Hooky

A coworker passed on this interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. I’d never paid the guy too much time but I’m paying attention now. There were a couple of standout points that he made, and I’m adjusting my mental models accordingly. Heavy stuff.

Elder is staying home today. She wanted to play hooky — and I’m inclined to let her. She had her choral performance last night — I missed it because Younger wanted to go and they only gave each kid two tickets. She then proceeded to act up during the performance, forcing Missus to leave early. Not pleased.

So I told Elder she could stay home as long as she did her school work: today’s; her homework for the week, which she’s behind on and is due on Friday; and a special project that is due on Friday also. I told her I was going to set her a pomodromo timer and she was going to work off of that for an hour and we’d see how things work. She’s out doing her gym class, and out running and riding her bike around.

I’m fine with her staying home from school. As long as she’s motivated to work, I’m fine with it. I offered her the opportunity to pull out in third grade, during COVID, so that she could do GalileoXP, but she — and her mother — wanted her to go. So back she went. But maybe today is a look at what it might look like for her to homeschool.

I wrote the following message to Younger’s elementary school principal:

I was the one hollering at you about GPT this morning and wanted to follow-up with you on it. To show you what it does, I prompted it to generate the following text for you:

I wanted to bring to your attention a new technology that is going to greatly impact education in the next few years – GPT-3. GPT-3 is a conversational AI model that has the ability to understand and respond to human language with unprecedented accuracy.

This technology has the potential to revolutionize how we approach learning and collaboration in the classroom. Through its ability to generate text based on prompts, students can use GPT-3 to help them write essays and research papers, leading to a deeper understanding of the material.

However, we must also be aware of the potential for students to use GPT-3 to cheat on assignments. We will need to put in place measures to detect and prevent this type of behavior.

Overall, I believe GPT-3 has the potential to greatly enhance the educational experience for both elementary and collegiate students. I would be happy to discuss this further with you and how we can integrate this technology into our curriculum.

Best regards,
[Your Name]


You can access the chatGPT page here: https://chat.openai.com/chat. I encourage you to talk to it and ask it questions: things your teachers and students might ask, and see how it responds. It is very good at ‘imagining’ or role-playing, so you might tell it that you are a middle-school principal dealing with whatever various issues, and see what it comes up with. The language model is somewhat inconsistent with certain subjects, but it’s very good overall.

chatGPT just released last week and it’s ease of use tells me that it’s going to be everywhere soon. I’m already incorporating it into my professional workflows, it’s very good at generating copy or condensing and editing. And for variations, it’s amazing.

Just don’t trust it’s answers. There’s a lot of inconsistencies. That said, I expect these models to continue to continuously improve. The next version of GPT, GPT-4 is expected in the coming months.

Take care, I’d be more than happy to speak more on this if you like.