Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Yeah right, just like the elite are the only ones that have access to the courses from all the top universities, every book ever digitized, and software and hardware that allow you to operate a business out of your home now.



You seem to have missed the part about having a qualified human mentor guiding you through so that content.

It will be hard to impossible to build career as a teacher with all that free content as a competitor, unless you're an extremely talented teacher who can sell your services to the wealthy.


Even now ChatGPT is pretty close to being able to tutor someone in a subject. You could build a product around it that would work off of a lesson plan, ask the student questions and determine if they answered correctly or not and be able to identify what part of their knowledge was missing and then create a lesson based around explaining that. It would need to have some capabilities that ChatGPT doesn't have by itself like storing the progress of the student, having some way of running a prepared prompt to kick off each lesson, and would probably require fine tuning the GPT model on examples of student-teacher interactions but all of that is well within the capabilities of a competent developer. I wouldn't be surprised if we see such a product come out in the next 12 months.

The great thing about a chatbot style LLM is that it can answer questions the student has about the lessons or assigned content. That's most of what a tutor is there for. It won't be as good at making modifications to the curriculum but you could work around that with some smart design e.g. evaluate the students response, if it's not great then expand on the lesson and ask more questions about the content to find out which parts the student doesn't understand then expand on those or provide additional resources as assignments, test and repeat.


If you think mentoring can be replaced by answering a few questions and pointing out where they went wrong or what popular articles to read next, I'm afraid you don't know anything about what constitutes good mentoring. It's all about transmitting a point of view from life lessons learned from human experience, and an AI chatbot has nothing of that.

What you describe is the "learning equivalent to personalized ads" that I was talking about as the only option available to poor people.


Fine, looks like you won't budge on your opinion. You don't have to use these things if you don't want to but I look forward to having an even better service than things like Khan Academy or Udemy which I already get great value from.

I wasn't saying the AI tutor would recommend articles by the way. If you were creating a learning platform you would have some custom produced videos and text lessons that you could use. There are also plenty of free or open source materials that could be used like open courses or public domain books. I don't know why you're stuck on "personalized ads".




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: