Arguably it is succeeding on this front - LLMs have been much more helpful for learning about mathematics topics than Wikipedia for a while now. Admittedly a somewhat low bar, but they are genuinely helpful. In many other fields the models can still only pull up equal (in my opinion).

▲

p1necone a day ago | parent | next [-]

It's the 'can answer arbitrary questions' part for me.

You could give me the most well crafted, comprehensive document ever and I would still misread bits of it, or miss some crucial bit of information that contextualises the rest or whatever.

With LLMs I can ask endless dumb questions in a way that just would not be practical otherwise. The quality of the responses doesn't even have to be particularly good for it to be extremely useful - it's basically a turbo charged rubber duck for learning new concepts.

	▲	marcus_holmes a day ago \| parent [-]
		I want the multimedia version of this that can animate pictures and play sounds, to help explain things. More like The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer [0] than our current chatbot paradigm. I expect there are 48956789560984 startups trying for this now, though, so... soon? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

▲

munksbeer 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> LLMs have been much more helpful for learning about mathematics topics than Wikipedia for a while now.

I can't imagine anyone but someone extremely gifted at first parse understanding learning mathematics from wikipedia. No effort is made to make it understandable for the average reader.

▲

thedreammachine a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Agreed. An always-on agent focused solely on improving your knowledge/skills could ask you questions daily, build a picture of the gaps in your understanding and learn where to push you next.

I'm experimenting with this at https://miletus.app

I'm also curious about training models with that singular goal. If anyone is exploring similar ideas, I'd love to chat.

▲

drivebyhooting a day ago | parent | next [-]

How can you source or generate a curriculum graph (similar to what math academy does)?

It seems to me that it would be cool if that could be solved automatically for any learning goal/target

	▲	thedreammachine a day ago \| parent [-]
		I started with a curated backbone across several fields, drafted with frontier models and reviewed by hand. The automatic (and fun) part happens when you pick a goal and a quest gets generated with its own prerequisites, mapped onto that backbone. It's def not as robust as Math Academy's graph yet, they spent years hand-building and testing it on real students. But I bet a few more iterations of frontier models get there, especially once there's learner data to correct it.

▲

mycall a day ago | parent | prev [-]

How do you handle the 'people often learn through repetition' problem?

	▲	thedreammachine a day ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]