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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

There is a huge cultural influence opportunity too.

Imagine if, in 10 years time, every school kid is learning the causes of the US civil war from an LLM, getting their essays on hiroshima and nagasaki graded by an LLM, and a million other things.

A country with competitive LLMs gets to decide whether "it was more complicated than just slavery", and whether "it was tragic but necessary, saving lives over all".

Countries without competitive LLMs are effectively going to be buying all their history, economics and sociology textbooks from abroad.

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It might seem so til you consider how an LLM is trained.

An indirect illustration: I can attest that Deepseek has very good 19th German, and knowledge of German 19th c literature, science and historical scholarship. No one in China could control the training that led to this. The German training sources were well aware of the exact nature of eg American slavery, so they are in the weights.

State control operates in the outer layers not the llm itself.

People can and will use LLMs to curate the training data for the next generation. I expect they already do.

Maybe your kids. In my corner of the country, parents are actively demanding that schools back off computer usage, much less AI

Every school kid in the USA, you mean? Because I think other countries would rightly perceive the world you described as a dystopia.

I don't want my kids' education to be surrendered to the whims of Big Tech douchebags any more than I want AI decisions in legal cases or an AI replacement for a family doctor.

Some systems are better left mostly analog. Education is one of them.

Your kids education was already surrendered to the whims of the Big Textbook Politburo. History textbooks are full of propaganda. I think what we have today and what we grew up with is 10x more dystopian.

Textbooks, especially in the early years, are a minor part of education.

I want them to have an actual human teacher.

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