4 ms·

I think the elephant in the room is that if LLM's improve at the same pace as diffusors. Then there won't be much to educate towards. What does a decade of agen

I think the elephant in the room is that if LLM's improve at the same pace as diffusors. Then there won't be much to educate towards. What does a decade of agentic multimodal model progress look like? https://rocketdash.io/midjourney-and-the-progress-of-ai-in-2023-a-year-of-milestones/ https://rocketdash.io/midjourney-and-the-progress-of-ai-in-2...

danpalmer 3y ago
I disagree, I think very little of what is taught in school would be made unnecessary by LLMs. We teach maths, but calculators didn't stop this. Even if LLMs can take a less structured question and call a calculator, it just means maths moves more high level, and to understand the goals students would still need a foundational understanding anyway. We teach language for communication, and we'll still need to communicate. LLMs can write emails for us, but only if we can communicate what we want written. We need to be able to understand the output, decide what we want to change about it, and voice that back to the LLM. They're a time saver but don't really remove the necessity of the skills development in some sense. We teach languages for communication with others. Translation apps haven't stopped this. Being able to speak to someone is still worth a lot. If this does get solved in the future it'll be by UX improvements not AI improvements. We teach creative skills, but we know most students don't go into creative jobs. These skills are taught for pleasure, for cultural reasons, and to create well-rounded individuals. We teach history, geography, and science, not so that students can regurgitate facts (even if that is what ultimately gets tested) but because we as a society believe it is important to understand and learn from what came before us and how the world around us works, and be able to ask the right questions about the world. LLMs, if they continue to improve, might change how we assess students, and they might change the focus somewhat, just like the introduction of the ubiquitous home PC or the internet did, but I don't think they're going to eliminate most of what is taught in school.
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  I think the fundamental question to be answered is "Will humans be needed to move society forward in the future?" People stand behind "Sure, AIs can write emails, but they won't know what to write emails about". But to me that doesn't make sense. The holy grail of AI, what we are racing towards at a breakneck pace, what every company really wants, is the AI that knows what to write the email about... OpenAI, Meta, Google, homebrew. None of them are trying to build a calculator. They are all trying to build a calculator user. It's a very big difference and their progress has been nothing short of remarkable and unexpectedly fast.
  - kiba 3y ago
    Are we looking to create AI agents? Citizens, not slaves?
  - danpalmer 3y ago
    Even then, I don't think that changes many or any of the arguments. Perhaps you could drop the maths, but people still need to speak to each other, will probably still write to each other, will probably still write to persuade or describe even if it's just for pleasure. People will still want to know how the world works, we should definitely still learn from our history. As I said, the focus on why we're learning may change, and the testing may change, but I don't think that just because there are no jobs that require a human to write an email means we won't teach kids to write.
- Telemakhos 3y ago
  Early education especially is not something that AI can handle, because it isn't just about learning facts or processes. Take small motor skill acquisition, for example: you have kids play with play-dough, finger-paint, fold origami, play musical instruments, and learn various handwriting styles like block and cursive and calligraphic styles, all to teach kids how to move their hands in complex ways to achieve what their brains want. AI isn't going to do that for kids, and tablets seem to have made motor-skills acquisition worse since the range of movements needed for a tablet is much smaller than that needed for 3d manipulation of objects in the real world. I don't think AI is going to excel in language education, either: I get bored chatting with a bot very quickly. Language education is all about keeping students engaged and communicating about tasks they actually care about. I don't see chatbots like ChatGPT doing that.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  > We teach... we teach... we teach... Reading this, not sure about anyone else's experience but very little written here reflects how any of those subjects were actually approached and you know just the assumption that because you have something called a "teacher" in a class called "x" means that the "teacher" actually taught "x", because yeah from my experience a lot of it was just about regurgitating facts, no creativity was never really taught and was often punished, actual speaking and actual communication was never really taught only judged, and no way did "learn from what came before us and how the world around us works" ever occur within the walls of any classroom I was unfortunate enough to sit within. Wouldn't ever risk my kids future by throwing them into that system, honestly feel extremely lucky it didn't completely screw mine up.
  - danpalmer 3y ago
    I tried to get it across but perhaps the point didn't land – I'm not talking about any given classroom or the practical aspects of it. Curriculums have all sorts of issues, teaching is increasingly a job of meeting quotas, school funding is problematic all over the world, and examination sucks. However, we're still choosing as a society to send kids to school. The fact that school systems suck in so much of the world doesn't stop it from being the right idea in theory, and if you ask almost anyone on the street "should kids learn to read" or "should kids be taught about their history" you'll almost unanimously get answers of absolutely. (We can debate what "their history" means, but most people agree something should be taught, they just disagree on what)
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Is it true that calculators did not reduce math education on tasks that the calculator automated? I find that dubious.
  - danpalmer 3y ago
    I didn't suggest it reduced education on tasks that the calculator automated, I just don't think it reduced the desire of society in general to educate kids in maths. We now just have a blended approach of learning enough of the basics to understand why a calculator is valuable, and in some cases more advanced maths that students are able to tackle because of the availability of calculators. My point is that we decided as a society that we couldn't stop teaching kids maths just because calculators exist.
hashtag-til 3y ago
This really could be a plot for "Idiocracy 2", showing humanity hundreds of years in future, where all education was given up in favour of LLMs and a bunch of undergrads/startups.
ozr 3y ago
I'm not sure how this connects. Diffusion models are great for certain tasks, not for others. They have sort of a niche use in audio and are the SOTA for image generation, but there is a lot of education (almost all) that doesn't apply to those domains. When we're talking about multimodal ML systems, the core is generally a transformer-based LLM with no diffusion component.
- IanCal 3y ago
  I think the point is that diffusion models improved at a very fast rate, how do we think things will look if LLMs (in whatever form) see the same rate of improvements?
  - ozr 3y ago
    Ah, ok, I read that wrong. You're right. Thank you.

danpalmer 3y ago

I disagree, I think very little of what is taught in school would be made unnecessary by LLMs. We teach maths, but calculators didn't stop this. Even if LLMs can take a less structured question and call a calculator, it just means maths moves more high level, and to understand the goals students would still need a foundational understanding anyway. We teach language for communication, and we'll still need to communicate. LLMs can write emails for us, but only if we can communicate what we want written. We need to be able to understand the output, decide what we want to change about it, and voice that back to the LLM. They're a time saver but don't really remove the necessity of the skills development in some sense. We teach languages for communication with others. Translation apps haven't stopped this. Being able to speak to someone is still worth a lot. If this does get solved in the future it'll be by UX improvements not AI improvements. We teach creative skills, but we know most students don't go into creative jobs. These skills are taught for pleasure, for cultural reasons, and to create well-rounded individuals. We teach history, geography, and science, not so that students can regurgitate facts (even if that is what ultimately gets tested) but because we as a society believe it is important to understand and learn from what came before us and how the world around us works, and be able to ask the right questions about the world. LLMs, if they continue to improve, might change how we assess students, and they might change the focus somewhat, just like the introduction of the ubiquitous home PC or the internet did, but I don't think they're going to eliminate most of what is taught in school.

Workaccount2 3y ago
I think the fundamental question to be answered is "Will humans be needed to move society forward in the future?" People stand behind "Sure, AIs can write emails, but they won't know what to write emails about". But to me that doesn't make sense. The holy grail of AI, what we are racing towards at a breakneck pace, what every company really wants, is the AI that knows what to write the email about... OpenAI, Meta, Google, homebrew. None of them are trying to build a calculator. They are all trying to build a calculator user. It's a very big difference and their progress has been nothing short of remarkable and unexpectedly fast.
- kiba 3y ago
  Are we looking to create AI agents? Citizens, not slaves?
- danpalmer 3y ago
  Even then, I don't think that changes many or any of the arguments. Perhaps you could drop the maths, but people still need to speak to each other, will probably still write to each other, will probably still write to persuade or describe even if it's just for pleasure. People will still want to know how the world works, we should definitely still learn from our history. As I said, the focus on why we're learning may change, and the testing may change, but I don't think that just because there are no jobs that require a human to write an email means we won't teach kids to write.
Telemakhos 3y ago
Early education especially is not something that AI can handle, because it isn't just about learning facts or processes. Take small motor skill acquisition, for example: you have kids play with play-dough, finger-paint, fold origami, play musical instruments, and learn various handwriting styles like block and cursive and calligraphic styles, all to teach kids how to move their hands in complex ways to achieve what their brains want. AI isn't going to do that for kids, and tablets seem to have made motor-skills acquisition worse since the range of movements needed for a tablet is much smaller than that needed for 3d manipulation of objects in the real world. I don't think AI is going to excel in language education, either: I get bored chatting with a bot very quickly. Language education is all about keeping students engaged and communicating about tasks they actually care about. I don't see chatbots like ChatGPT doing that.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
> We teach... we teach... we teach... Reading this, not sure about anyone else's experience but very little written here reflects how any of those subjects were actually approached and you know just the assumption that because you have something called a "teacher" in a class called "x" means that the "teacher" actually taught "x", because yeah from my experience a lot of it was just about regurgitating facts, no creativity was never really taught and was often punished, actual speaking and actual communication was never really taught only judged, and no way did "learn from what came before us and how the world around us works" ever occur within the walls of any classroom I was unfortunate enough to sit within. Wouldn't ever risk my kids future by throwing them into that system, honestly feel extremely lucky it didn't completely screw mine up.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  I tried to get it across but perhaps the point didn't land – I'm not talking about any given classroom or the practical aspects of it. Curriculums have all sorts of issues, teaching is increasingly a job of meeting quotas, school funding is problematic all over the world, and examination sucks. However, we're still choosing as a society to send kids to school. The fact that school systems suck in so much of the world doesn't stop it from being the right idea in theory, and if you ask almost anyone on the street "should kids learn to read" or "should kids be taught about their history" you'll almost unanimously get answers of absolutely. (We can debate what "their history" means, but most people agree something should be taught, they just disagree on what)
jncfhnb 3y ago
Is it true that calculators did not reduce math education on tasks that the calculator automated? I find that dubious.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  I didn't suggest it reduced education on tasks that the calculator automated, I just don't think it reduced the desire of society in general to educate kids in maths. We now just have a blended approach of learning enough of the basics to understand why a calculator is valuable, and in some cases more advanced maths that students are able to tackle because of the availability of calculators. My point is that we decided as a society that we couldn't stop teaching kids maths just because calculators exist.

hashtag-til 3y ago

This really could be a plot for "Idiocracy 2", showing humanity hundreds of years in future, where all education was given up in favour of LLMs and a bunch of undergrads/startups.

ozr 3y ago

I'm not sure how this connects. Diffusion models are great for certain tasks, not for others. They have sort of a niche use in audio and are the SOTA for image generation, but there is a lot of education (almost all) that doesn't apply to those domains. When we're talking about multimodal ML systems, the core is generally a transformer-based LLM with no diffusion component.

IanCal 3y ago
I think the point is that diffusion models improved at a very fast rate, how do we think things will look if LLMs (in whatever form) see the same rate of improvements?
- ozr 3y ago
  Ah, ok, I read that wrong. You're right. Thank you.