> horrifying survey of genAI’s impact on secondary and tertiary education.
I agree with this. It's probably terrible for structured education for our children.
The one and only one caveat: Self-Driven language learning
The one and only actual use (outside of generating funny memes) I've had from any LLM so far, is language learning. That I would pay for. Not $30/pcm mind you . . . but something. I ask the model to break down a target language sentence for me, explaining each and every grammar point, and it does so very well. sometimes even going to explain the cultural relevance of certain phrases. This is great.
I've not found any other use for it yet though.
As a game engine programmer (C++) The code I write now a days quite deliberate and relatively little compared to a web-developer (I used to be one, I'm not pooping on web devs). so if we're talking about the time/cost of having me as a developer work on the game engine, I'm not saving any time or money by first asking Claude to type what I was going to type anyway. And it's not advanced enough yet to hold the context of our entire codebases spanning multiple components.
Edit, Migaku [https://migaku.com/] is a great language learning application that uses this
As OP, I'm not sure it's worth all that CO2 we're pumping into our atmosphere.
AI progress has also made high quality language translation a lot cheaper. When I started https://nuenki.app last year, the options were exorbitantly priced DeepL for decent quality low latency translation or Sonnet for slightly cheaper, much slower, but higher quality translation.
Now, just a year later, DeepL is beaten by open models served by https://groq.com for most languages, and Claude 4 / GPT-4.1 / my hybrid LLM translator (https://nuenki.app/translator) produce practically perfect translations.
LLMs are also better at critiquing translations than producing them, but pre-thinking doesn't help at all, which is just fascinating. Anyway, it's a really cool topic that I'll happily talk at length about! They've made so much possible. There's a blog on the website, if anyone's curious.
I agree with this. It's probably terrible for structured education for our children.
The one and only one caveat: Self-Driven language learning
The one and only actual use (outside of generating funny memes) I've had from any LLM so far, is language learning. That I would pay for. Not $30/pcm mind you . . . but something. I ask the model to break down a target language sentence for me, explaining each and every grammar point, and it does so very well. sometimes even going to explain the cultural relevance of certain phrases. This is great.
I've not found any other use for it yet though. As a game engine programmer (C++) The code I write now a days quite deliberate and relatively little compared to a web-developer (I used to be one, I'm not pooping on web devs). so if we're talking about the time/cost of having me as a developer work on the game engine, I'm not saving any time or money by first asking Claude to type what I was going to type anyway. And it's not advanced enough yet to hold the context of our entire codebases spanning multiple components.
Edit, Migaku [https://migaku.com/] is a great language learning application that uses this
As OP, I'm not sure it's worth all that CO2 we're pumping into our atmosphere.