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> Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need. This is one o

> Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need. This is one of those few cases where I'm actually more bullish than Altman. I don't need to wait for my kids to have it, but rather I personally am already using this daily. My regular thing is to upload a book/article(s) into the context of a Claude project and then chat with it - I genuinely find it to already be at the level of a decent (though not yet excellent) tutor on most subjects I tried, and by far better than listening to a lecture. The main feature I'm missing is of the AI being able to collaborate with me on a digital whiteboard.

jay_kyburz 2y ago
Just yesterday I was wondering how well AI's would provide feedback to my high school kids essays, without actually re-writing them for him. I will give it a try later today.
lordnacho 2y ago
One thing I was thinking about was live translation. We gotta be near the stage where I can take earbuds with me to Spain and hear what the locals are saying in English? There's already apps that are pretty good at "talk to it and it hears the words, prints them, and prints the translation", so it would seem to be close?
- whamlastxmas 2y ago
  Given the advanced voice model that still isn’t widely released, the technology is there, even if the implementation isn’t yet.
- codethief 2y ago
  Whisper and a bit of Python code (and a text2speech model) can already do this. At my day job we have Whisper live-translate all-hands calls for the non-native speakers in the audience. It's incredibly good.
  - lordnacho 2y ago
    > Whisper and a bit of Python code (and a text2speech model) can already do this. How do I do this?
mellavora 2y ago
So there is some interesting research about brainwave syncing during effective communication, which certainly includes personalized instruction (tutoring) or small-class learning. I wonder how that works with computers, when we are only sync'ing with the ghosts and statistical patterns of other humans, and those patterns are generated by electronic brains.
- smokel 2y ago
  That might be research, but it's most likely not scientific research.
oculty 2y ago
That sounds really useful. Can you give an example of what kind of content your are uploading and how the tutoring looks like?
- falcor84 2y ago
  One example is of studying robotics. I started with this course on Coursera [0]. It was ok at the start, but got hard for me early on. A big part of the course is of reading the book that they make available for free [1], so I would upload the relevant chunk of chapters into Claude (the whole book was a bit too much for it), and would then just ask it to explain each topic to me, whereby I'd ask additional questions, and then when, I felt I got it, ask it to check my understanding (which it does quite well, saying "sort of, but note that..." in many appropriate circumstances). As another specific example, in that book and in others, I sometimes struggle with the math, so I would ask Claude to give me the sympy code for the relevant mathematical derivation, and being able to actually see those expressions change in a python notebook really helps my understanding. I'm really impressed with how it usually does well on the first try, even with relatively complex stuff, like expressions involving symbolic matrix exponentiation. Being able to pause on any topic like this, and have the LLM help me dive into it in the way that works best for me, has been amazing, and getting as much time from a knowledgeable human tutor would have probably cost me 1,000x as much. [0] https://coursera.org/specializations/modernrobotics https://coursera.org/specializations/modernrobotics [1] http://hades.mech.northwestern.edu/images/7/7f/MR.pdf http://hades.mech.northwestern.edu/images/7/7f/MR.pdf
  - saati 2y ago
    How do you know the answers are actually useful and not just hallucinations?
    - falcor84 2y ago
      It's not an oracle, and does get things wrong occasionally, but if anything, having to check its responses actually helps me confirm that I'm learning.
  - 2y ago

jay_kyburz 2y ago

Just yesterday I was wondering how well AI's would provide feedback to my high school kids essays, without actually re-writing them for him. I will give it a try later today.

lordnacho 2y ago

One thing I was thinking about was live translation. We gotta be near the stage where I can take earbuds with me to Spain and hear what the locals are saying in English? There's already apps that are pretty good at "talk to it and it hears the words, prints them, and prints the translation", so it would seem to be close?

whamlastxmas 2y ago
Given the advanced voice model that still isn’t widely released, the technology is there, even if the implementation isn’t yet.
codethief 2y ago
Whisper and a bit of Python code (and a text2speech model) can already do this. At my day job we have Whisper live-translate all-hands calls for the non-native speakers in the audience. It's incredibly good.
- lordnacho 2y ago
  > Whisper and a bit of Python code (and a text2speech model) can already do this. How do I do this?

mellavora 2y ago

So there is some interesting research about brainwave syncing during effective communication, which certainly includes personalized instruction (tutoring) or small-class learning. I wonder how that works with computers, when we are only sync'ing with the ghosts and statistical patterns of other humans, and those patterns are generated by electronic brains.

smokel 2y ago
That might be research, but it's most likely not scientific research.

oculty 2y ago

That sounds really useful. Can you give an example of what kind of content your are uploading and how the tutoring looks like?

falcor84 2y ago
One example is of studying robotics. I started with this course on Coursera [0]. It was ok at the start, but got hard for me early on. A big part of the course is of reading the book that they make available for free [1], so I would upload the relevant chunk of chapters into Claude (the whole book was a bit too much for it), and would then just ask it to explain each topic to me, whereby I'd ask additional questions, and then when, I felt I got it, ask it to check my understanding (which it does quite well, saying "sort of, but note that..." in many appropriate circumstances). As another specific example, in that book and in others, I sometimes struggle with the math, so I would ask Claude to give me the sympy code for the relevant mathematical derivation, and being able to actually see those expressions change in a python notebook really helps my understanding. I'm really impressed with how it usually does well on the first try, even with relatively complex stuff, like expressions involving symbolic matrix exponentiation. Being able to pause on any topic like this, and have the LLM help me dive into it in the way that works best for me, has been amazing, and getting as much time from a knowledgeable human tutor would have probably cost me 1,000x as much. [0] https://coursera.org/specializations/modernrobotics https://coursera.org/specializations/modernrobotics [1] http://hades.mech.northwestern.edu/images/7/7f/MR.pdf http://hades.mech.northwestern.edu/images/7/7f/MR.pdf
- saati 2y ago
  How do you know the answers are actually useful and not just hallucinations?
  - falcor84 2y ago
    It's not an oracle, and does get things wrong occasionally, but if anything, having to check its responses actually helps me confirm that I'm learning.
- 2y ago