What happens when the big AI labs go public and must start earning a profit for investors. The price increases 10x¹ and it suddenly becomes excessively expensive for ~80 of society to access.

If education is all dependent on the use of AI, then we're cutting off everyone but the most wealthy from access to education. Seems very regressive to me.

1. This is an assumption but I think it's fairly well established that current LLM prices are far below operating costs of inference, so prices will go up, maybe not 10x but some multiple > 1

Here’s a counter analysis - would you see the difference between your individual, motivated efforts to learn vs the experience of learning at scale, for all other students ?

There’s a lot of individual anecdotal responses that people come up with in these threads, and I’m happy for the positive examples.

I do think people are capable of extrapolating, especially since all of us have the experience of seeing students wanting to escape studies as kids.

It’s identical to the gym problem, everyone wants to be healthy and fit, but the effort sucks and we avoid it.

Education at scale is the same issue. We basically nurture/force crops of students over a 20 year time span.

Education is not for helping a motivated person to learn a language, it's for teaching an entire population on many different subjects.

The people who wanted and could learn by themselves always had the possibility to do it with books, audio and videos, and AI just add a layer of interactivity on top. Self-learning never replaced standard education, even in the high bourgeois class because they answer to different problematics.

There is a massive difference between a person learning a topic they have an actual interest in, and someone who is forced into a learning system alongside their peers. Especially since we're talking about kids.

ChatGPT might work for you learning German because you have a reason to care about learning it, but for most kids the goal of school is getting good grades, not learning.

Sorry for the tangent, but if you don't mind can you explain more how you're using it effectively? Are you speaking using "Live" mode or typing? Is it remembering and planning lessons for you or is that on you to do?

I had already studied German as a teenager(I’m 40 now) and I speak Swedish which is a bit similar.

The first thing I did was ask it to continuously adjust its difficulty level based on my replies(A1-C1), it told me I’m in the A2-B1 span. Then I formalised my training on Akkusativ and Dativ, which is basically A2 level.

I have structured the lessons like this:

Every day I wake up with a new lesson. It starts with the nominativ/dativ/akkusativ table. Now I’ve also added wechselpräpositionen including translation to Swedish. It then gives me 5 sentences for me to fill out. If I have time and energy, I continue the exercises throughout the day.

This allows me to continue the practice at my own pace and at my own time.

I only type and read. I can already pronounce quite well but this may be the next step.