Wait, when you say one-to-one you mean AI to Human? That’s not the same, I’m sorry.
Perhaps I am a bit more optimistic, but if AI could give me, let's say, 90% of an average lecturer's capability, at 10% of the price or even less, that is probably extremely valuable. (For one, I would certainly be interested in learning new things that otherwise wouldn't make sense financially)
But I did not learn everything I wanted to know. And I can’t afford to take a time-out to go to grad school again for a second PhD. On the other hand, an LLM, in some sense, has access to the world’s knowledge. With some patience and persistence, you can mine almost-expert-level instruction from one.
When ChatGPT 3.5 came out, I excitedly tried this for a topic that I WAS an expert in. The results were discouraging. The model’s answers seemed to reflect the general misunderstandings that people had about the topic. More recently though, I had to review a paper in the same area, and I used a late-model ChatGPT to help check my work. It was an eye-opening experience because it was no longer confused. And it found longstanding misunderstandings I had, buttressing its answers against my skepticism with citations to original work. I came away very impressed. This kind of AI “rubber duck programming” is my preferred style of use now. I used it just today to help me learn an area of statistics I have always been fuzzy about. This approach definitely requires some careful prompting, but I am optimistic that AI tutors will one day be a real thing. My only worry is that people lose the ability to understand what makes an answer a good one and why we should care about good answers.
This is of course about the PhD level and beyond. For regular university-level education, where the goal is to pass the usual exams, ChatGPT and Claude are more than enough. But for real-world "doing", not (yet).
Did you check those citations to make sure they actually contained the information they were being cited for? Because I've asked difficult questions too and have had mixed results. I would never trust an LLM as a teacher. They make stuff up all the time, and when you're learning you're in the very worst position to be checking the information you're given.
Note I said "meaningfully" - something with LLMs that deeply concerns me is that they provide edutainment, and people actually think they're learning something. One of the comments on this thread mentioned giving a "dense linear algebra pdf" and having an LLM use the Socratic method. I guarantee they would have learned more if they read the PDF. I strongly doubt they learned anything at all with a bunch of silly "Socratic" questions about linear algebra. But it felt like they learned something!
What an incredibly elitist thing to say.
On your point of MOOCs and YouTube lectures: I agree that the latter is sufficient for me, but there's nothing stopping AI from creating something similar, or even better: lectures tailored to my specific interests and needs. MOOC failed for me exactly because it wasn't "for me" - I might as well try and find a YouTube playlist.
These are all tangential, of course. I don't know how this specific thing would turn out.
Sadly we do not, so something like this will have to serve as a more accessible backup.