alt Hacker NewsIt probably isn't a good tutor, I'm using frontier SOTA models and whenever I ask them to explain anything they don't consider my question and don't display any understanding but just spam out unrelated simplistic metaphors, can only imagine how much worse the models the kids had access to were, LLMs don't have understanding and can't fake it either, there's no conception of how a memory might be formed or something might be understood, without that qualia it can't be a good teacher it can only output text that looks like it might be a good explanation until you read it
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> whenever I ask them to explain anything they don't consider my question and don't display any understanding
You are absolutely doing it wrong.
My experience is completely different. It doesn’t take a frontier model to give a good explanation (likely plagiarized from a textbook or a “blank for dummies” article).
Try a bit harder to tell it your background and the kind of analogies you want and don’t want.
Possibly this is topic-dependent. Most of my queries are about science and math.
Agreed, I need to do a lot of prompt crafting when some math academy thing is explained poorly by them.
What sometimes helps is to ask them to make something interactive and visual. Like 3B1B does
A good tutor builds an understanding of the learners current mental model then tries to broaden it with targeted materials (text, diagrams, videos), selected exercises, the Socratic method ... All LLMs can do is produce text that statistically looks like tutoring. AI has a lot of uses but tutoring is not a great fit. I think a well written textbook even would be better than AI because the author can have a general understanding of where the target audience is usually at and where they're expected to end up.