AI Tutor not grounded only in course content? Uses general knowledge?

It's still being tweaked and worked on so this all may change, but it does have to rely on some general knowledge. Otherwise it wouldn't know that the Earth is round unless my Rise course said so, right? With how much information the average course is missing, the tutor would be useless if it was literally restricted to only the information in the course.

If someone was taking a Rise course about marketing principles and someone asked the tutor something like "Does Coca-Cola fit that model?" and the AI tutor said "What's Coca-Cola?" the perceived utility would quickly crater. I think the AI tutor probably tries to bias its focus toward the course content, but we should expect that the LLM behind the scenes is encountering guard rails that help it "decide" what it should and should not speak to. That doesn't mean it doesn't "know" those things but rather that it's choosing its words carefully. It's probably similar in some ways to how other commercial LLMs self-censor about other topics.