I know the idea of AI replicating some parts of the function of a tutor isn’t that comfortable, and there are whole rafts of the more human aspects, such as emotional intelligence, that this work doesn’t go near. But also, we know many students value AI for learning. They value its availability, patience, and lack of perceived judgement (‘no such thing as stupid questions with AI’). It’s also almost certain we are going to see many products built on this, and marketed directly to students, either as study aids, or as part of an entire online course.
Michael Webb (2024). Some Thoughts on Google’s Recent AI for Education Work.
Michael Webb provides an overview of the LearnLM paper from Google, describing some of the background work done to ensure the model acts like a ‘good tutor’. One of the challenges is that you can’t simply specify that the model should act like a ‘good tutor’ in the system prompt, and Google seems to have done a lot of work to provide examples of what ‘good tutoring’ looks like.
It’s also worth noting that OpenAI have released a fine-tuned version of GPT that aims to support learning, called ChatGPT Edu.
Read the blog post announcing LearnLM.