I'm a former physics teacher, and while I'm impressed by the technology, I think this is a low efficacy innovation.
The real challenge in teaching Newton's laws of motion to teenagers is that they struggle to deal with the idea that friction isn't always there. When students enter the classroom, they arrive with an understanding of motion that they've intuited from watching things move all their lives, and that understanding is the theory of impetus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_impetus
An AI system that can interrogate individual students' understanding of the ideas presented and pose questions that challenge the theory of impetus would be really useful, because 'unteaching' impetus theory to thirty students at once is extremely difficult. However, what Google has presented here, with slides and multiple guess quizzes, is just a variation on the 'chalk and talk' theme.
The final straw that made me leave teaching was the head of languages telling me that a good teacher can teach any subject. Discussions about 'the best pedagogy' never make any consideration of what is being taught; there's an implicit assumption that every idea and subject should be taught the same way. School systems have improved markedly since they were introduced in the nineteenth century, but I think we've got everything we can out of the subject-agnostic approach to improvement, and we need to start engaging with the detail of what's being taught to further improve.
> the head of languages telling me that a good teacher can teach any subject.
Tell me this wasn't foreign languages? :face_palm:
Okay, I was totally with you until this,
> but I think we've got everything we can out of the subject-agnostic approach to improvement, and we need to start engaging with the detail of what's being taught to further improve
I think if you walk into the bottom 80% of classrooms you would not see, interleaving, spaced repetition, recall-over-reread, or topic shuffling to avoid interference.
There's a load of understanding we've gained in pedagogy and human learning that has not affected how we structure formal education yet.
> I think if you walk into the bottom 80% of classrooms you would not see, interleaving, spaced repetition, recall-over-reread, or topic shuffling to avoid interference.
Where have you taught? I taught in Australia and the United Kingdom, where many of these things were mandated by the promulgation of spiral curricula by the relevant government departments. I'm aware in the US that, for example, algebra is taught as one or two block courses, but in the school systems I've taught in, algebra is taught as a few 'topics' of about a month in duration each, sprinkled throughout the whole four or five years in which mathematics is mandatory in secondary school. For Year 7 to 10 in Australia, there would be one or two topics for each of physics, chemistry, biology and earth sciences, covered across each year, building up from year to year. None of this was a choice by individual teachers or even schools; it was an artefact of the way the curricula are structured.
The issue with learning things isn't that it hasn't been tailored to be interesting or relatable to me, it's just that it's a lot of content and it's hard. The solution is figuring out how to set up a type of spoon feed algorithm that checks that I'm understanding little bite size pieces along the way in addition to giving layman's terms for things that don't necessitate the formal description (e.g., deciphering math language).
ChatGPT Study mode has actually been quite good at this when you prompt it correctly and are studying a subject that it's well trained on.
I'm not a teacher, but I think a simple change to "objects in motion stay in motion" could help with teaching it. Instead, tell students that any change in motion always has a cause, then ask them for the cause in different scenarios. Why does the ball stop rolling across the room? Why does the rocket launch into space? Why does the falling feather stop as it hits the ground? Then, ask what happens if there is no cause for change. Now you are left with the original law. That object will stay in motion.
My general experience with things like this from Google is to assume that this is at least one big step behind what they're doing now internally. Taking a position on how useful one finds this today effectively insulates from thinking more seriously about what could be done. If taken from a perspective of "what hints are laying around in this blog post or scientific articles about what's possible?" it's probably more effective use of time if you're going to invest time in reading it.
As an example, as you're reading it, try posing a few relevant counterfactuals.
>My general experience with things like this from Google is to assume that this is at least one big step behind what they're doing now internally
What they are doing internally after launching something like this is patting themselves on the back, updating their resumes, and promptly forgetting it exists.
Plug for our https://uphop.ai/app : it's for adult learning / corporate training. We break down a desired job skill into small chunks, and engage the user with practice & give nuanced feedback. And of course like chatbots make it easy for user to ask more questions or go on tangents.
Would appreciate feedback!
There's a bit of overlap with Learn Your Way I guess. I'm not sure users need to toggle between alternate formats of the same instruction though. Instead the instruction itself should be as multi-modal as possible, and offer flexibility to ask questions... which even gemini.google.com offers so I'm not sure this is a net improvement over that.
I'm sure computer science has improved in high school over the last (gulp) 20 years, but when I did variations of IT and programming lessons before university, it was bad. This was peak "you must Microsoft Office"-era. I've been involved in outreach for almost as long at this point. A lot of kids ask sensible questions like 'when do I ever need to use trig in real life?', because the examples in lessons and exams are so divorced from reality that it feels pointless.
I do think there is pedagogical value in showing where these concepts can be used practically and the advantage of LLMs is that you can transform the examples to what you're actually interested in. For example the Red Blob Games series on A* pathfinding are really good at showing how Dijkstra and graph traversal algorithms work, for a use-case (video games) that is appealing to a lot of nerdy people.
It's a cute "how do I reach these kids?" idea -- find what they like and explain the concepts with custom-tailored analogues.
I don't think the failure mode here is really "7th graders will see through the superficiality of this really quick". I think the failure mode here will be:
> Explain computer science basics for a 7th grader interested in poop and butt-sniffing
Although who knows... maybe this will unleash a generation of memes of the likes we have never seen before. And if the side-effect is more people are at least conversant in more topics, well, maybe that's not a failure mode at all
Technology is a tool to expand the possible ways to educate, but isn't necessary for education to happen.
i.e. we've been educating people for 1,000s of years even without textbooks.
Education itself isn't primarily a technology problem. Treating it as such is an administrative failure, as is pursuing a technological solution in many scenarios that are first social in nature.
Shameless plug but I made a similar tool called asXiv[1] which allows you to "ask" arXiv.org papers questions.
It also recommends questions on initial load that can help understand or explore the paper, here's a demo[2] from the popular Attention Is All You Need paper.
The code is all opensource[3], it uses the google 2.5 flash lite model to keep costs down (it's completely free atm), but that can be changed via env var if you run it locally.
whoa this is fantastic. wish I had known about this earlier! just made a similar product for reading arXiv / epub / pdfs called Ruminate (www.tryruminate.com), would love to hear what you think
Right. I do this all the time with Gemini. Add a pdf or a link and ask it whatever I want. It will even turn it into a podcast with two people discussing the entire paper that I can listen to on the tram to work.
No one who understands ai can rely on it to help us learn. I provided one with 100 citations I wanted to standardize and it deleted 10 and made up 10 to replace them. Can’t imagine this being used to replace a textbook or even explain a textbook.
But the problem is, you don't understand the passage, so therefore how will you vet the answers? Seems like hallucinations would be very very damaging in this use-case
If you can't discern what good answers look like to the questions you're asking, you're not asking the right kind of questions.
Asking the right kind of questions is a genuine skill.
It applies to every domain of life where you are at the mercy of a "professional" or at the mercy of some knowledge differential. So you need to be a good judge of whether the answers you're getting are good answers or bad answers.
I was in the middle of typing the same question. This is the part that worries me about Generative AI; far too many people seem to have forgotten that its prone to confabulation and telling the user what they want to hear.
Sure, but if the LLM tells you the jump from step 2 to 3 in a calculus problem is the use of l'hopital's rule, you should be able to figure out pretty quickly if it's a red herring or not.
I’m not sure this approach is the right one, but the problem resonates with me.
I vividly remember hitting some blocker (7th grade chem, 4th grade reading, 2nd grade dinosaurs), where I had a question that the teacher dismissed.
My mind was stuck (blocked) as it couldn’t get past the question I had, and in a public school setting, it wasn’t worth the time for the teacher to dive down the tangent (or they simply weren’t prepared).
My hope for LLMs in education, is that they can supplement traditional curriculums such that students can go “off the rails” while still being nudged back to the desired outcome.
- How do we know electrons “spin”?
- Why does that word behave differently than others (in English)?
- How big is a sauropod compared to a blue whale?
I’ve found that on my own journey through education, it’s these sparks of interest that drive towards deeper understanding, rather than surface level rote memorization.
TFA says: “What if students had the power to shape their own learning journey?”
In the context of nonfiction/textbooks, this is already possible!
I didn’t read “How to read a book”[0] until high school, but it opened the world for me on another silly blocker I had, which is that material should be consumed start to finish.
Hopefully with “AI” more students will learn that there are many paths towards understanding the world, and not just the curriculum in front of them.
Another anecdote: In university, I ended up taking Circuits 1&2 before Calc 4 (diff. eqs).
This was fantastic, because everything I learned about Laplace, Fourier, etc. had an immediate connection to another area of interest, which made the class much more engaging.
I was thinking about that when I bought my pinenote - imagine Tom Riddle's diary helping you with mathematics. Sadly I lost interest in the Linux side of the pinenote as it took a while to get to a working state and now I've got other things going on.
This is one of the areas where LLMs are really useful. At their core they aren’t “thinking” so much as transforming and reorienting data.
What’s been most valuable for me is the way they create a kind of imperfect but effective Socratic dialogue with whatever I’m reading. I was the kid who always had my hand up in class, not to show off, but because I hated leaving something unexplained. Good teachers could make a text come alive by answering those questions.
LLMs give me some of that back outside the classroom. Even when I ask them to speculate, the process forces me to interrogate the material and refine my own model of it. That’s changed how I read, learn, and even how I experience novels.
So innovation on this “Socratic interface” and other interfaces is pointed in the right direction.
As a side note, I'm going through all the Le Carré novels... it is a lovely experience to be able to ask an LLM more questions about 1960s British culture, West German Cold War politics, and Le Carré's background as a diplomat/spy. A lovely way to engage with novels.
Also, Smiley is getting up their in fictional characters I admire. Not Iroh level, but up there.
I'm excited by this multi-media approach. I've been avid self-learner for years, and I've often found the textbook format too dry, and forbidding, but ever since I started using NotebookLM, I'm diving into textbooks more and more. There is genuine value in creating a new format that meets learners where they are at.
I wonder how this will contribute to declining literacy rates in a social climate that's already rife with anti-intellectualism and isolation. Even if this worked well, it appears to be to be a step backwards.
Call me pessimistic, but this technology looks more poised to replace teachers in schools than supplement them.
In that case the problem isn’t what technology we do or do not introduce. A society that values literacy isn’t going to be duped by a demo and a blog post. However a society which does not value understanding, expertise, or teachers will take every opportunity to shortcut them.
I feel like this is thinking too small. I don’t want a better textbook. I want them to be basing this off of the experience of going to the most effective private tutors.
The textbook is there so that the model has something reasonably correct to work with and doesn't make up too much wrong stuff to teach.
For tutoring, I think the approach in https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-97652-6 is promising. (Prompts are included in the supplementary material on the last page: https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415... ) They start with an existing collection of worked exercises, give the chatbot access to the full solution and then let students interact with it to get a walkthrough or just check their own solution, depending on how much help the student thinks they need.
This feels at first glance like another instance of an AI tool doing something humans already enjoy doing, rather than replacing work we'd like to avoid.
The teachers and professor I've known have always loved adapting their lessons to suit the interests of their students - I think that's a core educational instruction skill.
I'm open to hearing disagreements, but reading through the usages and evaluations does not leave me thinking of a tool that would provide any benefit greater than just giving teachers more resources would.
Also some stuff are just hard to learn. They require a good (even deep) familiarity with some foundational knowledge and it will be a slow process to go through those.
Isn't this just showing the effects of actively engaging the learner by placing a topic in contexts familiar/favored by learner versus just reading about a topic?
Like, if you had made the text pdf readers do some manual thinking by working on trying to place the topic into the same type of familiar/favored context, wouldn't that have been the better comparison?
I think using GenAI for learning is cool and exciting (especially for autodidacts) but I'm not excited by this particular study structure.
Figure 10 of the technical report https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/ai_augmented_textb... has a third n=30 group labeled "LCG" that is mentioned nowhere else. It scores 100% on "I felt like today's educational tool helped me gain a good understanding of the content." so I wonder what's up with that.
The point of the rigidity and uniformity of school is not that it is the best way to get everyone to understand everything if they try. The point is that it forces all the kids to try. School is not just for the most interested, it is for everyone.
No AI you ever create will get a kid to choose learning how math works over doing basically anything else with their time. The point of school is not to teach, it is to discipline children to participate in education. Otherwise, why have it at all? Kids can find extensive information and guides for basically any topic they want on the internet right now.
Seems very similar when Microsoft invested in Apple back in the day when Apple was about to die.
Their concern was that they would be the only one OS company standing and be defacto a monopoly and regulated such. So, it was a away to keep your 'weak' competition alive just enough not to make you the sole provider.
Steve Jobs was able to turn around Apple in such a fashion that they become even bigger by letting go of the PC market and going mobile.
All the people at the forefront of AI really loved and thrived in highly academic settings from kindergarden to PhDs, their own lived experience doesn't match up with this product at all. Why are they making it?
EdTech has the worst returns of any industry in venture capital. Why?
There are no teachers who say that technology has generally improved experiences in classrooms, even if some specific technology-driven experiences like Khan Academy and Scratch are universally liked. Why?
When you look at Scratch, which I know a lot about, one thing they never do is allege that it improves test scores. They never, ever evaluate it quantitatively like that. And yet it is beloved.
Khan Academy: it is falling into the same trap as e.g. the Snoo. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's about, who pays? Who is the customer? Khan Academy did a study that showed a thing. Kids are not choosing to watch educational YouTube videos because of a study. It is cozy learning.
But why does Khan Academy need studies for a test score thing? Why does Google? This is the problem with Ed Tech: the only model is to sell to districts, and when you sell to districts, you are doing Enterprise Sales. You can sometimes give them a thing that does something, but you are always giving them exactly what they ask for. Do you see the difference?
It doesn't matter if it's technology or if it is X or Y or Z: if the district asks for something that makes sense, great, and if it asks for something that doesn't make sense, or doesn't readily have the expertise to know what does and doesn't make sense, like with technology, tough cookie. Google will make something that doesn't make sense, if it feels that districts will adopt it.
We can go and try the merits of Learn Your Way, thankfully they provide a demo. All I'll say is, people have been saying, "more reading" is the answer, and there is a lot of fucking reading in this experience, but maybe the problem isn't that there isn't enough text to read. The problem is that kids do not want to read, so...
> EdTech has the worst returns of any industry in venture capital. Why?
I think this one is fairly simple. Half of consumer spending comes from the top 10% of earners, whose kids we can assume have generally pretty decent educations already. The people who need education help the most don’t have money to spend on it.
The parents who do have money to spend want to invest in tailored education from a human teacher, not cheap, generic scalable technology. So margins will be low.
So if you want to make money, you need to focus on things like enrichment and test/college prep for the top 10%. Helping inner city kids who are 3 grades behind in reading doesn’t print money and VCs don’t want anything to do with that.
If you have free weights, a bench, and a place to run, you are already 98% of the way to being a healthy fit human. There is ample information available on how to use those tools.
You don't need a trainer, a $10,000 gym machine, and a $5,000 stationary bike.
Education has gotten so insane with per-student spend, and the results are the same as the kids who had pencils and 10 year old text books.
You know what really motivates studying though? The promise of being completely useless when you finish studying since everything will be done by AI! What a motivator!
It's tough because the problems in education are so vast. Not that I'm saying you're wrong, but: everyone wants a stylistic answer to the question, "What is the problem with education?" Sometimes the style of that answer is malaise (you). Sometimes it is, some racist drivel. Which is pretty common on this forum, unfortunately.
Everywhere you look in education there are problems. There isn't going to be some stylized answer.
These Google guys - and a lot of other people who write comments online - go and promote something they think is a world view or theory, and is really just a bunch of stereotypes and projections of their own college-aged vengances. VC likes these kind of people! These Google guys fit that mold. I can agree with the broad strokes of techno-utopia, but that also means you need space to say that your app is bad, your art is ugly, and your text is long and boring.
These Google guys do not have space for criticism. They are Enterprise Sales. If the district asks for tasteless Corporate Memphis art, that's the art they're going to get - I'm going to focus on the art because I know something about art, and the text that appeared in the demo was so horrifically boring that I didn't read it. Have you opened a children's book? None of it looks like fucking Corporate Memphis!
One thing I am certain of is that these Google guys do have taste, they are smart people. Their problem is Enterprise Sales. Don't get me wrong. If you are narrowly focused on giving people what they want, your creative product will fail.
I wish instead Google would instead find a good way to have exercise books, with:
1) well-thought out exercises (covering all cases, whether in math or Spanish)
2) CORRECT solutions (just saying because even ChatGPT gets it wrong even for high school math)
3) that you can enter them using pen (if need be on an iPad)
Just a way to make zillions of exercises if I want to. And for my kids, the problem is these days teachers won't (AND mostly can't, they just don't know their subject) help them make a lot of exercises.
Lot of exercises does not really help. What is valuable is feedback, not the chore itself. You either need someone more knowledgeable guiding you, or rely on insights.
I'm a former physics teacher, and while I'm impressed by the technology, I think this is a low efficacy innovation.
The real challenge in teaching Newton's laws of motion to teenagers is that they struggle to deal with the idea that friction isn't always there. When students enter the classroom, they arrive with an understanding of motion that they've intuited from watching things move all their lives, and that understanding is the theory of impetus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_impetus
An AI system that can interrogate individual students' understanding of the ideas presented and pose questions that challenge the theory of impetus would be really useful, because 'unteaching' impetus theory to thirty students at once is extremely difficult. However, what Google has presented here, with slides and multiple guess quizzes, is just a variation on the 'chalk and talk' theme.
The final straw that made me leave teaching was the head of languages telling me that a good teacher can teach any subject. Discussions about 'the best pedagogy' never make any consideration of what is being taught; there's an implicit assumption that every idea and subject should be taught the same way. School systems have improved markedly since they were introduced in the nineteenth century, but I think we've got everything we can out of the subject-agnostic approach to improvement, and we need to start engaging with the detail of what's being taught to further improve.
> the head of languages telling me that a good teacher can teach any subject.
Tell me this wasn't foreign languages? :face_palm:
Okay, I was totally with you until this,
> but I think we've got everything we can out of the subject-agnostic approach to improvement, and we need to start engaging with the detail of what's being taught to further improve
I think if you walk into the bottom 80% of classrooms you would not see, interleaving, spaced repetition, recall-over-reread, or topic shuffling to avoid interference.
There's a load of understanding we've gained in pedagogy and human learning that has not affected how we structure formal education yet.
> I think if you walk into the bottom 80% of classrooms you would not see, interleaving, spaced repetition, recall-over-reread, or topic shuffling to avoid interference.
Where have you taught? I taught in Australia and the United Kingdom, where many of these things were mandated by the promulgation of spiral curricula by the relevant government departments. I'm aware in the US that, for example, algebra is taught as one or two block courses, but in the school systems I've taught in, algebra is taught as a few 'topics' of about a month in duration each, sprinkled throughout the whole four or five years in which mathematics is mandatory in secondary school. For Year 7 to 10 in Australia, there would be one or two topics for each of physics, chemistry, biology and earth sciences, covered across each year, building up from year to year. None of this was a choice by individual teachers or even schools; it was an artefact of the way the curricula are structured.
Yeah, as a student, I have to agree.
The issue with learning things isn't that it hasn't been tailored to be interesting or relatable to me, it's just that it's a lot of content and it's hard. The solution is figuring out how to set up a type of spoon feed algorithm that checks that I'm understanding little bite size pieces along the way in addition to giving layman's terms for things that don't necessitate the formal description (e.g., deciphering math language).
ChatGPT Study mode has actually been quite good at this when you prompt it correctly and are studying a subject that it's well trained on.
You should have asked the head of languages to teach you tensor calculus.
I'm not a teacher, but I think a simple change to "objects in motion stay in motion" could help with teaching it. Instead, tell students that any change in motion always has a cause, then ask them for the cause in different scenarios. Why does the ball stop rolling across the room? Why does the rocket launch into space? Why does the falling feather stop as it hits the ground? Then, ask what happens if there is no cause for change. Now you are left with the original law. That object will stay in motion.
My general experience with things like this from Google is to assume that this is at least one big step behind what they're doing now internally. Taking a position on how useful one finds this today effectively insulates from thinking more seriously about what could be done. If taken from a perspective of "what hints are laying around in this blog post or scientific articles about what's possible?" it's probably more effective use of time if you're going to invest time in reading it.
As an example, as you're reading it, try posing a few relevant counterfactuals.
>My general experience with things like this from Google is to assume that this is at least one big step behind what they're doing now internally
What they are doing internally after launching something like this is patting themselves on the back, updating their resumes, and promptly forgetting it exists.
*leaving, raising a round because they worked on this, promptly not doing anything without Google's distribution behind them
(see NotebookLM)
Plug for our https://uphop.ai/app : it's for adult learning / corporate training. We break down a desired job skill into small chunks, and engage the user with practice & give nuanced feedback. And of course like chatbots make it easy for user to ask more questions or go on tangents.
Would appreciate feedback!
There's a bit of overlap with Learn Your Way I guess. I'm not sure users need to toggle between alternate formats of the same instruction though. Instead the instruction itself should be as multi-modal as possible, and offer flexibility to ask questions... which even gemini.google.com offers so I'm not sure this is a net improvement over that.
I looked at the example for computer science basics for a 7th grader interested in food. Explanations include:
"a list can be used for a recipe"
"a set can be used to list all the unique ingredients you need to buy for a week's meals"
"a map can be used for a cookbook"
"a priority queue can be used to manage orders in a busy restaurant kitchen"
"a food-pairing graph can show which ingredients taste good together"
Maybe I'm over-estimating the taste of 7th graders, but I feel like I would get sick of this really quickly.
I'm sure computer science has improved in high school over the last (gulp) 20 years, but when I did variations of IT and programming lessons before university, it was bad. This was peak "you must Microsoft Office"-era. I've been involved in outreach for almost as long at this point. A lot of kids ask sensible questions like 'when do I ever need to use trig in real life?', because the examples in lessons and exams are so divorced from reality that it feels pointless.
I do think there is pedagogical value in showing where these concepts can be used practically and the advantage of LLMs is that you can transform the examples to what you're actually interested in. For example the Red Blob Games series on A* pathfinding are really good at showing how Dijkstra and graph traversal algorithms work, for a use-case (video games) that is appealing to a lot of nerdy people.
This is a start, not the end.
Instruction and instructors won't be going away.
Most people have never looked at textbooks needing evolving.
It's like the LLM ai shift to not think about how software used to be.
It's a cute "how do I reach these kids?" idea -- find what they like and explain the concepts with custom-tailored analogues.
I don't think the failure mode here is really "7th graders will see through the superficiality of this really quick". I think the failure mode here will be:
> Explain computer science basics for a 7th grader interested in poop and butt-sniffing
Although who knows... maybe this will unleash a generation of memes of the likes we have never seen before. And if the side-effect is more people are at least conversant in more topics, well, maybe that's not a failure mode at all
yea this is stupid . agreed.
I don't know when these dorks will understand that education isn't a technical problem. Its a social and emotional problem.
existing material is clear enough to learn from.
It’s both. Technology is a component (I’d we wouldn’t have books, recorded videos, multimedia aids, etc.).
Technology is a tool to expand the possible ways to educate, but isn't necessary for education to happen.
i.e. we've been educating people for 1,000s of years even without textbooks.
Education itself isn't primarily a technology problem. Treating it as such is an administrative failure, as is pursuing a technological solution in many scenarios that are first social in nature.
Shameless plug but I made a similar tool called asXiv[1] which allows you to "ask" arXiv.org papers questions.
It also recommends questions on initial load that can help understand or explore the paper, here's a demo[2] from the popular Attention Is All You Need paper.
The code is all opensource[3], it uses the google 2.5 flash lite model to keep costs down (it's completely free atm), but that can be changed via env var if you run it locally.
1. https://asxiv.org
2. https://asxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762
3. https://github.com/montanaflynn/asxiv
whoa this is fantastic. wish I had known about this earlier! just made a similar product for reading arXiv / epub / pdfs called Ruminate (www.tryruminate.com), would love to hear what you think
Seems legit, I'll have to try later. Just curious, why didn't you make this a commercial SaaS?
maybe because every LLM provider has an "attach file" feature so you can attach a paper and then ask questions about it?
what's the value add of the wrapper that this person wrote at all?
Right. I do this all the time with Gemini. Add a pdf or a link and ask it whatever I want. It will even turn it into a podcast with two people discussing the entire paper that I can listen to on the tram to work.
No one who understands ai can rely on it to help us learn. I provided one with 100 citations I wanted to standardize and it deleted 10 and made up 10 to replace them. Can’t imagine this being used to replace a textbook or even explain a textbook.
> explain a textbook
I've had very good luck using LLMs to do this. I paste the part of the book that I don't understand and ask questions about it.
But the problem is, you don't understand the passage, so therefore how will you vet the answers? Seems like hallucinations would be very very damaging in this use-case
If you can't discern what good answers look like to the questions you're asking, you're not asking the right kind of questions.
Asking the right kind of questions is a genuine skill.
It applies to every domain of life where you are at the mercy of a "professional" or at the mercy of some knowledge differential. So you need to be a good judge of whether the answers you're getting are good answers or bad answers.
I was in the middle of typing the same question. This is the part that worries me about Generative AI; far too many people seem to have forgotten that its prone to confabulation and telling the user what they want to hear.
Sure, but if the LLM tells you the jump from step 2 to 3 in a calculus problem is the use of l'hopital's rule, you should be able to figure out pretty quickly if it's a red herring or not.
What is "it": what models did you try? What was your prompt? When did you try it?
I’m not sure this approach is the right one, but the problem resonates with me.
I vividly remember hitting some blocker (7th grade chem, 4th grade reading, 2nd grade dinosaurs), where I had a question that the teacher dismissed.
My mind was stuck (blocked) as it couldn’t get past the question I had, and in a public school setting, it wasn’t worth the time for the teacher to dive down the tangent (or they simply weren’t prepared).
My hope for LLMs in education, is that they can supplement traditional curriculums such that students can go “off the rails” while still being nudged back to the desired outcome.
- How do we know electrons “spin”?
- Why does that word behave differently than others (in English)?
- How big is a sauropod compared to a blue whale?
I’ve found that on my own journey through education, it’s these sparks of interest that drive towards deeper understanding, rather than surface level rote memorization.
TFA says: “What if students had the power to shape their own learning journey?”
In the context of nonfiction/textbooks, this is already possible!
I didn’t read “How to read a book”[0] until high school, but it opened the world for me on another silly blocker I had, which is that material should be consumed start to finish.
Hopefully with “AI” more students will learn that there are many paths towards understanding the world, and not just the curriculum in front of them.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book
Another anecdote: In university, I ended up taking Circuits 1&2 before Calc 4 (diff. eqs).
This was fantastic, because everything I learned about Laplace, Fourier, etc. had an immediate connection to another area of interest, which made the class much more engaging.
Looking forward to my copy of "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" a la Diamond Age
I was thinking about that when I bought my pinenote - imagine Tom Riddle's diary helping you with mathematics. Sadly I lost interest in the Linux side of the pinenote as it took a while to get to a working state and now I've got other things going on.
> imagine Tom Riddle's diary helping you with mathematics.
Your tone suggests that this wouldn’t be horrifying so I wonder what you meant by this.
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This is one of the areas where LLMs are really useful. At their core they aren’t “thinking” so much as transforming and reorienting data.
What’s been most valuable for me is the way they create a kind of imperfect but effective Socratic dialogue with whatever I’m reading. I was the kid who always had my hand up in class, not to show off, but because I hated leaving something unexplained. Good teachers could make a text come alive by answering those questions.
LLMs give me some of that back outside the classroom. Even when I ask them to speculate, the process forces me to interrogate the material and refine my own model of it. That’s changed how I read, learn, and even how I experience novels.
So innovation on this “Socratic interface” and other interfaces is pointed in the right direction.
As a side note, I'm going through all the Le Carré novels... it is a lovely experience to be able to ask an LLM more questions about 1960s British culture, West German Cold War politics, and Le Carré's background as a diplomat/spy. A lovely way to engage with novels.
Also, Smiley is getting up their in fictional characters I admire. Not Iroh level, but up there.
I'm excited by this multi-media approach. I've been avid self-learner for years, and I've often found the textbook format too dry, and forbidding, but ever since I started using NotebookLM, I'm diving into textbooks more and more. There is genuine value in creating a new format that meets learners where they are at.
I wonder how this will contribute to declining literacy rates in a social climate that's already rife with anti-intellectualism and isolation. Even if this worked well, it appears to be to be a step backwards.
Call me pessimistic, but this technology looks more poised to replace teachers in schools than supplement them.
In that case the problem isn’t what technology we do or do not introduce. A society that values literacy isn’t going to be duped by a demo and a blog post. However a society which does not value understanding, expertise, or teachers will take every opportunity to shortcut them.
I feel like this is thinking too small. I don’t want a better textbook. I want them to be basing this off of the experience of going to the most effective private tutors.
The textbook is there so that the model has something reasonably correct to work with and doesn't make up too much wrong stuff to teach.
For tutoring, I think the approach in https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-97652-6 is promising. (Prompts are included in the supplementary material on the last page: https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415... ) They start with an existing collection of worked exercises, give the chatbot access to the full solution and then let students interact with it to get a walkthrough or just check their own solution, depending on how much help the student thinks they need.
> I want them to be basing this off of the experience of going to the most effective private tutors.
Good goal, but they've got to start somewhere.
Delivering an education experience even 80% as effective as the best private tutors would be a huge achievement.
https://learnyourway.withgoogle.com/
Link to an example:
https://learnyourway.withgoogle.com/scopes/AOcKkhsL/slides-n...
Upload your pdf so we can gather more training data but you’re providing it!
How much of this is cutesy animations and how much is really valuable?
This feels at first glance like another instance of an AI tool doing something humans already enjoy doing, rather than replacing work we'd like to avoid.
The teachers and professor I've known have always loved adapting their lessons to suit the interests of their students - I think that's a core educational instruction skill.
I'm open to hearing disagreements, but reading through the usages and evaluations does not leave me thinking of a tool that would provide any benefit greater than just giving teachers more resources would.
Also some stuff are just hard to learn. They require a good (even deep) familiarity with some foundational knowledge and it will be a slow process to go through those.
Isn't this just showing the effects of actively engaging the learner by placing a topic in contexts familiar/favored by learner versus just reading about a topic?
Like, if you had made the text pdf readers do some manual thinking by working on trying to place the topic into the same type of familiar/favored context, wouldn't that have been the better comparison?
I think using GenAI for learning is cool and exciting (especially for autodidacts) but I'm not excited by this particular study structure.
Figure 10 of the technical report https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/ai_augmented_textb... has a third n=30 group labeled "LCG" that is mentioned nowhere else. It scores 100% on "I felt like today's educational tool helped me gain a good understanding of the content." so I wonder what's up with that.
Well, if shoehorning interests in works for youth pastors...
The point of the rigidity and uniformity of school is not that it is the best way to get everyone to understand everything if they try. The point is that it forces all the kids to try. School is not just for the most interested, it is for everyone.
No AI you ever create will get a kid to choose learning how math works over doing basically anything else with their time. The point of school is not to teach, it is to discipline children to participate in education. Otherwise, why have it at all? Kids can find extensive information and guides for basically any topic they want on the internet right now.
The entire "AI education" thing misses this.
Google Veo 3 could also do a lot to spark interest by making 3D environments of Rome or Medieval Europe
If anyone can take on textbook companies, large companies can.
Doesn’t work on mobile when you click into one of the examples. It says it is best for wide layouts
Seems very similar when Microsoft invested in Apple back in the day when Apple was about to die. Their concern was that they would be the only one OS company standing and be defacto a monopoly and regulated such. So, it was a away to keep your 'weak' competition alive just enough not to make you the sole provider.
Steve Jobs was able to turn around Apple in such a fashion that they become even bigger by letting go of the PC market and going mobile.
All the people at the forefront of AI really loved and thrived in highly academic settings from kindergarden to PhDs, their own lived experience doesn't match up with this product at all. Why are they making it?
EdTech has the worst returns of any industry in venture capital. Why?
There are no teachers who say that technology has generally improved experiences in classrooms, even if some specific technology-driven experiences like Khan Academy and Scratch are universally liked. Why?
When you look at Scratch, which I know a lot about, one thing they never do is allege that it improves test scores. They never, ever evaluate it quantitatively like that. And yet it is beloved.
Khan Academy: it is falling into the same trap as e.g. the Snoo. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's about, who pays? Who is the customer? Khan Academy did a study that showed a thing. Kids are not choosing to watch educational YouTube videos because of a study. It is cozy learning.
But why does Khan Academy need studies for a test score thing? Why does Google? This is the problem with Ed Tech: the only model is to sell to districts, and when you sell to districts, you are doing Enterprise Sales. You can sometimes give them a thing that does something, but you are always giving them exactly what they ask for. Do you see the difference?
It doesn't matter if it's technology or if it is X or Y or Z: if the district asks for something that makes sense, great, and if it asks for something that doesn't make sense, or doesn't readily have the expertise to know what does and doesn't make sense, like with technology, tough cookie. Google will make something that doesn't make sense, if it feels that districts will adopt it.
We can go and try the merits of Learn Your Way, thankfully they provide a demo. All I'll say is, people have been saying, "more reading" is the answer, and there is a lot of fucking reading in this experience, but maybe the problem isn't that there isn't enough text to read. The problem is that kids do not want to read, so...
> EdTech has the worst returns of any industry in venture capital. Why?
I think this one is fairly simple. Half of consumer spending comes from the top 10% of earners, whose kids we can assume have generally pretty decent educations already. The people who need education help the most don’t have money to spend on it.
The parents who do have money to spend want to invest in tailored education from a human teacher, not cheap, generic scalable technology. So margins will be low.
So if you want to make money, you need to focus on things like enrichment and test/college prep for the top 10%. Helping inner city kids who are 3 grades behind in reading doesn’t print money and VCs don’t want anything to do with that.
It's like exercise equipment.
If you have free weights, a bench, and a place to run, you are already 98% of the way to being a healthy fit human. There is ample information available on how to use those tools.
You don't need a trainer, a $10,000 gym machine, and a $5,000 stationary bike.
Education has gotten so insane with per-student spend, and the results are the same as the kids who had pencils and 10 year old text books.
You know what really motivates studying though? The promise of being completely useless when you finish studying since everything will be done by AI! What a motivator!
It's tough because the problems in education are so vast. Not that I'm saying you're wrong, but: everyone wants a stylistic answer to the question, "What is the problem with education?" Sometimes the style of that answer is malaise (you). Sometimes it is, some racist drivel. Which is pretty common on this forum, unfortunately.
Everywhere you look in education there are problems. There isn't going to be some stylized answer.
These Google guys - and a lot of other people who write comments online - go and promote something they think is a world view or theory, and is really just a bunch of stereotypes and projections of their own college-aged vengances. VC likes these kind of people! These Google guys fit that mold. I can agree with the broad strokes of techno-utopia, but that also means you need space to say that your app is bad, your art is ugly, and your text is long and boring.
These Google guys do not have space for criticism. They are Enterprise Sales. If the district asks for tasteless Corporate Memphis art, that's the art they're going to get - I'm going to focus on the art because I know something about art, and the text that appeared in the demo was so horrifically boring that I didn't read it. Have you opened a children's book? None of it looks like fucking Corporate Memphis!
One thing I am certain of is that these Google guys do have taste, they are smart people. Their problem is Enterprise Sales. Don't get me wrong. If you are narrowly focused on giving people what they want, your creative product will fail.
Ah yet another project done to fill out promo doc
I wish instead Google would instead find a good way to have exercise books, with:
1) well-thought out exercises (covering all cases, whether in math or Spanish)
2) CORRECT solutions (just saying because even ChatGPT gets it wrong even for high school math)
3) that you can enter them using pen (if need be on an iPad)
Just a way to make zillions of exercises if I want to. And for my kids, the problem is these days teachers won't (AND mostly can't, they just don't know their subject) help them make a lot of exercises.
Lot of exercises does not really help. What is valuable is feedback, not the chore itself. You either need someone more knowledgeable guiding you, or rely on insights.
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