this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2025
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I feel so conflicted about this. On the one hand huge reductions in resource consumption of these things is good for everyone. The Western ones are so wasteful for how quickly and widely pushed they are. On the other hand these things feel like technology in search of a problem.
People often tend to underestimate the potential for new technology, but there are plenty of legitimate use cases already. For example, I practice speaking Mandarin using a LLM, it's great at doing conversation and correcting me when I say something grammatically wrong. They're also good for narrating audio books, generating subtitles, adding voice to games, etc. I also find they can be helpful when coding, it's often faster to get a model to point you in the right direction than searching for something on the internet. For example, I find they're great at crafting SQL queries. I often know what I want in a query, but might not know the specific syntax. I'm sure we'll be finding plenty of other use cases going forward especially as stuff like reasoning models starts to mature where they can actually explain the steps they use to arrive at a solution and can be corrected.
The power usage was basically the main legitimate argument against this tech, but now we're seeing that problem is already being addressed. I'm sure we'll continue to see even more improvements down the road.
Can you elaborate on how you use an LLM to practice Mandarin? This is very interesting to me, I'd love to do the same to build a base knowledge before actually yknow communicating w people
I use this app https://www.superchinese.com/ and it has a chat bot that walks you through different conversation scenarios.
Do you mind if I ask a few questions? I've been wary of AI in language learning because I don't want to learn hallucinated words or grammar.
Does the app use AI to generate conversations or to guide you through human-written conversations? Or maybe both?
If you're interacting with the AI in Chinese, how good is it? I imagine you didn't be using it if it was poor but I'm wondering whether you put up with any obvious problems because some other features are worth it, for example.
Are you on the free, Chao, or Plus plan and was it an easy decision once you saw the features?
Tbh I can't wait to use AI for this purpose, I just want to be sure the software is ready. I've seen some terrible translations in languages they I'm familiar with, so I'm wary.
It uses a mix, it does not hallucinate words and it's actually pretty good at catching stuff like grammar mistakes. I find the big value is that it forces you to do free form conversation where you have to think on your feet. I find this is more valuable than just reading and memorizing stuff which other apps do. I ended up getting the Plus plan, and definitely feel it's been worth it. The app itself also has a lot of regular lessons, the AI isn't the only part of it.