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You know how that journalist had a long conversation with Bing and it slowly turned into a psycho-ex girlfriend? This is going to be hilarious, giving kids prol

You know how that journalist had a long conversation with Bing and it slowly turned into a psycho-ex girlfriend? This is going to be hilarious, giving kids prolonged access to these AI tools. You get to the parent teacher evening at the end of a term at school: "Err... little timmy and his virtual assistant appear to have entirely neglected maths in favour of adopting Zoroastrianism". On a more serious note, we have the internet and wikipedia now, we have ipads in classrooms. They all have a role, and we have to incorporate them in sensible ways. I'm sure that these AI tools will have some use, but these language models don't know anything. The examples of them making up information, or being persuaded by people are all over the place. I think it's great to use AI in teaching, but how about we learn from history, the technology we bring in to the classroom has to be well understood and directed in order to be effective. And just as importantly we need to understand that in many cases a focus on technological solutions distract from societal solutions. We can spend billions on deploying AI all over Africa, or we pay for some teachers and ship them some second hand textbooks, which one should we do, and how will that decision be made? Because I fear the decision will be made by some SBF-alike, more interested in their own journey than effective solutions.

yieldcrv 4y ago
fine tuning AI to be limited in a topic will be better by like next week.
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  I think it's actually going to be non-trivial to really make these tools both useful, smart, and unexploitable. Hell, I remember being at school and we had access to the internet through a very strong content moderation system. What do you think happened? We spent our entire time trying (and succeeding) at circumventing that system. We've already seen with Bing that they've very strongly pulled back on it to mitigate downsides, I'm not sure that's a totally solvable problem. Having said that, sure, as I said, I do think it has a place, I'm just not convinced it's a panacea.
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    I'm fine with that. That's the new job, AI doctors. Prompt Counterengineering. AI suppressants.
    - qsort 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure sooner or later we'll collaboratively upload our prompts to PromptHub so that our PromptOps team can achieve AICI/AICD. Because it's definitely not easier with 2 lines of code. Not at all.
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    > I think it's actually going to be non-trivial to really make these tools both useful, smart, and unexploitable I mean, you could say that about human teachers too. I don't think they need to be perfect to be useful. In the end, as Peter Thiel opined in his book, the future is humans and robots working together on solving bigger and bigger problems. A teacher working with AIs that tutor kids and then managing that relationship and the relationship with the parents, etc. while also being the adult role model that kids will always need will remain.
    - topaz0 4y ago
      *humans and robots working together to find better and more fine-tuned ways to exploit labor
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    Also add that these tools have to obey the political stance of what the education system should be teaching, based on the geography of the student. So the AI needs to be intelligent enough to do the "war of northern aggression" shit in some places, the "if you have sex before marriage you will die" shit in other places, the progressive mathematics or whatever it's called in other other places... I'm imagining the infinite amount of weird model tuning that'd be necessary to ensure only some students learn about white flight depending on what state, county, or school district they're in.
  - welshwelsh 4y ago
candiddevmike 4y ago
The world is going to become similar to His Dark Materials, only with LLMs instead of daemons.
- slickdork 4y ago
  Completely agreed. Once we have consumer level AR, our personal AI could take 'physical' (really just visual) form that follows us around.
  - akiselev 4y ago
    Imagine the possibilities! We could sell so many digital hats!!!
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      I used to maintain that "Fifteen Million Merits" wasn't about the future at all, but was an allegory for the present. These days, though, I'm beginning to wonder....
- sfpotter 4y ago
  I think you may not have understood those books…
- rolenthedeep 4y ago
  That's not what daemons are... At all. A better comparison would be literally any sci-fi book where everyone has a personal AI. Spider Robinson's Stardancer trilogy is the first one that comes to mind.
acomjean 4y ago
Seeing how the new political trend is "Protect the children", (Is it new?) I can't see this not ending up in court once the AI goes off the rails. Kids being kids are going to try really hard to get them to go off the rails.
- b1c837696ba28b 4y ago
  > (Is it new?) Nope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
This has been my point for a while. The tools are largely here ( or at least should be based on money spent - my district just sent flyer they want to issue bonds for 170MM -- and that is only part 1 of their grand plan; they want to empty the coffers for the rest ). And I am almost like.. what is throwing money going to do? It won't help the kids. Kids that want to learn or have parents that enforce standards still excel. There are things a school can do to also enforce standards, but those things are not being done. The opposite appears to be happening.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Edu-tech has been a promoted thing for decades whether by techno-optimists or by (probably more commonly) companies whose primary mission is to extract money from school systems. Like most other uses of money in secondary schools (subject to probably some limits like class size), it doesn't move the needle much relative to parental involvement. While the availability of the Internet is certainly useful in some respects, overall, I doubt secondary school education overall has improved a lot since teachers were writing on blackboards.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    The trouble with throwing money at education to try to improve it is that the things we know work are, on one side, nothing to do with the schools (home environment—what needs money are social services and shit like universal healthcare, not schools, poverty-reduction is the clearest target here) and on the other, a lot more expensive than we're willing to pay (e.g. Tutorial System, very-small class sizes, that kind of thing). So instead of going after the things we know work—either because it's outside the scope of what a school can address, or because it's far more expensive than we're ever going to pay—what money we do spend just chases a bunch of unproven and unlikely-to-succeed garbage, basically. Schools are like the patient who needs a heart transplant, but can only afford healing crystals.
    - vkou 4y ago
      You've missed 'smaller class sizes' on your list of needed, but politically impossible solutions.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
raincole 4y ago
I'll feel much better if they give my child an AI that knows everything about elementray level math rather than an AI that knows something in every field.
ren_engineer 4y ago
>I'm sure that these AI tools will have some use, but these language models don't know anything we're still in the early days of LLMs, this is like making a statement on the potential of social networks in the Usenet era. My guess is we'll see specialized tools of all kinds with LLMs integrated in some fashion, it won't be just giving a kid access to a general LLM model there are already companies that are able to eliminate LLM hallucinations by giving it access to ground truth facts it needs to conform its answers to. Similar things will be done for education type stuff and other use cases as well
- Espressosaurus 4y ago
  That's a great comparison, because social networks have been, on the whole, bad for people. Early evidence suggests LLMs have high potential to be similarly negative in their impact if they're just unleashed willy-nilly the way everyone is trying to integrate them into everything.
- falcolas 4y ago
  > we're still in the early days of LLMs, this is like making a statement on the potential of social networks in the Usenet era FWIW, we didn't try to use Usenet (or social media) to replace teachers. And we still don't today, even though they've matured (for... some meaning of the word) significantly.
ben_w 4y ago
> these language models don't know anything. The examples of them making up information, or being persuaded by people are all over the place Sounds just like humans to me. Primary school, some people showed up to explain blood donation, showed and told us they were putting a bag of fake blood up the teacher's sleeve and would take from that rather than from our actual teacher, and yet when the fake blood went into the collection thingie the kid next to me screamed "they're killing her!" Same school, show-and-tell, astronomy textbook showing the circular orbit of a moon at two different points of the parent planet's orbit around the star. "This is a picture of a mouse". Secondary school. Main teacher and replacement teacher cover the same passage of a sort story, one interpreting the word "patronised" as in "patron" the other as in talking down to people whose intelligence you underestimate. A-levels. Philosophy. What even is knowledge anyway? Tripartite definition. Example given was "shaggy" dog, one of the other students stifles a laugh at the double entendre. But to your core point: > the technology we bring in to the classroom has to be well understood and directed in order to be effective Yes, absolutely. But it's deeper than that. When this tech is flawless, we will have to ask ourselves: "What is school for?" After all, being flawless in this context means it already knows all that can be taught, so why not just have it do the work related to those things instead of putting humans through ever longer school years so they can do the same things less well? This isn't the first time technology has forced such questions; my generation never had to learn how to starch clothes, shoe horses, look after a tinder box, or send and receive Morse code.
- lm28469 4y ago
  It's about scale and reach, 100 teachers/educators will be biased/wrong in 100 ways but you'll average it out by interacting with each over your education. If an AI is wrong about one thing you'll have the same bias over entire generations, once a full generation is skipped it's very hard to go back That's why we need diversity, political pluralism, &c. because not many things are inherently "true", it's all about nuance, personal perception, mitigation, ... > "What is school for?" Socialisation, experiencing new things, general culture, deciding where you want to go in life, &c. Many things you learn in school aren't used for jobs but for day to day life and for the well being of society If we take that out and replace it by "kids in front of screens" we're in for a massive and quick change with potential deep and long lasting effects. By the way keep in mind a shit ton of jobs aren't even close to being automatised, and a shit ton of jobs aren't done by people sitting in front of screens
rpastuszak 4y ago
> "Err... little timmy and his virtual assistant appear to have entirely neglected maths in favour of adopting Zoroastrianism". Hehe, had to re-read this twice because it hits a little close to home. I ditched maths for Iranian Studies and ended up studying Avesta. I work in tech, but still remember Ashem Vohu by heart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashem_Vohu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashem_Vohu
- eternalban 4y ago
  How cool. (Iranian born here.) So curious on your take on the meaning of that prayer. How would you translate it?
- kkarimi 4y ago
  That’s wonderful! I have a similar background and am also surprised at how I learnt and still remember it even though it is quite distant from modern Persian
  - rpastuszak 4y ago
    Yeah, I imagine it's closer to Pashto than modern Iranian tbf. Ossetian is another outlier here, close to Georgia/Russia but related to the languages from Pamir/Tajikistan. Avestan (IIRC, my memory is fuzzy) had some weird similarities to my native language—Polish. Occasionally I'd stumble upon a phrase I could actually understand. Random example I just remembered: "both ears" (again IIRC) sounded like uba ushi /uba uši/ (uba being 2 in dual, ushi meaning ears). Polish used to have dual number, but now retained it mostly for some body parts ( oba == 2). Ears in PL is uszy /ushee/. You'd sound a bit weird saying saying "oba uszy" in Polish, but people would understand you. Nowadays I just enjoy the fact that Ashem Vohu is one of the oldest phrases I can utter in its original language. (I'm really good at learning and forgetting languages it seems.)
dalbasal 4y ago
I agree with everything, but I also think there might be genuinely by g opportunities here. Idk about teaching kids. At adult, or near adult levels... I think these programs may very quickly be a major learning technology. It's good, sometimes, to have optimism. Optimism, even naive optimism, is often conducive to inventing things. The guardrail should be in avoiding utopic ideas, like designing things for schoolchildren in remote places^. It's too abstract. Too aloof to be a testbed. TED talking windbags have had their day. That still leaves plenty of room. A program that can produce exercises and lessons on the fly might be very useful. Thinking big is helpful to discovering what that use is. The Hegelian pendulum of 2023 is hype driven. Hype, anti-hype. Fanboys. Haters. Ping pong. The disillusionment of digital utopians, as they watched their creations serve Zuck, SBF, Thiel... dropping out in a cloud of ominous pessimism is no solution either.
- milsorgen 4y ago
  >Idk about teaching kids. At adult, or near adult levels... I think these programs may very quickly be a major learning technology I concur and I think in terms of children the last thing they need is more (any) technology. They need a solid foundation rooted in human interaction so that they can then leverage these potentially potent tools in effective ways later.
rpastuszak 4y ago
> They all have a role, and we have to incorporate them in sensible ways. I'm sure that these AI tools will have some use, but these language models don't know anything. I find it worrying that I see so many techies not understanding this. Especially, because many bigger players in the area benefit from this lack of knowledge. This means that people who don't have time to procrastinate on the orange website are even less likely to understand the implications. LLMs are excellent plausible bullshit generators, which has many uses, but being factually correct is not their strength. The issue is that even if the factual mistakes are rare, they're really hard to spot. I'm looking for a good, terse, catchy metaphor I could use to explain that to some of my family members and friends. > We can spend billions on deploying AI all over Africa, or we pay for [...] Looking back at the conversations I had with founders even I pre ChatGPT bonanza, I'm 100% sure someone's already pitching that idea to someone. I wouldn't be surprised if that conversation started in a marketing department of an ad tech business.
- SuoDuanDao 4y ago
  So long as the LLM teaching the kids and whoever is testing the kid's learning are rivalrous entities, that seems like an easy problem to get around.
  - rpastuszak 4y ago
    Why do you think so and how would that work?
    - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
      If the test-making entity writes the test so that the weaknesses of LLMs are brought to the fore, students taking the test will need to know how to compensate for those weaknesses when they're using them as a tool post-graduation.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- unshavedyak 4y ago
seydor 4y ago
This is different. You can use it to practice a foreign language right now, with the most patient teacher one can imagine. The logical errors in other subjects will be fixed over time. Education is an easy domain because it is artificial by nature. I can see a lot of people switching to ai homeschooling in a few years
maxdoop 4y ago
As with every thread on this: Define “knowing”, and then say why it even matters if an LLM gives a great illusion of knowing.
7speter 4y ago
I think there was a comment on this site yesterday where someone was talking about how we shouldn’t let people who don’t know how these “ai” tools work deploy said tools to evaluate mortgage applicants or manage defense systems, and that the technically minded should act as a buffer for those who rtfm. And here we are. Are there any real gains in giving kids ipads in classrooms? Did anyone have an actual plan in how such a tool could help kids or is it just “tech good?”
- ej3 4y ago
  Sample size 1, but I've got a kid. I've got an ipad. I put the two together in with supervision, and what I've got now is a 4 year old that reads the walls in the bathroom stall while she's pooping. I don't know if this is "better" or what you had in mind as "gains", but it's certainly entertaining for me!
  - Syonyk 4y ago
    My daughter could do the same at that age, and basically never got screen time. I don't think screen time has anything to do with it, it's just dependent on the child, parental involvement, and how much you read in the house.
  - 7speter 4y ago
    Its great that you are able to supervise your own two kids while they engage in screentime, I’m talking about in school, where in a lot of cases, a teacher is trying to supervise 20+ kids. Its great if there are laptops for students who maybe cant afford a computer and wordprocessor software at home, but textbooks and lectures seem to work effectively.
logifail 4y ago
> This is going to be hilarious, giving kids prolonged access to these AI tools [..] we have the internet and wikipedia now, we have ipads in classrooms. They all have a role, and we have to incorporate them in sensible ways I have three kids, and as far as devices used in education is concerned I become more of a Luddite with each passing day. I have yet to come across any actual evidence that shows children experience a net benefit from additional screen time. The only exception is our 13 year-old, who currently is recovering from a dislocated and fractured right thumb due to being on the wrong end of a vicious tackle in school sport. He's still unable to hold a pen but found his iPad allows him to do various bits of schoolwork. This - fortunately - is the exception rather than the rule.
ovaistariq 4y ago
I think, in the long run, AI will have a positive impact on education for kids. But I agree that we have to start by being skeptical about it because it is still being determined whether the effect will be positive or negative with the current state of AI tools.
samstave 4y ago
HER ; https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/
cjf101 4y ago
I give it about 5 minutes before the first child figures out how to jailbreak the tutor into helping it bypass the screen time controls preventing them from playing fortnite.
mgraczyk 4y ago
This sounds to me a lot like my high school teachers, who were extremely critical of this new-fangled thing called "Wikipedia". They said it would destroy my ability to learn, that it would ruin education if kids used it. How can you tell what's factual or made up if anyone can edit it? Instead, Wikipedia was by far the most important part of my high school education. Nearly everything I learned in my second two years of high school I got from Wikipedia. I think most people today would agree that Wikipedia is an invaluable part of early education and that it's done far more harm than good. All the fear-based arguments you are making applied equally well to Wikipedia in 2005, and I suspect that in less than 18 years we'll similarly recognize that LLMs or other intelligent language systems are invaluable parts of education.
- piuantiderp 4y ago
  "Nearly everything I learned in my second two years of high school I got from Wikipedia." Wow, and please understand this is not personal, but it must be one of the saddest things I read this decade.
  - mgraczyk 4y ago
    Why? I graduated at the top of my class. Wikipedia had more information on many more topics than are available at any high school anywhere in the world
    - piuantiderp 4y ago
      About the state and value of the average high school.
      - mgraczyk 4y ago
        Maybe, but on the other hand what do you expect without personalization? At big high schools, the best students will learn more in a few weeks than the median students will learn in all.4 years. We shouldn't expect one curriculum to work for everyone. That's why there new models should be so exciting for education.

yieldcrv 4y ago

fine tuning AI to be limited in a topic will be better by like next week.

SilverBirch 4y ago
I think it's actually going to be non-trivial to really make these tools both useful, smart, and unexploitable. Hell, I remember being at school and we had access to the internet through a very strong content moderation system. What do you think happened? We spent our entire time trying (and succeeding) at circumventing that system. We've already seen with Bing that they've very strongly pulled back on it to mitigate downsides, I'm not sure that's a totally solvable problem. Having said that, sure, as I said, I do think it has a place, I'm just not convinced it's a panacea.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  I'm fine with that. That's the new job, AI doctors. Prompt Counterengineering. AI suppressants.
  - qsort 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure sooner or later we'll collaboratively upload our prompts to PromptHub so that our PromptOps team can achieve AICI/AICD. Because it's definitely not easier with 2 lines of code. Not at all.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  > I think it's actually going to be non-trivial to really make these tools both useful, smart, and unexploitable I mean, you could say that about human teachers too. I don't think they need to be perfect to be useful. In the end, as Peter Thiel opined in his book, the future is humans and robots working together on solving bigger and bigger problems. A teacher working with AIs that tutor kids and then managing that relationship and the relationship with the parents, etc. while also being the adult role model that kids will always need will remain.
  - topaz0 4y ago
    *humans and robots working together to find better and more fine-tuned ways to exploit labor
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  Also add that these tools have to obey the political stance of what the education system should be teaching, based on the geography of the student. So the AI needs to be intelligent enough to do the "war of northern aggression" shit in some places, the "if you have sex before marriage you will die" shit in other places, the progressive mathematics or whatever it's called in other other places... I'm imagining the infinite amount of weird model tuning that'd be necessary to ensure only some students learn about white flight depending on what state, county, or school district they're in.
- welshwelsh 4y ago

candiddevmike 4y ago

The world is going to become similar to His Dark Materials, only with LLMs instead of daemons.

slickdork 4y ago
Completely agreed. Once we have consumer level AR, our personal AI could take 'physical' (really just visual) form that follows us around.
- akiselev 4y ago
  Imagine the possibilities! We could sell so many digital hats!!!
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    I used to maintain that "Fifteen Million Merits" wasn't about the future at all, but was an allegory for the present. These days, though, I'm beginning to wonder....
sfpotter 4y ago
I think you may not have understood those books…
rolenthedeep 4y ago
That's not what daemons are... At all. A better comparison would be literally any sci-fi book where everyone has a personal AI. Spider Robinson's Stardancer trilogy is the first one that comes to mind.

acomjean 4y ago

Seeing how the new political trend is "Protect the children", (Is it new?) I can't see this not ending up in court once the AI goes off the rails. Kids being kids are going to try really hard to get them to go off the rails.

b1c837696ba28b 4y ago
> (Is it new?) Nope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

This has been my point for a while. The tools are largely here ( or at least should be based on money spent - my district just sent flyer they want to issue bonds for 170MM -- and that is only part 1 of their grand plan; they want to empty the coffers for the rest ). And I am almost like.. what is throwing money going to do? It won't help the kids. Kids that want to learn or have parents that enforce standards still excel. There are things a school can do to also enforce standards, but those things are not being done. The opposite appears to be happening.

ghaff 4y ago
Edu-tech has been a promoted thing for decades whether by techno-optimists or by (probably more commonly) companies whose primary mission is to extract money from school systems. Like most other uses of money in secondary schools (subject to probably some limits like class size), it doesn't move the needle much relative to parental involvement. While the availability of the Internet is certainly useful in some respects, overall, I doubt secondary school education overall has improved a lot since teachers were writing on blackboards.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  The trouble with throwing money at education to try to improve it is that the things we know work are, on one side, nothing to do with the schools (home environment—what needs money are social services and shit like universal healthcare, not schools, poverty-reduction is the clearest target here) and on the other, a lot more expensive than we're willing to pay (e.g. Tutorial System, very-small class sizes, that kind of thing). So instead of going after the things we know work—either because it's outside the scope of what a school can address, or because it's far more expensive than we're ever going to pay—what money we do spend just chases a bunch of unproven and unlikely-to-succeed garbage, basically. Schools are like the patient who needs a heart transplant, but can only afford healing crystals.
  - vkou 4y ago
    You've missed 'smaller class sizes' on your list of needed, but politically impossible solutions.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

raincole 4y ago

I'll feel much better if they give my child an AI that knows everything about elementray level math rather than an AI that knows something in every field.

ren_engineer 4y ago

>I'm sure that these AI tools will have some use, but these language models don't know anything we're still in the early days of LLMs, this is like making a statement on the potential of social networks in the Usenet era. My guess is we'll see specialized tools of all kinds with LLMs integrated in some fashion, it won't be just giving a kid access to a general LLM model there are already companies that are able to eliminate LLM hallucinations by giving it access to ground truth facts it needs to conform its answers to. Similar things will be done for education type stuff and other use cases as well

Espressosaurus 4y ago
That's a great comparison, because social networks have been, on the whole, bad for people. Early evidence suggests LLMs have high potential to be similarly negative in their impact if they're just unleashed willy-nilly the way everyone is trying to integrate them into everything.
falcolas 4y ago
> we're still in the early days of LLMs, this is like making a statement on the potential of social networks in the Usenet era FWIW, we didn't try to use Usenet (or social media) to replace teachers. And we still don't today, even though they've matured (for... some meaning of the word) significantly.

ben_w 4y ago

> these language models don't know anything. The examples of them making up information, or being persuaded by people are all over the place Sounds just like humans to me. Primary school, some people showed up to explain blood donation, showed and told us they were putting a bag of fake blood up the teacher's sleeve and would take from that rather than from our actual teacher, and yet when the fake blood went into the collection thingie the kid next to me screamed "they're killing her!" Same school, show-and-tell, astronomy textbook showing the circular orbit of a moon at two different points of the parent planet's orbit around the star. "This is a picture of a mouse". Secondary school. Main teacher and replacement teacher cover the same passage of a sort story, one interpreting the word "patronised" as in "patron" the other as in talking down to people whose intelligence you underestimate. A-levels. Philosophy. What even is knowledge anyway? Tripartite definition. Example given was "shaggy" dog, one of the other students stifles a laugh at the double entendre. But to your core point: > the technology we bring in to the classroom has to be well understood and directed in order to be effective Yes, absolutely. But it's deeper than that. When this tech is flawless, we will have to ask ourselves: "What is school for?" After all, being flawless in this context means it already knows all that can be taught, so why not just have it do the work related to those things instead of putting humans through ever longer school years so they can do the same things less well? This isn't the first time technology has forced such questions; my generation never had to learn how to starch clothes, shoe horses, look after a tinder box, or send and receive Morse code.

lm28469 4y ago
It's about scale and reach, 100 teachers/educators will be biased/wrong in 100 ways but you'll average it out by interacting with each over your education. If an AI is wrong about one thing you'll have the same bias over entire generations, once a full generation is skipped it's very hard to go back That's why we need diversity, political pluralism, &c. because not many things are inherently "true", it's all about nuance, personal perception, mitigation, ... > "What is school for?" Socialisation, experiencing new things, general culture, deciding where you want to go in life, &c. Many things you learn in school aren't used for jobs but for day to day life and for the well being of society If we take that out and replace it by "kids in front of screens" we're in for a massive and quick change with potential deep and long lasting effects. By the way keep in mind a shit ton of jobs aren't even close to being automatised, and a shit ton of jobs aren't done by people sitting in front of screens

rpastuszak 4y ago

> "Err... little timmy and his virtual assistant appear to have entirely neglected maths in favour of adopting Zoroastrianism". Hehe, had to re-read this twice because it hits a little close to home. I ditched maths for Iranian Studies and ended up studying Avesta. I work in tech, but still remember Ashem Vohu by heart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashem_Vohu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashem_Vohu

eternalban 4y ago
How cool. (Iranian born here.) So curious on your take on the meaning of that prayer. How would you translate it?
kkarimi 4y ago
That’s wonderful! I have a similar background and am also surprised at how I learnt and still remember it even though it is quite distant from modern Persian
- rpastuszak 4y ago
  Yeah, I imagine it's closer to Pashto than modern Iranian tbf. Ossetian is another outlier here, close to Georgia/Russia but related to the languages from Pamir/Tajikistan. Avestan (IIRC, my memory is fuzzy) had some weird similarities to my native language—Polish. Occasionally I'd stumble upon a phrase I could actually understand. Random example I just remembered: "both ears" (again IIRC) sounded like uba ushi /uba uši/ (uba being 2 in dual, ushi meaning ears). Polish used to have dual number, but now retained it mostly for some body parts ( oba == 2). Ears in PL is uszy /ushee/. You'd sound a bit weird saying saying "oba uszy" in Polish, but people would understand you. Nowadays I just enjoy the fact that Ashem Vohu is one of the oldest phrases I can utter in its original language. (I'm really good at learning and forgetting languages it seems.)

dalbasal 4y ago

I agree with everything, but I also think there might be genuinely by g opportunities here. Idk about teaching kids. At adult, or near adult levels... I think these programs may very quickly be a major learning technology. It's good, sometimes, to have optimism. Optimism, even naive optimism, is often conducive to inventing things. The guardrail should be in avoiding utopic ideas, like designing things for schoolchildren in remote places^. It's too abstract. Too aloof to be a testbed. TED talking windbags have had their day. That still leaves plenty of room. A program that can produce exercises and lessons on the fly might be very useful. Thinking big is helpful to discovering what that use is. The Hegelian pendulum of 2023 is hype driven. Hype, anti-hype. Fanboys. Haters. Ping pong. The disillusionment of digital utopians, as they watched their creations serve Zuck, SBF, Thiel... dropping out in a cloud of ominous pessimism is no solution either.

milsorgen 4y ago
>Idk about teaching kids. At adult, or near adult levels... I think these programs may very quickly be a major learning technology I concur and I think in terms of children the last thing they need is more (any) technology. They need a solid foundation rooted in human interaction so that they can then leverage these potentially potent tools in effective ways later.

rpastuszak 4y ago

> They all have a role, and we have to incorporate them in sensible ways. I'm sure that these AI tools will have some use, but these language models don't know anything. I find it worrying that I see so many techies not understanding this. Especially, because many bigger players in the area benefit from this lack of knowledge. This means that people who don't have time to procrastinate on the orange website are even less likely to understand the implications. LLMs are excellent plausible bullshit generators, which has many uses, but being factually correct is not their strength. The issue is that even if the factual mistakes are rare, they're really hard to spot. I'm looking for a good, terse, catchy metaphor I could use to explain that to some of my family members and friends. > We can spend billions on deploying AI all over Africa, or we pay for [...] Looking back at the conversations I had with founders even I pre ChatGPT bonanza, I'm 100% sure someone's already pitching that idea to someone. I wouldn't be surprised if that conversation started in a marketing department of an ad tech business.

SuoDuanDao 4y ago
So long as the LLM teaching the kids and whoever is testing the kid's learning are rivalrous entities, that seems like an easy problem to get around.
- rpastuszak 4y ago
  Why do you think so and how would that work?
  - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
    If the test-making entity writes the test so that the weaknesses of LLMs are brought to the fore, students taking the test will need to know how to compensate for those weaknesses when they're using them as a tool post-graduation.
deleted 4y ago
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unshavedyak 4y ago

seydor 4y ago

This is different. You can use it to practice a foreign language right now, with the most patient teacher one can imagine. The logical errors in other subjects will be fixed over time. Education is an easy domain because it is artificial by nature. I can see a lot of people switching to ai homeschooling in a few years

maxdoop 4y ago

As with every thread on this: Define “knowing”, and then say why it even matters if an LLM gives a great illusion of knowing.

7speter 4y ago

I think there was a comment on this site yesterday where someone was talking about how we shouldn’t let people who don’t know how these “ai” tools work deploy said tools to evaluate mortgage applicants or manage defense systems, and that the technically minded should act as a buffer for those who rtfm. And here we are. Are there any real gains in giving kids ipads in classrooms? Did anyone have an actual plan in how such a tool could help kids or is it just “tech good?”

ej3 4y ago
Sample size 1, but I've got a kid. I've got an ipad. I put the two together in with supervision, and what I've got now is a 4 year old that reads the walls in the bathroom stall while she's pooping. I don't know if this is "better" or what you had in mind as "gains", but it's certainly entertaining for me!
- Syonyk 4y ago
  My daughter could do the same at that age, and basically never got screen time. I don't think screen time has anything to do with it, it's just dependent on the child, parental involvement, and how much you read in the house.
- 7speter 4y ago
  Its great that you are able to supervise your own two kids while they engage in screentime, I’m talking about in school, where in a lot of cases, a teacher is trying to supervise 20+ kids. Its great if there are laptops for students who maybe cant afford a computer and wordprocessor software at home, but textbooks and lectures seem to work effectively.

logifail 4y ago

> This is going to be hilarious, giving kids prolonged access to these AI tools [..] we have the internet and wikipedia now, we have ipads in classrooms. They all have a role, and we have to incorporate them in sensible ways I have three kids, and as far as devices used in education is concerned I become more of a Luddite with each passing day. I have yet to come across any actual evidence that shows children experience a net benefit from additional screen time. The only exception is our 13 year-old, who currently is recovering from a dislocated and fractured right thumb due to being on the wrong end of a vicious tackle in school sport. He's still unable to hold a pen but found his iPad allows him to do various bits of schoolwork. This - fortunately - is the exception rather than the rule.

ovaistariq 4y ago

I think, in the long run, AI will have a positive impact on education for kids. But I agree that we have to start by being skeptical about it because it is still being determined whether the effect will be positive or negative with the current state of AI tools.

samstave 4y ago

HER ; https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/

cjf101 4y ago

I give it about 5 minutes before the first child figures out how to jailbreak the tutor into helping it bypass the screen time controls preventing them from playing fortnite.

mgraczyk 4y ago

This sounds to me a lot like my high school teachers, who were extremely critical of this new-fangled thing called "Wikipedia". They said it would destroy my ability to learn, that it would ruin education if kids used it. How can you tell what's factual or made up if anyone can edit it? Instead, Wikipedia was by far the most important part of my high school education. Nearly everything I learned in my second two years of high school I got from Wikipedia. I think most people today would agree that Wikipedia is an invaluable part of early education and that it's done far more harm than good. All the fear-based arguments you are making applied equally well to Wikipedia in 2005, and I suspect that in less than 18 years we'll similarly recognize that LLMs or other intelligent language systems are invaluable parts of education.

piuantiderp 4y ago
"Nearly everything I learned in my second two years of high school I got from Wikipedia." Wow, and please understand this is not personal, but it must be one of the saddest things I read this decade.
- mgraczyk 4y ago
  Why? I graduated at the top of my class. Wikipedia had more information on many more topics than are available at any high school anywhere in the world
  - piuantiderp 4y ago
    About the state and value of the average high school.
    - mgraczyk 4y ago
      Maybe, but on the other hand what do you expect without personalization? At big high schools, the best students will learn more in a few weeks than the median students will learn in all.4 years. We shouldn't expect one curriculum to work for everyone. That's why there new models should be so exciting for education.