Now…
If you’re here from Twitter, you probably asking:
What’s this graph about?
We’ll get there, hang with me for some context.
Disclaimer
First, let’s be clear.
This isn’t my idea, and this isn’t about me. I built something cool last night, but other’s have done exceedingly more in this space than I can even imagine. I’m thinking of Sal Khan, Jimmy Wales, and Larry Sanger. These guys have done more for the world’s education than perhaps anyone else has accomplished in history.
What I’m going to propose has to be a community effort to have any chance of working (and may get significant support from Wikipedia).
I hope many of us in the tech community can contribute and also that non-technical folks will in a very short time.
Bonus disclaimer: 50% of the thought behind this occurred in the last 24 hours. And a lot of this is probably wrong. It’s not well-researched (yet). Take it with a grain of salt. Actually don’t, call me out on Twitter so I can learn. I have a lot to learn, and your experience and knowledge helps.
My Idealistic Vision
I’m trying to sum up the vision in a sentence, here’s my current attempt:
Generative LLMs can make education costs approach $0 for everyone.
There’s several aspects to this.
- Generative
- Cost
- Everyone
We all know generative AI can answer questions when you’re learning something new. I would argue that if you’re an independent learner, GPT-4 could provide a better technical education than many current systems.
Unfortunately a lot of people don’t learn well that way. Many do better with structure imposed on them by someone else. What if generative AI could provide some of that structure?
Turns out it can. Here’s an example of it making a syllabus for a college course.
Interestingly, we can go in both directions from here.
What does a list of syllabi compose? A list of classes.
What is a syllabus broken down into? Weeks.
What is comprised by a list of classes? A degree.
What are weeks broken down into? Lectures, readings, and coursework.
Quick note: for brevity, I’m not going include all the prompts. I’d be happy to share them with anyone who wants them of course, but I think the baseline concept should be pretty straightforward.
Now which of these can AI not generate a baseline version of?
- Can it give me a list of degrees for a college? Yes.
- Can it give me a list of courses needed for a degree program? Yes.
- Can it take that list and make a list of syllabi for each one? Also yes!
Now we’re to the level of granularity most people use ChatGPT for all the time. A specific, niched down prompt. At this point we can use the LLM itself, agents (e.g., from Langchain), or human data validation. This last part is key, more on that later.
Alright, so everyone knows what the graph is now? You see where this is going?
Here’s a zoomed in version if you’re curious. The left-most node asks GPT-3.5 to list 25 college majors, the middle one represents one of those majors and asks to build a syllabus. The right-hand one represents a syllabus and could be further broken down into weeks, sections, etc. The labels are all automatically generated if you’re wondering why they are the way they are.
That’s what I got to yesterday. I’ll save the details about the tool I used for a Twitter thread. That’s not really what this is about.
Is that exciting? Eh, not really by itself. It’s a for loop and a tree data structure. Something any CS major should be able to build in a day.
But humor me for a bit. Tell me I’m wrong if you know better.
Can this beat traditional education?
Note that I’m only familiar with traditional western education. Would love to hear thoughts from those outside that bubble. Where I live, you usually go to a classroom environment and a teacher imparts knowledge to you (hopefully) in a way that the average student in his class will glean from.
There are three problems with this:
- Location
- The teacher
- The “average student”
Location is a big problem because if you didn’t grow up with location-access to a good school and couldn’t travel to a good college…
I think we can all finish that with a negative statement if we’re being honest.
Now I have a lot of respect for teachers, but let’s look at points 2 and 3 together. Teachers are human, and so are students. They both have learning and teaching patterns that can be changed a good bit, but not infinitely.
Thus the unfortunate circumstance often develops where in the vast majority of classes, there’s a number who can’t keep up. Often it’s because of their learning style not matching the teaching style, not just that the students are lazy.
Online learning solves the location problem easily (to a degree, we’ll get to this). It somewhat supplements the teaching/learning style problem due to the sheer number of styles currently available.
But having to jump around between “teachers” is not conducive to learning.
AI can be run behind a consistent interface, so you can focus on learning the material, not about the teacher nor his style. It can also:
- Generate content for a variety of learning styles on the fly.
- Decrease the cost of content.
- Make the content more interactive.
And no, I don’t mean just add a chat bot to pre-recorded class. That’s already been done:
I’m thinking more like what @synthesischool is doing for elementary education. For example, they build thinking games for kids to play that supplement more traditional assignments. Not only are they fun, but I imagine it has better results.
This is the sort of education the world’s richest men choose to put their children in (e.g., Elon). What if education along that level of quality could transcend to those who don’t even have internet access?
AI can already make game-development much easier, but we’re already seeing full 3D environment generation starting to peek. I would bet we’re about 3-6 months away from basic games being created in a matter of minutes with a nice, descriptive prompt (or series of prompts).
Here’s another example. @ykdojo shared with me how he’s thinking of building a less-gamified version for learning to code. I don’t think the “new devs” who are using ChatGPT to code are learning much. This could help fix that.
A note for any young developers reading this:
Learning to code isn’t easy (for the vast majority of people), so if you feel like it is, then you’re probably not learning as much as you should be.
This doesn’t mean you have to bang your head against the wall 24/7.
What about the 35% without internet?
From a (very quick) Google search, I’m seeing there’s about 35% of the world without internet and roughly 10% of the world without a phone. That means there’s an easy 25% win if @internetactvsm can roll something out globally that has a sufficient distributed throughput.
It wouldn’t even have to be much and wouldn’t have to be fast. A user could request a topic or “degree” if you will. Then the underlying data would get transferred to them over time and then cached on their phone. The endpoint’s mobile app would then recreate the modules from all the packets they received. This is a different use case, but almost exactly what IA has been working on lately (they’re also the guys who made the COVID tracker that had over 600 million users).
So while streaming video content is not necessarily unreasonable, at least text formats can be sent – even over air gaps. I have personal experience with this as it’s a major part of what I do at my day job, and I know folks who are far smarter and more capable with these technologies than I am. Our flagship product has to robustly handle remote environments where data transfer is never as simple as a cellular data connection. However, I’ve never seen this tech applied to education. If Internet Activism doesn’t make it happen, someone can and will.
What about the 10% without a phone? I honestly don’t know. I think education should be an option universally. There will likely always be exceptions, but this is a big group of people that deserve more thought.
The Accuracy Problem
That brings me to one of the biggest problems. I don’t believe we’ll have anything meaningful in the near future if we use ChatGPT live to generate educational material. Having conversations to explain things is great, but that needs to be constrained. There’s too much hallucination right now.
The solution? Wikipedia + Quora-style collaborative editing and improvement. GPT can structure a large, usable dataset very quickly. That doesn’t mean that it’s done. Ideally, SMEs at least skim through everything to check for accuracy and completeness.
The Bias Problem
Any global education platform, especially one that is based on an LLM has exposure to bias issues. It’s a significant issue, but I’m going to hold my thoughts on this for the moment. We should never constrain an individual to the point that they lose self-expression, but at the same time a centralized information center for the globe carries significant risks. Distributing the development, storage, and retrieval of internal knowledge frameworks may help to reduce this issue.
Summary
I hope we can collaboratively build something that harnesses the power of this LLMs technology to educate ourselves better. There’s a new era that just arrived and it’s up to us to make the most of it.
I appreciate your desire to make a difference. I truly believe we can build something together that will change the world.
Thanks for reading.
– Jake
