This post hopes foster discussion about latent heutagogic potential in human+LLM collaboration and share some early results with the LessWrong community.

Spontaneous emergence of theory of mind capabilities in large language models hints at a host of overhung possibilities relevant to education. Metaprompting can elicit the foundation of such behavior--reasoning pedagogically about the learner.

Teachers constantly construct & revise robust psychological models of their students--good ones, subconsciously. For AI applications to deliver worthwhile learning experiences they'll need to excel in this regard.

TL;DR

We open-sourced "tutor-gpt," a digital Aristotelian learning companion.

What makes tutor-gpt compelling is its ability to posit from dialogue the most educationally-optimal tutoring response. Eliciting this from the capability overhang involves multiple chains of metaprompting enabling construction of a very nascent academic theory of mind for each student.

Most ‘chat-over-content’ tools in this recent explosion fail to capitalize on the enormous latent abilities of LLMs. Even the impressive out-of-the-box capabilities of contemporary models don’t achieve the necessary user intimacy. Not-dangerous infrastructure for that doesn’t exist yet.

And the advent of personal, agentic AI for all is going to need it. So to that end, we see releasing tutor-gpt's architecture into the wild as one small step on the journey to supercharge the kind of empowering generative agents we want to see in the world.

Neo-Aristotelian Tutoring

Right now, tutor-gpt is a reading comprehension and writing workshop tutor. You can chat with it in Discord or spin-up your own instance. After supplying it a passage, it will coach you toward understanding or revising a piece of text. It does this by treating the user as an equal, prompting and challenging socratically.

We started with reading and writing in natural language because (1) native language acumen is the symbolic system through which all other fluencies are learned, (2) critical dialogue is the ideal vehicle by which to do this, and (3) that's what LLMs are best at right now.

The problem is, most students today don't have the luxury of "talking it out" with an expert interlocutor. But we know that's what works.

(Perhaps too) heavily referenced in tech and academia, Bloom’s 2 sigma problem suggests that students tutored 1:1 can perfor...

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