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.
Let me add a couple more use cases, as someone working in education:
Lesson Planning: You get tasked with planning and holding a lesson about world cultures. The lesson's conducted in English, the students are ESL students so you have to make sure all vocabulary is within their ability level. Also it's Chinese New Year soon so one of the Vice Principals has asked you to make it about that. Also, all the classes in the year group will have the lesson at the same time, so this has to be a lesson plan that even teachers that don't teach English can still teach, in English. Also, the government has mandated that its new 'values education' criteria should be integrated into all subjects, so you have to include some content about one of the 12 listed virtue categories. Also, every source material you use that isn't pre-approved has to be reviewed and countersigned by 4 other staff members as quality control and protection against misinformation (and, given that it's in English, Western propaganda), and there isn't any pre-approved teaching material for this task. Also you've got a budget, and a deadline.
You get lesson planning tasks of this complexity at least every 2 weeks, and it's a fucking timesuck. Deepseek cuts hours out of the process and takes it to a level that would require exponentially more research time from me. I refine the result (30-45m), take it to my colleagues for the safety checks and then we just have to prepare materials.
Music: that founder of Suno is a turd, judging by recent quotes attributed to him. But with Suno my very young students have action dance songs that mention every one of them by name. Older students are a lot more interested in creative writing when the words they write can be turned into K-Pop in the same lesson that they wrote them in.
And let me add that I work in a city where public education is well-funded. I can't imagine how much of a godsend this kind of tool would be for underfunded schools. I often see people say Suno and image generator AIs are 'just a toy', and a waste of resources because they're just toys. But they're tools that are sold as toys, because they wouldn't be profitable for their owners if they weren't also used for frivolous entertainment.
Remove the profit motive, fix the wastefulness, provide patronage for the source material artists and writers. That's the way forward.
These are great examples. Never considered stuff like lesson planning, but makes perfect sense once you described it. Completely agree that once profit motive is removed then we can start finding genuinely good uses for this tech. I'm really hoping that open source nature of DeepSeek is going to play a positive role in that regard.