Passive versus active learning

LLMs have made it absurdly easy to go deep on almost any topic. So why haven’t we all used ChatGPT to earn college degrees we wished we had majored in or pursued a niche interest, like learning how to name the trees in our neighborhood? I know I’m not the only one to feel guilty for well-intentioned attempts at autodidactism that inevitably peter out.

Entrepreneur Nir Zicherman has a reason for this disconnect: LLMs can answer most of your questions, but they won’t notice when you’re lost or pull you back in when your motivation starts to fade.

As the CEO and cofounder of Oboe, a platform that generates personalized courses about everything from the history of snowboarding to JavaScript fundamentals using AI, Zicherman has thought deeply about why the ability to access information does not automatically lead to understanding a concept. In this episode of AI & I, he talks to Dan Shipper about everything he’s learned about learning with LLMs.

They get into Zicherman’s counterintuitive belief that learning is a more passive process than you’d think, the biggest blocker for most people who want to learn something new, and where AI agents currently fall short in providing a meaningful learning experience.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Start

00:00:36 - Introduction

00:01:49 - Why you need a dedicated AI learning app

00:04:32 - The process of learning is more passive than you might think

00:10:21 - Live demo of Oboe to create a course about philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein

00:16:52 - Learning works best when it comes in many formats

00:28:21 - Where AI agents currently fall short in the learning experience

00:34:10 - The importance of making learning feel accessible

00:35:56 - How Zicherman uses Oboe to learn quantum physics

00:40:54 - How embeddings spaces remind Dan of quantum mechanics

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Nir Zicherman: @NirZicherman
• Learn something new with Oboe: https://oboe.com/