Finding new relevant things to learn gets progressively more difficult and LLMs have blown that right open. Even if they haze zero new ideas the encoding and searching of existing ideas is nothing live I’ve seen before. If they can teach me things they can definitely teach less experienced people things as well. Sometimes it takes a bit of prodding, like it will insist something is impossible but when presented with evidence to the contrary will resume to give working prototypes. Which means in these very long tail instances it does still help to have some prerequisite knowledge. I wish they were more able to express uncertainty.
I think the primary reason Ed Tech hasn’t been disrupted is that an expensive education is a costly signal and a class demarcator, making it cheaper defeats the primary purpose. Grade creep, reproducibility crisis, plagiarism crisis, cheating scandals fail to undermine this purpose. In fact the worse it gets the more it becomes a costly signal. As inequality increases so does the importance social signals. In many countries Universities are given special privileges to act as a gateway to permanent residency which is extremely profitable. If anything is to replace education it would have to either supplant this role as a social signal or the reward for the social signal will need to be lost and I don’t see either happening anytime soon short of a major calamity.
Maybe some fancy professors in their cushy Ivy league ivory tower won't, but a lot of teachers that work for minimal salary sure will.
> Because the reality is that LLMs are nothing more than a party trick, a stats based algorithm that gives you answers within a gaussian curve.
A lot of humans can't even do that.
> Some of the students even have the audacity to challenge the professor's marking saying "but the AI said it is right" in relation to some basic math formula that the student should know how to solve with their own brain.
Students challenge professors over some stupid assumption, more news at 11.
> Trying to cheat your way through university with an LLM is a waste of the students time, a waste of the professors time and a waste of the university's infrastructure.
Who even said anything about cheating? Witch hunting too much? For majority of layman topics LLM will be a far superior offering precisely because LLMs have no ego and will reply to their best abilities instead of chastising students about, oh God forgive, HAVING AUDACITY to disagree over a topic.
Which includes hallucination, reward-hacking, over-confident delivery of completely wrong answers etc.
> HAVING AUDACITY to disagree over a topic.
When we are discussing a long-standing centuries-old textbook mathematical formula which is internationally recognised there is no disagreement to be had.
If an LLM hallucinates and tells a student that the textbook mathematical formula is wrong, and the student has the audacity to complain to the professor on that basis, I see no issue with the professor firmly challenging the student. University is there to foster learning and reasoning using your own brain, not outsourcing it to a hallucinating LLM.
You said: "No it won't. It really, really wont."
With the explosive development of LLMs and their abilities, it seems your point of view is probably the hopeful one while the other poster has the realistic one.
It seems that you simply can't say anything about what LLMs will not be able to do. Especially when you try to use current "AI slop" as your main reason, which is being more and more eradicated.
The slop is the hard truth.
As I made perfectly clear in my original post. My university professor friends get handed AI slop by their students each and every day.
There is no "eradication of slop" happening. If anything, it is getting worse. Trust me, my friends see the output from all the latest algorithms on their desk.
The students think they are being very clever, the students think the magical LLM is the best thing since sliced bread.
All the professor sees is a wall of slop on their desk and a student that is not learning how to reason and think with their own damn brain.
And when the professors tries politely and patiently to challenge them and test their understanding as you would expect in a university environment, the snowflake students just whine and complain because they know they've been caught out drinking the LLM kool-aid again for the 100th time this week.
Hence the student is wasting their time and money at university, and the professor is wasting their time trying to teach someone who is clearly not interested in learning because they think they can get the answer in 5 seconds from an LLM chatbot.
My professor friends chose the career they did because they enjoy the challenge of helping students along the way through their courses and watching them develop.
They are no longer seeing that same development in their students. And instead of devoting time to helping students, they are wasting time thinking up over-engineered fiendishly-complicated lab-tasks and tests that the students cannot cheat using LLM.
It is honestly a lose-lose situation for everybody.
FINALLY ! Someone who gets the point I was trying to make. I wish I could upvote you a million times.
This is precisely the point. Professors are happy to help people who want to learn.
Students who prefer to copy/paste into LLMs do not want to learn. University is there to foster learning and reasoning using your own brain. An LLM helps with neither.
Being an auto-didact has always been a double-edged sword. You can potentially accelerate your learning and find your own specialization, but it is an extremely easy failure mode to turn yourself into some semi-educated crank. Once in a while, this leads to some renegade genius who opens new branches of knowledge. But in more cases, it aborts useful learning. The crank gets lost in their half-baked ontology and unable to really fix the flaws nor progress to more advanced topics.
The whole long history of learning institutions is, in part, trying to manage this very human risk. One of a teacher's main roles is to recognize a student who is spiraling out in this manner and steer them back. Nearly everyone has this potential to incrementally develop a sort of self-delusion, if not getting reality-checked on a regular basis. It takes incredible diligence to self-govern and never lose yourself in the chase.
This is where "sycophancy" in LLMs is a bigger problem than mere diction. If the AI continues to function as a sort of keyhole predictor, it does not have the context to model a big-picture purpose like education and keep all the incremental wanderings on course and bound to reality. Instead, it can amplify this worst-case scenario where you plunge down some rabbit-hole.
I'm talking about university education here. Where the hell does the clutching at straws "99% of children in the world" argument come into it ?
> as if he wasn't the one who clutched at some mythical "the university"
Next you'll tell that anything below Ivy league isn't considered university and kids should've known better and used their damn head™ really hard to be born in better families to be able to get real university™ education.
I know professors from across the spectrum and I most certainly do not consider Ivy League should be placed on a pedestal.
That is all I am willing to say on that subject. Let's not drift off into personal attacks, please.