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by Adam Pascarella

Accessing Knowledge On Demand

Unlocking the Hyper-Personalized Tutor

From time to time, I look at YCombinator's Requests for Startups. Even though I'm not looking for an idea, I think it's an interesting snapshot in seeing how new technology can unlock new markets or opportunities.

One of the more recent Requests for Startups focused on tutoring. The broad idea was that advancements in AI and LLMs have made it slightly more possible to create a personalized tutor for everyone.

As you'd assume, this would be light years beyond traditional classroom learning. The AI would know your educational history, your strengths and weaknesses, your preferred learning style, what you actually want to learn, and how best to get you from point A to point B.

It's just another example of how AI is going to democratize so many things. What used to cost thousands of dollars (like a hyper-personalized tutor) will cost dramatically less and be accessible to billions of people. It has the potential to unlock significant opportunities on all sides of the economic spectrum.

While I'm not building an education startup like this, I've been trying to replicate it in my day-to-day work. From higher-level conceptual queries to extremely granular questions, it's much easier to get up to speed on brand new subject areas.

Right now, I keep the LLM window open and then double-check its responses with my own research. However, as the models improve and hallucinate less, I'll likely do this less and less.

So what does this look like in practice? Here are some quick ways that I learn with LLMs. While these may not be the "best" practices, they work for me.

  1. Context is king: The perfect AI tutor would know your entire educational history. Clearly, LLMs can't do that, but we can help guide them. This can be everything from referencing your educational background to books that you've read. Even if I'm learning about a brand new topic, I've found that the LLM can use that type of context to provide a better, more customized plan.

  2. Embrace the Pareto Principle: When I ask LLMs to teach me something new, I specifically ask them to focus on the 20% of content that is the most meaningful. In most cases, this is enough for me to get started. By embracing Pareto, you can get more signal and less noise.

  3. Use analogies: Analogies can be flawed, but they are great ways to get a very basic understanding of complex topics. They have been especially helpful in my Cursor projects. Even if they aren't perfect, they are typically good enough to help me gain core foundational concepts so that I can dive deeper.

  4. Hold yourself accountable: LLMs may create good lesson plans for you, but it's up to us to stick with them. I'm sure some company will find a way to address this problem. But right now, ChatGPT isn't going to automatically follow up with you to ensure that you stick with its lesson plan. It goes without saying, but the best lesson plan won't matter if you forget about it.

We're all busy. I still love opening a book and taking my time to learn something new. Nonetheless, LLMs are often good enough to plant the seeds and offer "good enough" knowledge to take on a new subject area.

So even if we haven't gotten the hyper-personalized AI tutor yet, we are well on the way. We're likely only in the beginning stages here. It's an extremely exciting time!

Prompt of the Week

I've always liked the idea of Kaizen, which is the art of continuous improvement. Although it was pioneered in Japanese manufacturing, I think that it's a fantastic framework to improve our own lives. It's well-known at this point, but small changes every day can lead to fantastic results. Assuming that you've given enough context to your LLM, you can get a well-defined plan on how to improve certain aspects of your life. You can get some pretty interesting results!

"Kaizen is the idea of continuous improvement. Pretend that you are a career coach (or something similar) whose goal is to help me accomplish some of my larger goals. Consider my goals, common areas where I get tripped up, and anything else you think is appropriate. Develop a self-improvement plan that leverages principles from Kaizen."