If an LLM can teach me a language, why wouldn't I go straight to the source and use GPT or Claude and customize it to my exact needs.
I feel like so many AI products these days won't be around a few years from now once more people find out that all their doing is providing a slightly different UI to what you can get directly from OAI, Anthropic, Google for cheaper and better and more tailored to you.
People buying expensive products (assuming they aren't truly better) are helping screw over poor people. Just slightly.
Anyway you're not really helping the poor in practice when you do this. Corporations aren't hurting because one guy or even a dozen he inspires through HN stop buying a few boxes of kraft dinner.
If more people did it, and it became a movement, like buying clothes from the thrift store is becoming, then clothiers will shift business focus. Which to some extent they seem to have done over the past 20 years. But only slightly.
The more effective way is to form a group, call it a "club" or whatever, that does it. The group can then advertise to other people and get more people to join the club. Eventually, it becomes large enough to gain political power. This is called "unionizing" — people with a shared interest joining together for a common goal. Eventually you get large enough to hold the corporations over a barrel, either through strikes or a mass disinterest in buying products, etc.
The only reason we have a 40-hour work week is because of unionizing, it's a very, very effective tactic that is severely underutilized.
The problem with Unionizing in the US, is there's very little cultural problem with crossing picket lines.
I really liked the solution in the movie Our God's Brother adapted from a play written by Karol Wojtyla in the 1940s in Polish who later became Pope John Paul II.
Then again, the only languages I actually learned - besides my mother tongue - to the point of being able to do things were English and Latin and both were very much acquired offline. I have plenty of experience with language learning apps and I'm not convinced tech is the solution or even part of the solution.
I've used Duolingo in the past (and other apps) and quickly lost interest, it's a fun app, but I feel like you don't learn from it. If I had to learn a new language today, I'm confident I could make good progress with GPT or Gemini, but tailoring it to how I learn.
After 4 weeks I also learned Spanish enough to maintain casual conversations just from trying to talk to someone online who did not speak English. I am rusty now, however, because I do not speak it with anyone, nor do I see or hear Spanish anywhere. Spanish is way easier, IMO, in comparison to Polish.
Thoughts?
On what? If I understand you correctly you learned through people and practice and community.
It worked for me, and I found it to be the best way to learn a new language.
I tried Duolingo but I got nowhere useful that way.
My take is that basically anything can be made to work if you are properly motivated. Tech is - at best - a secondary concern.
Could I ask ChatGPT to just "teach me spanish"? Surely not. But if you've got even a slight idea of what to do (learn present tense and vocab, then progressive, future and past, then some conditional, hypothetical etc...), it can be an absolutely incredible tutor.
I started using it when i was already at a pretty high level, but I'm quite certain that it would have been excellent from the very beginning. It translates, gives varied examples, explains syntax, compares verb tenses and conjugation and more.
Those are all things books will give and people as well and often better.
Can it be a tutor? Sure, if you squint. But "tutoring" you on some question you have is not the same as "learning a language".
> If an LLM can teach me a language, why wouldn't I go straight to the source and use GPT or Claude and customize it to my exact needs.
That said, I've found LLMs to be terrific if the goal is to learn the rules of language's grammar. But to actually learn to speak the language, find HelloTalk to be best, beaten by nothing other than actually sitting down with a native speaker.
you cannot build a moat with LLMs, so there is no value in using any service that is wrapper around the chatpgt
For what it's worth, I also stopped using Duolingo when the human forums closed. I often found as much value in the forums as in the actual course. And like GP, the hardest part was relinquishing my nearly 1000 day streak.