Putting down a marker here.
Today OpenAI announced GPT4o. Simply put, it is the most amazing product launch I have ever seen.
It’s funny that this should be a Khan Academy demo. A good friend of mine – who also happens to be one of the smartest people I know – were chatting about the release when he told me, to my surprise, that his five year old is teaching himself things on Khan Academy already using the service’s “Khanmigo” AI assistant, which he interacts with via keyboard. Soon the little thing will be using ChatGPT to talk to Khan Academy and interact with the problem on an iPad or via video or 3D projection or whatever.
The essay by Eric Hoel, Why We Stopped Producing Einsteins, asks the intriguing question of why the world, when it became connected via the Internet, didn’t immediately begin producing Newtons or Einsteins. Where is our Feynman, our Einstein, our Hawking? Are Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Brian Greene really the best we have? Hoel’s theory is that aristocratic education, chiefly one on one tutoring, is the secret ingredient for cultivating a great mind from a young age. He writes:
Recently I was discussing with a friend the hypothesis that aristocratic tutoring (of the kind we don’t do anymore) is the only known consistent method to at least occasionally produce geniuses, to which he objected “What about Einstein?” A great point. Einstein’s reputation makes him seem one the most democratic of geniuses, a term he’s synonymous with; Einstein emphasizes the innateness of genius, its capability of coming from anywhere, even a lowly patent clerk. Isn’t there that story of him getting low grades in middle school?
Well, it turns out most of the school stuff is exaggerated or apocryphal, and Einstein had multiple tutors growing up in subjects like mathematics and philosophy, such as his uncle, Jakob Einstein, who taught him algebra. In fact, there was a family tutor of the Einsteins who went by the name Max Talmud (possibly the best name of a tutor ever), and it was indeed Max Talmud who introduced the young 12-year-old Albert to geometry, prefacing young Albert’s eventual transformation of our understanding of space and time into something geometric. Maybe we don’t make Einsteins anymore because we don’t make Max Talmuds anymore.
Hoel laments that even if you could afford to hire a Max Talmud with 2022 levels of technology (and you probably couldn’t), the implications of this from a classist perspective would give him, and would probably give prospective employers, colleges and universities, friends & neighbors, etc. the willies:
Could you hire a Max Talmud for your own family? I can certainly imagine a start-up specializing in online aristocratic tutoring, geared not toward tests or college resume padding but toward fundamentals, completely orthogonal to the norm of academic mass-production. This would actually fit in with some of other recent movements, like the “slow food” movement. There has already been a significant rise in homeschooling and even “unschooling” (which sounds like something that could, in some cases, essentially be parental-driven aristocratic tutoring). Yet, for such a start-up the problem is obvious: tutoring highlights economic privilege. And as Tocqueville pointed out, the rejection of aristocracy is a foundation of the American ethos. It’s telling I felt uncomfortable writing this essay, despite being confident it’s true.
To wit, such a startup would have trouble finding clients who could afford it and even if they could, it’s right- and aristocratic-coded and thus would lack mass-market appeal.
Not anymore!
ChatGPT, having ingested close to all of the significant written output of humankind and ground through innumerable training cycles, may indeed have a Max Talmud somewhere in there – maybe not the man himself, but something approximating him.
The difference between now and *checks watch* 18 months ago, of course, is that if Max Talmud, or something like him, lives in ChatGPT, that means that we – for the price of $19.99 a month – can have a Max Talmud of our very own. And not just one of them. We can have as many Max Talmuds as we want – and they never sleep, don’t need to eat, never tire, never get frustrated, never feel bored, never have somewhere else to be.
In this future, which is literally just at hand, on one tutoring is no longer the preserve of the aristocracy. Rather, for the price of two Starbucks coffees a month, it belongs to anyone who chooses it.
Public education is expensive, inefficient, and failing a large proportion of those who rely on it. AI is nearly-free and improving both quickly and exponentially.
The town I live in spends $70 million per year to educate a few more than 2,000 students. AI only somewhat more advanced than that which is on the market today could do that job for $320,000 to OpenAI – a cost reduction of 99.6%. This story has only one possible end: as Amazon eviscerated Sears, AI education will eviscerate the public education complex.
The large buildings which house these organizations will one day sit largely empty and unused like so many 1980s shopping malls, slowly decaying into ruin, with actively maintained facilities reduced to a communal gymnasium, theater, some playing fields, and a handful of of science classrooms for practical teaching one or two days a week. Mathematics and all the humanities will be taught at home. Working from home will become virtually ubiquitous for any job capable of being so performed.
Private schools will differentiate by teaching the practical aspects of some disciplines that the computer can’t handle, like rhetoric or music. Most public schoolteachers will be laid off and probably have to pivot into being directly hired by parents to supervise small group learning with the AI for those parents who cannot work from home for, say, K-8. The AI will be doing most of the teaching.
All of this will be done at a fraction of the current cost with massive raw performance gains for individual students everywhere. Education will be cheaper, faster, and better.
“A chicken in every pot, a Max Talmud in every iPad” – what a future lies ahead of us!
If one is a parent, and is presented with a choice – Option A, send your kids to a state school that will fill their heads with a bunch of mush with class sizes of 25-50, and where the class can only progress as quickly as the slowest or most disruptive member, or Option B, hand them a $500 iPad and $20 monthly subscription to have the greatest tutor in all of history give 100% of its undivided attention to your children for the next 12 years, under one’s watchful eye as one works from home, to prepare that child for entry to Cambridge or Oxford, or to become a mechanic or enter a trade, and get the absolute best education possible for that chosen discipline – the only reason you would pick Option A for your children is if you hate them.
Given the choice I am going to take Option B every single time.
So would anyone.
So will everyone.
