9 ms·

ChatGPT, the Abacus, and Education

87 points by csmeyer 4y ago

jeffreportmill1 4y ago
The abacus and calculator analogy is a good one. I've been thinking about ChatGPT in terms of standard language libraries. So far, I think that is what ChatGPT is good for - solving small, self contained problems that are building blocks of larger apps. I'm glad that they are there, and I'm sure ChatGPT will provide a lot of code of this nature. So I shouldn't be concerned, because I love standard library functions. But for education, I fear that students will be discouraged (or tempted to cheat) when they are learning to code with exercises that can be solved with a simple online query.
- localhost 4y ago
  I like your extension of the argument towards standard libraries. I guess one way of thinking about this is that the standard library hasn't made programmers obsolete. Charlie ends his post with an intriguing question - what is the abacus for programming? Some way of reasoning about programming that isn't a black box. Perhaps raising the abstraction level even higher? Assignments that are like "design an app that makes it really easy to share photos" and then "reason about how you would test that app" and "what countermeasures would you create to prevent abuse" and then have the student(s) come up with specific pieces of implementation of parts of that solution that would fit the allotment of time?
  - csmeyer 4y ago
    I love those ideas for assignments. Humans will get boxed out of most programming tasks, but the questions that you raise will (probably?) be the last to go
- zamfi 4y ago
  > But for education, I fear that students will be discouraged (or tempted to cheat) when they are learning to code with exercises that can be solved with a simple online query. Is it cheating when kids learning to read have books read to them? Is it cheating when teens learning guitar watch YouTube videos of people playing guitar? ...or use Spotify to play music? Personally, I'm much more excited for how "learning to code" will change given these tools, than I am worried about cheating.
  - Chabsff 4y ago
    Learning to code is ultimately not about learning a pile of information. It's about learning how to react when faced with a wall. There is definitely something to be said in favour of presenting students with small walls to face before presenting them with large-scale and cognitively overwhelming problems. The concern here is that most of what we've been using as "small walls to conquer" are trivially solvable without having to go through the problem solving process. But I think this is excessive hand-wringing. StackOverflow is already as disruptive as can be on that regard, but that doesn't prevent a plurality of students from going through the motions for the sake of learning the "craft".
  - mwigdahl 4y ago
    No, those are not cheating. However, it's cheating when your kid types his math problems into Google and just enters them into an autovalidating document. If coding exercises are simple and working code can be acquired brainlessly by typing the problem statement into ChatGPTNext, then yes I'd consider that cheating (both in the direct sense of violating the rules of the course and in the sense of the learner cheating him/herself out of the value of the exercise). As a side note, the type of math "education" I describe above is worse than useless, as the autovalidator rejects correct answers that aren't entered exactly as the form expects, and has no facility for or requirement to show one's work. It's literally just teaching kids to Google and answer and then shotgun it into the form with random permutations until they get a green checkmark.
  - gibspaulding 4y ago
    Educator here. AI has really quickly been changing how assignments have to be crafted. In the last couple of years apps like photomath have made the old school approach of teaching math with a lecture on how to do something followed by practice homework problems pretty much useless since students can so easily just have the computer do the problems (complete with showing work for them). From messing around with ChatGPT a bit, it looks like things like writing essays/book reports/poems for English classes will be going the same way as soon as someone packages it up nicely. It's going to be a rough transition, but I hope one for the better. I'm not sure about what that will look like for gen-ed classes, but in my CS class, I try to embrace tools like this. Instead of worrying about getting students to memorize boilerplate and algorithms, I try to teach them to research and how to glue things together. Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1988/ https://xkcd.com/1988/
whacked_new 4y ago
I spent a good part of last year picking up the abacus and meticulously tracking my progress. I can attest to "continue to visualize the abacus in their mind, improving their skills even when the physical tool is unavailable", but make no mistake, this is a domain-specific skill which has little bearing on mathematical knowledge and intuition per-se (at least not at beginner-intermediate levels). One useful aspect which is not often discussed, but might actually complement OP's article, is that the mental abacus converts one kind of mental process (numerical perception) to another (visual scratchpad). Kind of like turning text into a QR-code as a more "efficient" 2D-storage, yet the QR-code contains no "text", and you have to convert it back. This complementary process in the brain becomes interesting when our mental abilities decline or get replaced, and we might as well re-purpose those brain areas using some kind of transfer encoding (e.g. Morse code). A naive first-guess could be to learn lists of logical challenges and strategies in order to clarify results given by an AI in the fastest way possible. So given a GAN, train the human on A, and leave the G and N to the computer.
btbuildem 4y ago
It's an interesting observation - that the use of a certain type of tool, while multiplying our productivity, simultaneously leads to atrophy of our ability to do that set of tasks "by hand". I think the "saving grace" for LLMs in this context is that the user still has to vigorously validate the results.
AltruisticGapHN 4y ago
On a bird's eye perspective... you know as much as I love and enjoy crafting with css/html/javascript ... as I grow older I am not that entertained in having to learn yet another API to do the same thing that we did years ago, only "more elegantly/faster/with less code/etc". The truth is, if I'm perfectly honest, that to KNOW those APIs in itself, is not real knowledge. It's just empty. Talk to your wife holding your newborn, about the latest tailwind version, or native Javascript additions. Seriously who gives a flying rat's ass? At this stage of human evolution, we live in a reality bubble where we're told that a life "well lived" is one where you have a "real" job, and one where you "work hard". And your parents tell you to "become somebody"... well maybe it's because they have never know anything else? Maybe the best thing that will come out of artificial intelligence, is to destroy all this supposed knowledge. All those mountains of nothing. Imagine you create a new API for a service, and EVEN WItHOUT feeding any examples to the deep learning, it manages to figure out the best way to solve xyz problems using your API, and even highlights inefficiencies in your API. Now we're talking. Why would anybody waste their human potential writing the 1000th tutorial on how to use your API ? That's gonna be replaced by another better API from someone else in 5 days? I love my work. I love CSS; JS .. I really do but honestly it's also all so empty. Would I do it all over again? I don't even remember how I wrote in assembler on the Amiga and 486. How I used the copper/blitter etc. All vague distant memories. Everything shifting... edit: I guess this comes off as a mini rant, simplifying. Not sure what my point is, frustrated with what "learning" means perhaps. Frustrated with the notion that knowledge is repeating stuff. Actually here's a good question : are teachers really necessary or have we yet to envision a world where children, helped with AI tools, can learn whatever they want - as an innate ability? curiosity?
- mkaic 4y ago
  This resonates with me. Tangentially related — for a few years now I've had my sights set on AI eventually driving the automation of all menial labor needed for human subsistence. Food, water, clothing, housing, healthcare — I see these all as things that every human should have for free. Survival should be free. I've often wondered what amazingly good and horrifyingly bad things humanity will do once nobody has to fight for their basic subsistence any more. I feel like so much turmoil in the world is caused by people acting irrational because they're afraid of going hungry, becoming homeless, being hurt, etc. A world where that fear is largely gone could be a marvelous utopia where everyone is free to chase after their dreams. It could also result in everyone living in VR 24/7 and our society decaying into hedonistic madness. I think it'll be a little bit of both.
woah 4y ago
The conclusion that high level programming languages are "complementary" while LLMs are "competitive" seems very shaky to me. If we had never invented high level languages, and instead used LLMs to assist writing and debugging assembly code, I think we'd all be a lot better at reading assembly. I think the real effect on programming is to reduce the importance of mechanical and rote skills such as typing fast and having a photographic memory for standard library functions and algorithm patterns. If your main skill is that when given a detailed description of something to implement, you can bang out working code at 100 WPM, then LLMs are kind of making that obsolete. If your main skill is balancing requirements, making judgement calls, and reviewing code for correctness, then LLMs are going to help you work a lot faster.
- underlines 4y ago
  i think in longer terms. step one is what you mentioned. that's what people thought when computers came along and they said it will probably only be used to assist some scientists with complex calculus. step two is to automate the business analyst then the architect. step three might be to directly render whatever requirements the customer or enduser gives the LLM. and i bet this comes in under 10 years. Basically what StableDiffusion does right now. No Graphic designer needed. And imagine what will happen, if you allow an LLM 10 years in the future to improve it's own architecture and training data. And now imagine if you allow that thing to control chip factories and assembly lines to improve it's hardware...
  - goatlover 4y ago
    The hype over this is bordering the ridiculous claims made by initial AI researchers in the 50s. So chatGTP is going to be running its own factories in a decade. I guess we should make sure it doesn’t overvalue paper clip production. Or cyborgs and time travel.
    - visarga 4y ago
      You're sounding smart, but in reality NVIDIA is already using AI to design new GPUs. The incredulity in some people! It's absurd, right? https://screenrant.com/nvidia-using-ai-make-faster-better-gpus-how/ https://screenrant.com/nvidia-using-ai-make-faster-better-gp...
ren_engineer 4y ago
GPT3 could be a legit game changer for teaching CS. The first time I tried self-learning programming I gave up because I often got stuck on random things that a tutor/mentor could have helped me solve in 5 seconds instead of hours of Googling. Some sort of fine-tuned model that can analyze why your code isn't working for practice problems and give hints and suggestions rather than just giving you the solution. Each student could effectively have their own personal tutor obviously people are going to use "unlocked" GTP3 to do their homework, but kids do that today as well. People who want to actually learn will be helped massively by tools built on LLMs
- raldi 4y ago
  And there’s so much attention on “oh no, take-home assignments are impossible now” but if so, I see the education world adapting. Instead of writing an essay about Napoleon, a bot will interview you like an oral exam — a far superior evaluation, but when done by humans there was just never enough to time in their day to do them regularly and for everyone. Instead of a homework assignment done behind closed doors and then tossed over the fence for the TA to grade, the bot pair programs with you and helps you through the places you’re getting stuck.
  - meowkit 4y ago
    A wonderful outcome if that level of adaption occurs. I am more worried that the Luddite mentality will get these models banned in (primary school) educational settings.
    - raldi 4y ago
      Yeah, I could see a position of, “How will people express themselves if they don’t practice writing essays?” but I could see in five years the primary two ways of doing that becoming (1) Machine-assisted essay writing, and (2) People with ideas explaining them to an AI model through conversation, and then the model going out and explaining it en masse to others. Maybe even some of those others will challenge points or extend the ideas, and the tech can distill all this feedback and critique into a summary that they take back to the author.
Weaaklearnergpt 4y ago
Is chatgpt a weak learning tool? ,that is, does it have the capacity to begin with basic fa ts that provides a probability above Zero about knowing something and then combine the database encoded knowledge to guarantee a lower bound of general knowledge?
ttul 4y ago
I’ve also been using ChatGPT like crazy since it came out. I am a tech CEO and occasionally write code to automate various CEO things or to prototype technical ideas. Although I trained as a software engineer years ago, I can’t afford to spend a lot of time learning new frameworks or languages just to get a simple prototype written up. ChatGPT is very helpful in getting past the learning curve. For example, I wanted to write a script that pulls data from RabbitMQ, does some text manipulation, and sends the result to DynamoDB. And, for fun, I wanted to write it in Rust. ChatGPT quickly gave me a working template and I was on my way. I can’t wait for ChatGPT to reach 1.0 as a paid service. I will gladly pay to accelerate the boilerplate phase of my projects.
- waboremo 4y ago
  What do you get from ChatGPT when it comes to boilerplate on software projects that already existing paid services like Copilot don't give you?
  - underlines 4y ago
    explanations and interactions. you can correct it or alter the outcome by giving additional feedback. Something copilot can't.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Karunamon 4y ago
    Copilot is AI IntelliSense. You still have to write code. ChatGPT is an AI programmer (of limited skill, but still). You describe what you want in plain English and get a runnable program out the other side. You may or may not have to modify this program. It can also make changes to the program based on plain English descriptions.
evouga 4y ago
Nobody uses an abacus anymore. I use a calculator (well, Mathematica or scipy) to effortlessly solve problems that would be impossible to solve by hand. I appreciate, but don’t particularly understand or care about, the many decades of numerical analysis research that went into making scipy algorithms robust and efficient. ChatGPT is the most exciting thing to come out of CS in a long while. Forget all of the debate and angst about whether ChatGPT is “really” an AI and what its “real” capabilities are (and I squarely blame the AI community’s recent history of brazen overhype and self-promotion for this)—-it’s a red herring. Call it the most powerful Internet search engine ever invented, if you want. That alone will change the world. It will trivialize a lot of tasks that are currently laborious and burdensome. The hand-wringing I’m seeing about this reminds me a lot of the rise of the Internet in the 90s, or Wikipedia in the 00s… yes, we will need to rethink how we write software and we will need to rethink how we teach students. But getting hung up on the dangers of ChatGPT as a “competitive” too is to cling a bit too tightly to old paradigms about of how humans leverage technology that have never been rigid, even in our lifetime.
- goatlover 4y ago
  Will chatGPT be free to use as a search like Google is, and why hasn’t Google leveraged its own language model? What happens to websites when nobody visits anymore because their info is easily available in the search response?
  - visarga 4y ago
    That will be interesting to see. I bet by 2030 few people will be seeing ads or websites unless they want to, most will get polite and helpful answers based on language models that use search engines under the hood. We'll eventually have our own models running on our computers, in privacy, and maybe a small index of text (few TB) for reference checking. This will create a new private space of creativity where we can't be tracked and advertised to.
seydor 4y ago
ChatGpt doesn't augment education, if replaces it. A version that is 99% correct on a subject will be enough to replace the teacher. It is endlessly patient, unlike any teacher. Coupled with high quality video courses, i can see children above a certain age using it to learn and explore science,math, languages and literature
- felideon 4y ago
  That would still be "education", so I’m not sure what part you mean it will replace. Do you mean it will replace educators? If so, who exactly would be creating these “high level” video courses? Also who would provide the curriculum? Someone would have to tell the child: “This week, have a conversation with ProfessorGPT on the following topic. At the end of a week, submit an essay (generated by ProfessorGPT) that shows a summary of your discussion, and include a transcript of the entire session.” You’re also assuming a socratic approach to education works for every child. I’m not sure that’s universally true.
  - seydor 4y ago
    that last person is not an educator, it's a janitor
    - felideon 4y ago
      How are kids supposed to know what they’re supposed to be learning about at a particular point in time?
madrox 4y ago
I was nodding along in the introduction, rolling my eyes in cognitive artifacts, and sighing in the conclusion. It seems like math educators still loathe students use calculators, and I find the reasoning has major blindspots. Competitive artifacts abound in society, and we are better for it. If I am in a situation where I do not have immediate access to a calculator, I am not in a situation where I need to do quick math. In 20 years, if we're still asking what year WW1 started on history tests, then we utterly failed. We absolutely need to find a way to teach programming in a world of AI. We also need to find a way to teach art in a world of AI. We'll need to find a way to teach everything in a world of AI. What we don't need to hold onto is this mistaken belief that we need to somehow teach people how to get by without it. It's like telling someone they need to learn all of a python framework before they're allowed to use it...utterly defeats the point of its existence.

87 points by csmeyer 4y ago

The abacus and calculator analogy is a good one. I've been thinking about ChatGPT in terms of standard language libraries. So far, I think that is what ChatGPT is good for - solving small, self contained problems that are building blocks of larger apps. I'm glad that they are there, and I'm sure ChatGPT will provide a lot of code of this nature. So I shouldn't be concerned, because I love standard library functions. But for education, I fear that students will be discouraged (or tempted to cheat) when they are learning to code with exercises that can be solved with a simple online query.

localhost 4y ago
I like your extension of the argument towards standard libraries. I guess one way of thinking about this is that the standard library hasn't made programmers obsolete. Charlie ends his post with an intriguing question - what is the abacus for programming? Some way of reasoning about programming that isn't a black box. Perhaps raising the abstraction level even higher? Assignments that are like "design an app that makes it really easy to share photos" and then "reason about how you would test that app" and "what countermeasures would you create to prevent abuse" and then have the student(s) come up with specific pieces of implementation of parts of that solution that would fit the allotment of time?
- csmeyer 4y ago
  I love those ideas for assignments. Humans will get boxed out of most programming tasks, but the questions that you raise will (probably?) be the last to go
zamfi 4y ago
> But for education, I fear that students will be discouraged (or tempted to cheat) when they are learning to code with exercises that can be solved with a simple online query. Is it cheating when kids learning to read have books read to them? Is it cheating when teens learning guitar watch YouTube videos of people playing guitar? ...or use Spotify to play music? Personally, I'm much more excited for how "learning to code" will change given these tools, than I am worried about cheating.
- Chabsff 4y ago
  Learning to code is ultimately not about learning a pile of information. It's about learning how to react when faced with a wall. There is definitely something to be said in favour of presenting students with small walls to face before presenting them with large-scale and cognitively overwhelming problems. The concern here is that most of what we've been using as "small walls to conquer" are trivially solvable without having to go through the problem solving process. But I think this is excessive hand-wringing. StackOverflow is already as disruptive as can be on that regard, but that doesn't prevent a plurality of students from going through the motions for the sake of learning the "craft".
- mwigdahl 4y ago
  No, those are not cheating. However, it's cheating when your kid types his math problems into Google and just enters them into an autovalidating document. If coding exercises are simple and working code can be acquired brainlessly by typing the problem statement into ChatGPTNext, then yes I'd consider that cheating (both in the direct sense of violating the rules of the course and in the sense of the learner cheating him/herself out of the value of the exercise). As a side note, the type of math "education" I describe above is worse than useless, as the autovalidator rejects correct answers that aren't entered exactly as the form expects, and has no facility for or requirement to show one's work. It's literally just teaching kids to Google and answer and then shotgun it into the form with random permutations until they get a green checkmark.
- gibspaulding 4y ago
  Educator here. AI has really quickly been changing how assignments have to be crafted. In the last couple of years apps like photomath have made the old school approach of teaching math with a lecture on how to do something followed by practice homework problems pretty much useless since students can so easily just have the computer do the problems (complete with showing work for them). From messing around with ChatGPT a bit, it looks like things like writing essays/book reports/poems for English classes will be going the same way as soon as someone packages it up nicely. It's going to be a rough transition, but I hope one for the better. I'm not sure about what that will look like for gen-ed classes, but in my CS class, I try to embrace tools like this. Instead of worrying about getting students to memorize boilerplate and algorithms, I try to teach them to research and how to glue things together. Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1988/ https://xkcd.com/1988/

whacked_new 4y ago

I spent a good part of last year picking up the abacus and meticulously tracking my progress. I can attest to "continue to visualize the abacus in their mind, improving their skills even when the physical tool is unavailable", but make no mistake, this is a domain-specific skill which has little bearing on mathematical knowledge and intuition per-se (at least not at beginner-intermediate levels). One useful aspect which is not often discussed, but might actually complement OP's article, is that the mental abacus converts one kind of mental process (numerical perception) to another (visual scratchpad). Kind of like turning text into a QR-code as a more "efficient" 2D-storage, yet the QR-code contains no "text", and you have to convert it back. This complementary process in the brain becomes interesting when our mental abilities decline or get replaced, and we might as well re-purpose those brain areas using some kind of transfer encoding (e.g. Morse code). A naive first-guess could be to learn lists of logical challenges and strategies in order to clarify results given by an AI in the fastest way possible. So given a GAN, train the human on A, and leave the G and N to the computer.

btbuildem 4y ago

It's an interesting observation - that the use of a certain type of tool, while multiplying our productivity, simultaneously leads to atrophy of our ability to do that set of tasks "by hand". I think the "saving grace" for LLMs in this context is that the user still has to vigorously validate the results.

AltruisticGapHN 4y ago

On a bird's eye perspective... you know as much as I love and enjoy crafting with css/html/javascript ... as I grow older I am not that entertained in having to learn yet another API to do the same thing that we did years ago, only "more elegantly/faster/with less code/etc". The truth is, if I'm perfectly honest, that to KNOW those APIs in itself, is not real knowledge. It's just empty. Talk to your wife holding your newborn, about the latest tailwind version, or native Javascript additions. Seriously who gives a flying rat's ass? At this stage of human evolution, we live in a reality bubble where we're told that a life "well lived" is one where you have a "real" job, and one where you "work hard". And your parents tell you to "become somebody"... well maybe it's because they have never know anything else? Maybe the best thing that will come out of artificial intelligence, is to destroy all this supposed knowledge. All those mountains of nothing. Imagine you create a new API for a service, and EVEN WItHOUT feeding any examples to the deep learning, it manages to figure out the best way to solve xyz problems using your API, and even highlights inefficiencies in your API. Now we're talking. Why would anybody waste their human potential writing the 1000th tutorial on how to use your API ? That's gonna be replaced by another better API from someone else in 5 days? I love my work. I love CSS; JS .. I really do but honestly it's also all so empty. Would I do it all over again? I don't even remember how I wrote in assembler on the Amiga and 486. How I used the copper/blitter etc. All vague distant memories. Everything shifting... edit: I guess this comes off as a mini rant, simplifying. Not sure what my point is, frustrated with what "learning" means perhaps. Frustrated with the notion that knowledge is repeating stuff. Actually here's a good question : are teachers really necessary or have we yet to envision a world where children, helped with AI tools, can learn whatever they want - as an innate ability? curiosity?

mkaic 4y ago
This resonates with me. Tangentially related — for a few years now I've had my sights set on AI eventually driving the automation of all menial labor needed for human subsistence. Food, water, clothing, housing, healthcare — I see these all as things that every human should have for free. Survival should be free. I've often wondered what amazingly good and horrifyingly bad things humanity will do once nobody has to fight for their basic subsistence any more. I feel like so much turmoil in the world is caused by people acting irrational because they're afraid of going hungry, becoming homeless, being hurt, etc. A world where that fear is largely gone could be a marvelous utopia where everyone is free to chase after their dreams. It could also result in everyone living in VR 24/7 and our society decaying into hedonistic madness. I think it'll be a little bit of both.

woah 4y ago

The conclusion that high level programming languages are "complementary" while LLMs are "competitive" seems very shaky to me. If we had never invented high level languages, and instead used LLMs to assist writing and debugging assembly code, I think we'd all be a lot better at reading assembly. I think the real effect on programming is to reduce the importance of mechanical and rote skills such as typing fast and having a photographic memory for standard library functions and algorithm patterns. If your main skill is that when given a detailed description of something to implement, you can bang out working code at 100 WPM, then LLMs are kind of making that obsolete. If your main skill is balancing requirements, making judgement calls, and reviewing code for correctness, then LLMs are going to help you work a lot faster.

underlines 4y ago
i think in longer terms. step one is what you mentioned. that's what people thought when computers came along and they said it will probably only be used to assist some scientists with complex calculus. step two is to automate the business analyst then the architect. step three might be to directly render whatever requirements the customer or enduser gives the LLM. and i bet this comes in under 10 years. Basically what StableDiffusion does right now. No Graphic designer needed. And imagine what will happen, if you allow an LLM 10 years in the future to improve it's own architecture and training data. And now imagine if you allow that thing to control chip factories and assembly lines to improve it's hardware...
- goatlover 4y ago
  The hype over this is bordering the ridiculous claims made by initial AI researchers in the 50s. So chatGTP is going to be running its own factories in a decade. I guess we should make sure it doesn’t overvalue paper clip production. Or cyborgs and time travel.
  - visarga 4y ago
    You're sounding smart, but in reality NVIDIA is already using AI to design new GPUs. The incredulity in some people! It's absurd, right? https://screenrant.com/nvidia-using-ai-make-faster-better-gpus-how/ https://screenrant.com/nvidia-using-ai-make-faster-better-gp...

ren_engineer 4y ago

GPT3 could be a legit game changer for teaching CS. The first time I tried self-learning programming I gave up because I often got stuck on random things that a tutor/mentor could have helped me solve in 5 seconds instead of hours of Googling. Some sort of fine-tuned model that can analyze why your code isn't working for practice problems and give hints and suggestions rather than just giving you the solution. Each student could effectively have their own personal tutor obviously people are going to use "unlocked" GTP3 to do their homework, but kids do that today as well. People who want to actually learn will be helped massively by tools built on LLMs

raldi 4y ago
And there’s so much attention on “oh no, take-home assignments are impossible now” but if so, I see the education world adapting. Instead of writing an essay about Napoleon, a bot will interview you like an oral exam — a far superior evaluation, but when done by humans there was just never enough to time in their day to do them regularly and for everyone. Instead of a homework assignment done behind closed doors and then tossed over the fence for the TA to grade, the bot pair programs with you and helps you through the places you’re getting stuck.
- meowkit 4y ago
  A wonderful outcome if that level of adaption occurs. I am more worried that the Luddite mentality will get these models banned in (primary school) educational settings.
  - raldi 4y ago
    Yeah, I could see a position of, “How will people express themselves if they don’t practice writing essays?” but I could see in five years the primary two ways of doing that becoming (1) Machine-assisted essay writing, and (2) People with ideas explaining them to an AI model through conversation, and then the model going out and explaining it en masse to others. Maybe even some of those others will challenge points or extend the ideas, and the tech can distill all this feedback and critique into a summary that they take back to the author.

Weaaklearnergpt 4y ago

Is chatgpt a weak learning tool? ,that is, does it have the capacity to begin with basic fa ts that provides a probability above Zero about knowing something and then combine the database encoded knowledge to guarantee a lower bound of general knowledge?

ttul 4y ago

I’ve also been using ChatGPT like crazy since it came out. I am a tech CEO and occasionally write code to automate various CEO things or to prototype technical ideas. Although I trained as a software engineer years ago, I can’t afford to spend a lot of time learning new frameworks or languages just to get a simple prototype written up. ChatGPT is very helpful in getting past the learning curve. For example, I wanted to write a script that pulls data from RabbitMQ, does some text manipulation, and sends the result to DynamoDB. And, for fun, I wanted to write it in Rust. ChatGPT quickly gave me a working template and I was on my way. I can’t wait for ChatGPT to reach 1.0 as a paid service. I will gladly pay to accelerate the boilerplate phase of my projects.

waboremo 4y ago
What do you get from ChatGPT when it comes to boilerplate on software projects that already existing paid services like Copilot don't give you?
- underlines 4y ago
  explanations and interactions. you can correct it or alter the outcome by giving additional feedback. Something copilot can't.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Karunamon 4y ago
  Copilot is AI IntelliSense. You still have to write code. ChatGPT is an AI programmer (of limited skill, but still). You describe what you want in plain English and get a runnable program out the other side. You may or may not have to modify this program. It can also make changes to the program based on plain English descriptions.

evouga 4y ago

Nobody uses an abacus anymore. I use a calculator (well, Mathematica or scipy) to effortlessly solve problems that would be impossible to solve by hand. I appreciate, but don’t particularly understand or care about, the many decades of numerical analysis research that went into making scipy algorithms robust and efficient. ChatGPT is the most exciting thing to come out of CS in a long while. Forget all of the debate and angst about whether ChatGPT is “really” an AI and what its “real” capabilities are (and I squarely blame the AI community’s recent history of brazen overhype and self-promotion for this)—-it’s a red herring. Call it the most powerful Internet search engine ever invented, if you want. That alone will change the world. It will trivialize a lot of tasks that are currently laborious and burdensome. The hand-wringing I’m seeing about this reminds me a lot of the rise of the Internet in the 90s, or Wikipedia in the 00s… yes, we will need to rethink how we write software and we will need to rethink how we teach students. But getting hung up on the dangers of ChatGPT as a “competitive” too is to cling a bit too tightly to old paradigms about of how humans leverage technology that have never been rigid, even in our lifetime.

goatlover 4y ago
Will chatGPT be free to use as a search like Google is, and why hasn’t Google leveraged its own language model? What happens to websites when nobody visits anymore because their info is easily available in the search response?
- visarga 4y ago
  That will be interesting to see. I bet by 2030 few people will be seeing ads or websites unless they want to, most will get polite and helpful answers based on language models that use search engines under the hood. We'll eventually have our own models running on our computers, in privacy, and maybe a small index of text (few TB) for reference checking. This will create a new private space of creativity where we can't be tracked and advertised to.

seydor 4y ago

ChatGpt doesn't augment education, if replaces it. A version that is 99% correct on a subject will be enough to replace the teacher. It is endlessly patient, unlike any teacher. Coupled with high quality video courses, i can see children above a certain age using it to learn and explore science,math, languages and literature

felideon 4y ago
That would still be "education", so I’m not sure what part you mean it will replace. Do you mean it will replace educators? If so, who exactly would be creating these “high level” video courses? Also who would provide the curriculum? Someone would have to tell the child: “This week, have a conversation with ProfessorGPT on the following topic. At the end of a week, submit an essay (generated by ProfessorGPT) that shows a summary of your discussion, and include a transcript of the entire session.” You’re also assuming a socratic approach to education works for every child. I’m not sure that’s universally true.
- seydor 4y ago
  that last person is not an educator, it's a janitor
  - felideon 4y ago
    How are kids supposed to know what they’re supposed to be learning about at a particular point in time?

madrox 4y ago

I was nodding along in the introduction, rolling my eyes in cognitive artifacts, and sighing in the conclusion. It seems like math educators still loathe students use calculators, and I find the reasoning has major blindspots. Competitive artifacts abound in society, and we are better for it. If I am in a situation where I do not have immediate access to a calculator, I am not in a situation where I need to do quick math. In 20 years, if we're still asking what year WW1 started on history tests, then we utterly failed. We absolutely need to find a way to teach programming in a world of AI. We also need to find a way to teach art in a world of AI. We'll need to find a way to teach everything in a world of AI. What we don't need to hold onto is this mistaken belief that we need to somehow teach people how to get by without it. It's like telling someone they need to learn all of a python framework before they're allowed to use it...utterly defeats the point of its existence.