn this sort of think before, you'll immediately have an intuition that this is called sorting, there are slow (n^2) sorting algorithms and faster (n log n) sorting algorithms and you want the latter, and that quicksort is probably a good candidate to start with. You don't necessarily have to be able to write quicksort by hand, you can look up an implementation online and port it to your weird proprietary language, but the intuition is important.
That sounds like a different thing than I'm saying, and I agree with what I think you're saying.
So, if an AI can answer "what's a fast sort function" with "quicksort, here's some pseudocode: …", that's a related but different question to "write quicksort in [this brand new language you've never encountered before]".
Is like how AI won't take our jobs, but it will take over for each individual task that our jobs are made from.
It is overwhelmingly likely that you are learning incorrect facts about mathematics from ChatGPT, especially with the distracting gimmick of using cartoon characters.
Second, I know what fuck I'm doing, and I'm sorry to "depress" you, but having a high level summary of something in terms of a cartoon is generally reasonably accurate, and generally any information I learn is also mechanically checked with Isabelle. I agree that it shouldn't be the be-all-end all of everything but if you're a student who's already frustrated with math, having a high-level description of stuff in terms of something you understand can be valuable.
I maintain that one of the very best teachers I ever had was my 9th grade biology teacher, purely because she understood absolutely nothing about biology and appeared to just be making shit up. You could argue that in a vacuum this might be benign, but part of the issue is that she would use tests provided by the textbook, written by competent biologists. As a result of this, I had to learn to ignore most of what my teacher said, and sometimes argue back with her, and I feel like ironically I learned biology better than most people in that class; if nothing else I did get an A on all the "real" tests from the textbooks.
I think that arguing is actually a really underrated tool in education. Looking for and correcting bullshit is something that extraordinarily enlightening, at least for me, and I think AIs even in their current state can be useful for that.
The future generations do not have the same background as we do. For them it is very difficult to teach what is "misinformation", or have a thinking model like that, unless we make them read proper books and compare the content for the output of the AI.
But if the AI is soon correct enough, they don't get it, and they don't feel it important, and they just take the output from AI as fact.
I think that just like human teachers, it'll be impossible to completely solve the misinformation problem, but I do think it'll get asymptotically close to being solved.
What I think is valuable is trying to figure out stuff where ChatGPT contradicts the "established" stuff, and having students figure it out.
A clever guy he was.
While I do obviously hope that ChatGPT is able to curve against the misinformation problem, I actually do think there's been a lot of value for me personally in trying to figure out where it's getting things subtly wrong. Since I'm taking everything it says with huge grain of salt, the I am kind of forced to dissect every sentence a bit more thoroughly than I might with a textbook where I know everything is gonna be correct.
When I was a lecturer I would use ChatGPT to generate Java homework assignment. It would do "ok" with that, but it usually required three or four iterations to get something that actually made sense, and usually it would require a bit of editing on my end to get results I was happy with. It still saved me a boatload of time though, particularly since it was even able to give me the assignment in pandoc-compatible markdown.
In my case, that's why I usually try and figure out something to do in Isabelle. Trying to prove some kind of property based on something I learned from ChatGPT. I also will occasionally grab exercises from "real" textbooks once I know the keywords to search in Kagi.
I was a college dropout for quite awhile but was still working as a software engineer, and while that's definitely not something I would recommend to anyone (it makes stuff way harder), it did have the advantage of making me pretty decent at teaching myself stuff, simply because my career depended on me being able to play with the "big boys" on an intellectual level.
For software it's comparatively easier though, because you can just have a project to do X, and if it's complicated enough you'll likely touch on a lot of CS concepts, even some you didn't directly self-select. Math (particularly more abstract math) is harder simply because it's much harder to practice; there aren't a ton of tangible "math projects" that you can hack on.
The closest way I've been able to practice it is by using Isabelle. I didn't use ChatGPT to learn that initially, since I learned how to use it before ChatGPT was released; I read through the "Concrete Semantics" free book and did those examples, so I guess that of proves your point more than mine.
(Plus every one of them who gets out makes life better for the rest at least by reducing downward pressure on wages, and hopefully also by creating new business opportunities that raise wages further by increasing supply. Rigorous education is almost always a win-win: https://matiane.wordpress.com/2021/09/15/democratic-educatio... )
Sample size of one, and obviously there's a million confounding variables here, but I think that my love of math stems from the fact that both my parents, and especially my dad, really loved math (and physics), and so whenever I had any questions about any aspect of math (at least up to calculus and differential equations), I could ask one of them for help pretty much whenever I wanted, and they would enthusiastically help me immediately, and eventually I grew to love it myself.
Eventually I did well enough in math to where they gave me a test in school and I was able to skip two grades in it (going from 7th grade to 9th grade level). I ended up getting much more into discrete math and surpassed my parents in the more "pure" math. Even if my genetics were completely unaltered, I am quite convinced that if my parents weren't there to provide constant help then that wouldn't have happened.
I think AI has the possibility of providing a comparable experience to what I had. It can patiently explain every aspect of math that any middle or high school student is likely to come across, and I think it has power to "de-frustrate" them as a result.
So yes, I'd personally say we should expect people to "keep up in math".
(Source: a very smart science teacher I know and won't name. Keep in mind most high school science teachers have weak scientific backgrounds. This technology is poison.)
I don't think we need Generative AI for 7th grade. College, perhaps, but how much advanced math is there in 7th grade these days?
There is little point in writing essays any more. We’ll need to find other ways of testing knowledge acquisition.
But also, we’ll need other menus of skills/knowledge to acquire. It seems to me that rote memorization of facts is even less useful than it was 5 years ago. However being able to synthesize facts and ideas, this is where the human edge will be concentrated.
With AI to do the grunt work, maybe we can have our kids actually building meaningful things much earlier than they would otherwise be capable of.
It didn’t keep me from learning the material - a lot of those assignments and problem sets were simply busy work — but did improve ho much free time I had to read and surf the net and learn new tech things.
Not that Sal Khan is infallible but he is a good-egg. You're gonna have to give me more than, "this'll never work because of <cynical dime-a-dozen take>."