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Comment by ksala_ | Hacker News Reader

But with a teacher, I can get a feel of their qualifications after a while (or cross-reference whatever they tell me) and if they're wrong, I can go somewhere else. Also, a teacher is less likely to gaslight me and hopefully will research the topic in case they're not sure about something. With AI, it's always a coin toss.

I don't know, maybe I'm just a old person yelling at clouds, but I just find it crazy to use AI for learning anything. Maybe one day.

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With GPT it's more like rolling a d20 than a coin toss.

19-20=You receive the enlightenment you were asking for, more or less instantly.

3-18=You get what amounts to a Socratic conversation with Wikipedia. Which, unless you're fortunate enough to have access to expert personal mentorship, is better than what you had before.

1-2=You get a load of highly-plausible bullshit. You end up worse off intellectually, possibly much worse.

All in all, I'm OK with these odds, especially at this early stage of the LLM game.

The Khan Academy has made some good strides in this area with AI.

And just as I switched to a teaching career. FML... :-D

With an AI you also get a feel for what they typically know and what they'll probably fail at. The limitations are mostly consistent, at least on a per-model basis. Even more so than humans, since they never grow or learn anything new.

I feel like I've learned a ton of new things from GPT 4 in terms of software development recently, while also feeling I've been stagnating in my job with nobody to learn from. It's just so easy to have it explore alternative approaches or have it structure things in ways you may not be comfortable with yet (and would thus otherwise avoid) but would be better in the long run. It has the breadth to show you all that's possible while reducing the entry effort for learning to near zero.

It's just another useful tool, just like books, the internet, and real teachers are useful tools. They all have their pros and cons. The advantage of chat bots is that they're always there and scale to an arbitrarily large number of students. The advantage of teachers is that they're, well, people.

I'm not sure they scale so well. They probably need so many GPUs that teachers are more efficient.

That seems very unlikely to me. Certainly LLMs are very compute intensive relative to past applications, but I would find it shocking if they are not nonetheless far more scalable than human labor.

It's easier to make a teacher than to make a GPU though.

Again, no it isn't, what are you talking about?

Human beings are incredibly incredibly expensive to "make" into any useful adult thing. I have spent more money just this week just on a single one of the humans who are dependent on me than it would cost me to buy a fully packaged GPU in a box at best buy (and I think that box would actually have multiple GPUs packaged together in it). And I'll do that week after week for many more years. And then it will still be like four more years after that before they're capable of being a teacher.

It was harder to make the first GPU than to make one marginal unit of human teacher, but it's vastly easier to make a marginal unit of GPU.

I'm honestly curious what your mental model is, where you seem to think human labor is cheaper than computer hardware...

A teacher just teaches what he or she has been taught. And history is written by the winners. None of us can really know what is true.

Let me introduce you to the concept of theorems.

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