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”.

(not OP but..) I personally am not very into "prompting", you just need to figure out how these models work

it'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.

I can! What thing have you been learning lately? What is your current knowledge level? What is it your goal to learn about it next?

I’m an unusually good programmer, I’ve worked in over 25 different programming languages and have been doing it since I was 6. I’ve spent most of my career as an applied researcher in research orgs where my full time job is study.

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.

> No it won't. It really, really wont. You clearly don't have any university professors amongst your friends or acquaintances.

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.

He said: "LLM is going to change schools and universities a lot"

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.

What you call "slop" is a far better education than what 99% of children in the world receive.

I mean, you've collapsed a complex, mixed system into a single negative narrative.

Examples of how I learn with LLMs:

- Paste sections from reading and ask questions / clarify my understanding / ask it to quiz me

- Produce Anki cards by pasting in chapter text and the culling out the goods ones

- Request resources / links for further learning

Basically, LLMs serve as a thinking partner. Yes, it's a fallible tool, not an oracle. But dismissing the idea that you can learn (and learn faster / more efficiently) with LLMs is reductionist