you people pretend to hold a rather romantic notion about what school education is. most kids are being educated by indifferent teachers, 40 kids at a time, with little to no opportunity to ask questions. LLMs are an incredible boon for self-education, second only to the Internet itself, being able to function as a tutor on every subject, and you're hand-wriggling about imaginary dangers of... what, exactly?

I've seen the same moral panic during the commodification of Internet access in my country in mid 00's -- "students are going to cheat on their homework and become dumb!!1", blah-blah-blah-fart-blah. you only pretend to care about kids to push your politics.

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koof 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 40 kids at a time

i wonder why that is. what kind of attitude towards the value of education would allow this. grok help me out here

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bluefirebrand 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> most kids are being educated by indifferent teachers, 40 kids at a time, with little to no opportunity to ask question

What absolute horseshit

I have met a lot of teachers in my life and I don't think I have ever met one that was remotely indifferent to their students. Its not like they're getting into it for the money :/

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johnnyanmac 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So let's get this straight: we have many underpaid, overworked teachers who aren't given the resources needed for students to succeed. Our solution to this, in lieu of better educational budgets (and appropriations of said budget), is to rely on the rugged individualism of primary schoolers to be motivated to just learn content by themselves. This being driven by trillion dollar interests who have the budget but not the incentive nor drive to actually make sure students succeed.

Meanwhile, private schools who have both budget and drive will teach kids who can afford it and teach them proper railguarding against such tools. Did I get your point of view correct?

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vlyan 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

my point of view is that "better educational budgets" is a fantasy and kids whose parents can't afford tutors -- the overwhelming majority of them -- are infinitely better off now, with LLMs being able to explain virtually anything much better than a textbook does. they are already better than most humans at it.

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johnnyanmac 8 hours ago | parent [-]

My point of view is that we have more control over our governments, and especially our local governments, than private corporations. I don't have faith that one day LLMs won't simply explode in price and become yet another tool out of reach for all but the most privilege. We already are seeing that as we transition from subscriptions to token based charges.

There's no incentive to serve underprivileged kids and all the incentive to increase prices once the market is captured. So why not hold the ones already using our money accountable?

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vlyan 6 hours ago | parent [-]

>There's no incentive to serve underprivileged kids

there isn't. AI labs don't give a flying fuck about kids, underprivileged or otherwise -- why should they? LLMs being useful for education is a side effect of them being developed to replace knowledge workers. but they are extremely useful, and there are no sane arguments against that.

>and all the incentive to increase prices once the market is captured

by whom? the LLM market is delightfully competitive. and even if one of the labs makes a breakthrough and jacks up the prices on their SOTA, the rest of them won't just disappear.

I'm not suggesting we replace schools with LLMs. no one sane does. I'm just stating something that's been extremely obvious since GPT-4 almost 4 years ago -- LLMs are an incredibly useful tool for learning. fighting against them being used in education is as absurd as fighting against computers and Internet had been -- I'm old enough to have witnessed Soviet-bred boomers yelling at those clouds, and I'm baffled to see various Internet folx fighting the same fight using the same arguments. "we should fund schools better instead" is not going to happen. it was never going to happen even if LLMs didn't happen.

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johnnyanmac 6 hours ago | parent [-]

>but they are extremely useful, and there are no sane arguments against that.

I'm not arguing usefulness. We have many useful tools, programs, and institutions out there. I'm sure some parts of this community directly contributed to such tech.

I'm arguing cost. Costs raise too much (and as you mention, they don't give a flying fuck about those who can't afford it) and we throw LLMs into the pile of "useful yet inaccessible" tools that increases the disparity of the passing and failing kids. So we're back to square one.

>by whom

Shareholders. All the frontier models are going public, and we've seen this playbook being run. They compete until competitors peter out, or they collude to make sure prices all increase in coordination. It's happening now with memory, happened years back with the streaming wars. I see no reason why LLMs are different.

>fighting against them being used in education is as absurd as fighting against computers and Internet had been.

I'm simply asking two questions long term

1. Who foots the bill?

2. Who gets the benefit.

From what I see you haven't answered #2. And for #1 you're just hoping competition keeps prices low despite it being well established that LLMs are not sustainable at current costs. Something's going to give, and history tells me it's not going to be the privileged families.

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vlyan 5 hours ago | parent [-]

>Shareholders. All the frontier models are going public,

what I meant is that there isn't a singular entity capable of doing such a rag pull. even if/when closedai and misanthropic do it, open-weights models obviously won't follow.

>Who foots the bill?

primary schoolers don't need $50/1M SOTA. dirt cheap "flash" tier models are more than enough, and even models that can run on consumer hardware are enough for great many things if you know their limitations.

>Who gets the benefit.

students who use it.

again, a LLM can essentially act as a fairly proficient and infinitely patient tutor on every subject, and you have unlimited access to it. that's the application I see for them in education. it would've been amazing to me to have that when I was in school.

>despite it being well established that LLMs are not sustainable at current costs

not a single third-party provider on openrouter is subsidizing their tokens.

	▲	johnnyanmac 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>dirt cheap "flash" tier models are more than enough And do you trust companies to keep subsidizing the "cheap" models? The reason for the memory crisis isn't due to consumer DRAM but affects it nonetheless. Remember, the kinds of families being talked about here are on districts that apparently cannot afford basic learning supplies and it's a "fantasy" to get them more funding. Who's footing the bill? >and you have unlimited access to it. You keep handwaving the costs but not providing good argument for who's covering it. There's no such thing as a free (or in this case, unlimited) lunch. A disadvantaged family may not be able to bear yet another subscription (and again, that train has already left on subscription based syst3ms), a school district would need to fund this for thousands of students, likely funded by property taxes. >not a single third-party provider on openrouter is subsidizing their tokens. Yes. Their earnings reports reflect this. The companies are running defecits to fund this. They are the ones subsidizing it. We all know that will not last forever in this post ZIRP economy. Proponents for AI love to argue about the capabilities in 3-5 years whenever flaws in AI models arise, but seem sheepish to talk about the costs and monetization models. But the latter is the real important part when talking on the scale of an entire education system. I think we can all agree that the products that win such educational bids are rarely the highest quality ones.

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sejje 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Florida is getting better test scores with smaller budgets. It's not a money problem.

	▲	johnnyanmac 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, I agree appropriation of funds matter more than increasing the budget. We need more money to go towards districts who literally cannot afford resources. There's also matters of curriculum, but I'm not versed enough to advise on that issue directly. The small amounts of reading I've done on it suggests that other states need to swallow their pride and look to the statss improving for wisdom.