Discussion

Qikcik

piokoch: This is very interesting, I've been using LLM to learn new things that way and it really worked. To some extent, learning with LLM is better than taking any course, even with a tutor, as I am getting something prepared for me, in terms of my experience, progress level, etc.LLM is going to change schools and universities a lot, teachers, tutors will have to find themselves in the new reality, as they have a strong competitor with infinite resources and huge knowledge, patient and ready to work with every student in a distinct way, according to student's needs, level, intelligence, etc.Instruction-based tutoring is dead from that perspective, why should I follow someone reciting a book or online tutorial, while there is a tool that can introduce me into subject in a better and more interesting way?Sure, there are great teachers, who are inspiring people, who are able to present the topic in a great way, the point is, they are minority. Now, everyone can have a great tutor for a few dollars a month (or for free, if you don't need generating too much data quickly).

pandatigox: Sounds interesting, can you share some useful prompts for learning?

r_lee: (not OP but..) I personally am not very into "prompting", you just need to figure out how these models workit's best when you ask a well known problem/thing they can reference (vs. a niche way to solve exactly what you want to solve)then you work backwards, I e. why is it like this, what is this for, what are the alternative ways to accomplish this etc...it's a big query engine after all.don't try to ask like "what is the exact right way" or etc. because it will try to generate that and likely hallucinate if there is no such answer in its training corpus.instead ask what the model does know, or doesn't.

fragmede: To some extent. I had Claude (Sonnet 4.5) generate some homework problems for students I was teaching to code, and the problem/answers weren't actually right. They were subtlety wrong, which makes me worry about using it for other subjects.

traceroute66: > LLM is going to change schools and universities a lot, teachers, tutors will have to find themselves in the new reality, as they have a strong competitor with infinite resources and huge knowledge, patient and ready to work with every student in a distinct way, according to student's needs, level, intelligence, etc.No it won't. It really, really wont. You clearly don't have any university professors amongst your friends or acquaintances.What you wrote is what the STUDENTS think. The students think they have found a cheat code.The reality is just like LLMs will confidently push out slop code, they will also push out slop for everything else. 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.The students come to the professors with stupid questions because they've been trusting the AI instead of learning properly. Some of the students even have the audacity to challenge the professor's marking saying "but the AI said it is right".So what do my university professor friends end up doing ?They spend their evenings and weekends thinking up lab tasks that the students cannot achieve by simply asking the LLM for the answer. The whole point of university is you go there to learn to reason and think with your own damn brain, not paste the question into a text box and paste the answer to your professor.That, my friend, is the reality.

e12e: I think that Knoll’s law of media accuracy applies quite well to LLMs as well:> “everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true, except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge”.