Božidar Benko

A number of people are talking about implications of AI to schools. I spoke about some of my thoughts to a school board earlier, some highlights: 1. You will never be able to detect the use of AI in homework. Full stop. All "detectors" of AI imo don't really work, can be defeated in various ways, and are in principle doomed to fail. You have to assume that any work done outside classroom has used AI. 2. Therefore, the majority of grading has to shift to in-class work (instead of at-home assignments), in settings where teachers can physically monitor students. The students remain motivated to learn how to solve problems without AI because they know they will be evaluated without it in class later. 3. We want students to be able to use AI, it is here to stay and it is extremely powerful, but we also don't want students to be naked in the world without it. Using the calculator as an example of a historically disruptive technology, school teaches you how to do all the basic math & arithmetic so that you can in principle do it by hand, even if calculators are pervasive and greatly speed up work in practical settings. In addition, you understand what it's doing for you, so should it give you a wrong answer (e.g. you mistyped "prompt"), you should be able to notice it, gut check it, verify it in some other way, etc. The verification ability is especially important in the case of AI, which is presently a lot more fallible in a great variety of ways compared to calculators. 4. A lot of the evaluation settings remain at teacher's discretion and involve a creative design space of no tools, cheatsheets, open book, provided AI responses, direct internet/AI access, etc. TLDR the goal is that the students are proficient in the use of AI, but can also exist without it, and imo the only way to get there is to flip classes around and move the majority of testing to in class settings.

An attempt to explain (current) ChatGPT versions. I still run into many, many people who don't know that: - o3 is the obvious best thing for important/hard things. It is a reasoning model that is much stronger than 4o and if you are using ChatGPT professionally and not using o3 you're ngmi. - 4o is different from o4. Yes I know lol. 4o is a good "daily driver" for many easy-medium questions. o4 is only available as mini for now, and is not as good as o3, and I'm not super sure why it's out right now. Example basic "router" in my own personal use: - Any simple query (e.g. "what foods are high in fiber"?) => 4o (about ~40% of my use) - Any hard/important enough query where I am willing to wait a bit (e.g. "help me understand this tax thing...") => o3 (about ~40% of my use) - I am vibe coding (e.g. "change this code so that...") => 4.1 (about ~10% of my use) - I want to deeply understand one topic - I want GPT to go off for 10 minutes, look at many, many links and summarize a topic for me. (e.g. "help me understand the rise and fall of Luminar"). => Deep Research (about ~10% of my use). Note that Deep Research is not a model version to be picked from the model picker (!!!), it is a toggle inside the Tools. Under the hood it is based on o3, but I believe is not fully equivalent of just asking o3 the same query, but I am not sure. All of this is only within the ChatGPT universe of models. In practice my use is more complicated because I like to bounce between all of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Perplexity depending on the task and out of research interest.

Love the idea. Imagine just describing in words what you want. I think we even have the technology. I will pay a lot