"Capability stays inside the curriculum" implies that even much more advanced models are not able to go far beyond their pre-training data. Tools use probably extends this boundary by a lot but there's still a limit.
It was far from utopia but it wasn't orwellian. It was different in a way that's hard to explain if you didn't experience it. The lack of public goods, lower living standards, and the oppressiveness of the state were somewhat compensated by the peace of mind coming from knowing that you couldn't become unemployed or homeless. This is what a lot of people miss when they say they miss USSR.
Soviet union had homeless and unemployed people, It was a criminal offence with prison terms starting at 1 year in colony. There was even a law specifically for gypsies where punishment for unemployment was 2-5 years in siberia.
Yes, it was a criminal offense since 1961 (I didn't hear about a special law for gypsies but it could be). So there were homeless and unemployed, but only those who really wanted to be. It took effort.
No, it actually continues running headless on the host, and you can reconnect from another laptop or mobile phone, or even ssh to the host and attach to the session. At least Codex desktop app works this way.
It comes down to "what stays the same when all its atoms are replaced" and "how can we tell it is the same entity and not just an identical but different one". I think the answers are "shape" AND "continuity".
E.g. all "atoms" of a glider in Conway's Life get replaced every couple turns but an observer can tell it is still a glider because it keeps the shape, and it the same glider because it continues it's previous state.
This makes AI not quite alive because it's missing the continuity.
Sorry, it was more of a "shower thought" than a serious statement. The borders are blurry. Maybe it is alive. Maybe everything is alive. Maybe it is all relative. Humans classify as separate entities only on certain zoom level - zoom in and you get a symbiotic colony, zoom out and all you see is a population. Maybe AI is alive but only in the short time during inference. Maybe a continuously running claw is closer to a multiple generations of an organism going through evolution on each inference step. I am just musing.
It is simple. Continuing your metaphor, I have a choice of getting exactly where I want on a camel in 3 days, or getting to a random location somewhere on the other side of the desert on a helicopter in few hours.
And being a reasonable person I, just like the author, choose the helicopter. That's it, that's the whole problem.
Because of compound efficiency and technological enablement.
Or, risking to beat the metaphor to death, because over a span of time I'll cross many more deserts than I would have on a camel, and because I'll cross deserts that I wouldn't even try crossing on a camel.
Why does it matter how many deserts you cross if you never get to where you want to go? I similarly can take 10 flights across oceans but never end up in the city I'm trying to visit. Sounds like in your metaphor the person is just crossing desserts because they want to with no goal or destination in mind.
Maybe you wanted to visit Mexico and your dream was specifically about Cancún, but then you ended up in Veracruz and were like "oh well, it is Mexico after all, I'd rather be here and visit five other countries similarly than only a single one with my dream city."
I guess this is stretching the analogy a bit far because I'd rather get to the exact place I wanted to go rather than wasting my time non-deterministically wandering around because who knows how long that will take to get anywhere close to my destination.
There needs to be a word for the feeling of sudden realization that you're reading an AI-generated text (or watching an AI-generated video) where you expected it to be human-authored.
Yeah, strong crypto bubble vibes. Everyone is building tools for tool builders to make it easier to build even more tools. Endless infrastructure all the way down, no real use cases.
But this is the way of computer science at large for the last 15-20 years… most new CS students I’ve encountered have spent so much time grinding algorithms and OS classes that they don’t have life experience or awareness to build anything that doesn’t solve the problems of other CS practitioners.
The problem is two-fold… abstract thinking begets more abstract thinking, and the common advice to young, aspiring entrepreneurs of “scratch your own itch” ie dogfooding has gone wrong in a big way.
You may want to check out https://purelymail.com who are pretty close to your target pricing. I've been using them since forever and have no reasons to switch but it is always great to see more players in the niche!
Holy... That just unlocked a memory. When I was a 10 y.o. kid and a member of Young Pioneers organization in the late Soviet Union, we had a routine elderly care assignment. There was literally a task "to help N lonely elderly people next week"! We were split in pairs and provided with a list of addresses of nearby "targets" and a general guidance on what this help may constitute, like helping them with groceries, walking a dog, house cleaning, etc. And I remember there was a nice old lady who were treating us with tea and pies, and showing us some old photos, and who we then visited few times outside of the assignment just because she welcomed us and we liked it there. For me it was just some secondary quest that I barely registered and completely forgot about until now, but now I wonder if it was a big deal for her
Thanks for working on this! Language learning really needs a breakthrough.
Now, I tried the web app and chose to learn Greek as a beginner. And while I had better experience with your app than with ChatGPT or Gemini voice modes, I still got lost 5 minutes in because the AI tutor doesn't seem to have a plan for me, nor does it "see" my struggles. For example, after asking me about a hobby, it gives me a long sentence in Greek about how how it is nice to hike in mountains. Being absolute noob I cannot reply to it, nor even repeat it. And I don't even know what it is expected from me at the moment. A human tutor here would probably repeat a part of the sentence with a translation and ask me to repeat, or would explain something. The AI just sits there waiting for me to make a sound, and when I make it, it goes on on a tangental subject of beach vacations. :)
Again, this is still relatively not bad, and I'm going to give it another try.
I had a similar feeling with Swedish just now. It isn't really much different than conversing with ChatGPT in advanced voice mode - it's up to me to drive the conversation and it all feels quite arbitrary (and I find myself instinctively falling back on topics I know how to talk about, which quite defeats the purpose). I was hoping for a more structured learning plan that strategically expands my comfort zone and skills in a guided way.
I'm an advanced learner but I stopped after a few moments because it's boring. It's asking me questions that you'd ask a beginner (although a beginner wouldn't understand the questions). It just asked what food I like to eat, where I like to travel, whether I like the weather, etc. I have a language tutor IRL and I have found that we run out of things to talk about too. So we often find ourselves just discussing the latest events from the news. I think you should feed fresh conversation topics daily from a data source like the news, localized to the user. There are global news APIs you can subscribe to.
I'm not sure that would solve the problem. Ultimately this (and speaking with LLMs in general) feels a lot like filling in an adaptive form rather than talking to a human being. The LLM, for example, is never going to go on and tell you some anecdote from its life (and if it were prompted to do so it would come across as quite insincere). It's not going to say, "Oh that neighborhood is not safe," when you tell it about where you'll live when studying abroad. It's not going to recommend supplementary material (or worse, it will...with broken links that never existed).
I'm not even sure this helps with speaking practice since it's just a test of whether what you said can be transcribed by Whisper, which is not at all a test of correct pronunciation. I just tried it with the most horrid, butchered accent I could muster, and it still worked...if I practiced for months on end like that, I'd end up in a very difficult place as a language learner.
Do you mean that the experience is meant to have more structure if you pick the intermediate or advanced level? (fwiw I did pick intermediate for my Swedish level in the app).
My thinking is - I can have unstructured conversations with Advanced Voice Mode or in real life here in Sweden. What I'd really appreciate is a guided learning experience taking me up from intermediate/slightly above intermediate to fluent in the most efficient possible way (as opposed to just having us 'ramble' about random topics of my own choosing).
There is a structured curriculum that gets generated after the intro lesson (if you responded yes to the curriculum question).
This is available for all proficiencies. It's just much harder to talk for hours in a new language as a beginner. It's usable but requires more effort.
I see it now, thank you! This looks like what I was hoping for. I wonder if there's some way to communicate very clearly that you'll need to talk for around n minutes to get a structured curriculum prepared - and maybe even show a progress bar of some sort so the user can have an idea of when they're going to get to "the good stuff"?
Another thing is that the trial period seems incongruent. To me the structured curriculum is what I really want to _try_. I want to see what the planned lessons are like, how guided they are, etc. But the trial runs out and tries to make me pay right after the unstructured more all-over-the-place feeling introductory conversation, and I'm not prepared to pay at that point since I feel like I haven't gotten to evaluate the main part of the product at all. I would suggest leaving the trial unlocked to maybe the first three structured lessons of the learning plan. Let the user really experience what they'll be paying for.
Language Transfer[0] will continue to be a better resource than any AI course. It’s very hard to beat a human that has put in time crafting a logical way to teach a language with the appropriate ramp ups. The Greek course on there is fantastic. And it’s free with zero ads. Best language learning tool I’ve ever used period.
Agree, it was a game changer for me with Spanish. Learning a second language is just plain hard and LT is the closest to “a breakthrough” I think we will get, but it’s still hard and people don’t like that.
Funnily enough I said my native language is Greek but then it responded with an error and reset my onboarding guide. Then, I lied that my native language is English, which worked. But now it calls me Anton, rather than the name I said I have!
I think this is a pretty big limitation of the architecture (STT->LLM->TTS) they've chosen. The intonation around struggling to speak or difficulty with certain phrases is totally lost when the text is transcribed.
I paid for Memrise to polish up French. The scripted lessons alwere great but it dropped me into an AI conversation assistant that did exactly the same. It forgot the vocab and grammar level that the scripted lessons had taught, and often broke into idiom. I haven't picked it up since.
I'm a Memrise beta member w/ lifetime premium access for my contributions to the site in its early days. I cannot recommend anyone use Memrise for anything nowadays it has been so heavily enshittified. In fact, I recommend against using it in favor of Anki (Memrise's biggest strength over Anki in the early days was the community mnemonics and courses (Anki equivalent "community decks") - none of which really exist in any way today).
I tried following the modern Japanese track on Memrise and was appalled at how bad it is nowadays.
