3 ms·

Your comment is framed like "giving a student a personal AI datacenter to carry with them" is unrealistic, but in fact it is easy for anyone with access to $100

Your comment is framed like "giving a student a personal AI datacenter to carry with them" is unrealistic, but in fact it is easy for anyone with access to $1000-$2000 worth of compute to download and operate exactly that for free, with performance perhaps a year behind the state of the art.

latexr 6mo ago
> but in fact it is easy for anyone with access to $1000-$2000 worth of compute Even if we assume that to be true, you severely underestimate how many people that condition excludes.
- mquander 6mo ago
  It doesn't exclude people who attend high schools and colleges that have a computer lab.
  - mschuster91 6mo ago
    That however requires significant investments - either each computer gets a powerful GPU for local inference (which cost a fortune) or the school gets a rack worth of compute. Most schools however even struggle to get their children fed. Another issue is that it forces kids to stay in school for longer to do their homework, which can be a serious problem in rural areas where public transport is limited, so parents are forced to fetch their kids from school which may not be compatible with working hours.
- zozbot234 6mo ago
  There are simpler LLMs that run on much cheaper devices and are still helpful for baseline tasks. Of course they are prone to hallucinating once they reach the limits of their world knowledge, but this also changes their effectiveness in an educational context: they can help you polish a paper (much of their reliable knowledge is about language, syntax and style/pragmatics of the input texts), but you still have to plan the writing on your own.
  - muzzleflash 6mo ago
    Maybe teaching students to take their whatever devices to run AI is the way, sure. All I tried to say is if we're teaching students to think independently, we should teach them independent tools.

3 ms·

Your comment is framed like "giving a student a personal AI datacenter to carry with them" is unrealistic, but in fact it is easy for anyone with access to $100

by mquander 6mo ago

latexr 6mo ago
> but in fact it is easy for anyone with access to $1000-$2000 worth of compute Even if we assume that to be true, you severely underestimate how many people that condition excludes.
- mquander 6mo ago
  It doesn't exclude people who attend high schools and colleges that have a computer lab.
  - mschuster91 6mo ago
    That however requires significant investments - either each computer gets a powerful GPU for local inference (which cost a fortune) or the school gets a rack worth of compute. Most schools however even struggle to get their children fed. Another issue is that it forces kids to stay in school for longer to do their homework, which can be a serious problem in rural areas where public transport is limited, so parents are forced to fetch their kids from school which may not be compatible with working hours.
- zozbot234 6mo ago
  There are simpler LLMs that run on much cheaper devices and are still helpful for baseline tasks. Of course they are prone to hallucinating once they reach the limits of their world knowledge, but this also changes their effectiveness in an educational context: they can help you polish a paper (much of their reliable knowledge is about language, syntax and style/pragmatics of the input texts), but you still have to plan the writing on your own.
  - muzzleflash 6mo ago
    Maybe teaching students to take their whatever devices to run AI is the way, sure. All I tried to say is if we're teaching students to think independently, we should teach them independent tools.