Comment by emil-lp
7 hours ago
> Most Students Don’t Want to Use Chatbots
I think this is changing rapidly.
I'm a university professor, and the amount of students who seem to be in need of LLM as a crutch is growing really exponentially.
We are still in a place where the oldest students did their first year completely without LLMs. But younger students have used LLMs throughout their studies, and I fear that in the future, we will see full generations of students completely incapable of working without LLM assistance.
Reading the article, it seemed to me that both the professor and the students were interested in the material being taught and therefore actively wanted to learn it, so using an LLM isn't the best tactic.
My feeling is that for many/most students, getting a great understanding of the course material isn't the primary goal, passing the course so they can get a good job is the primary goal. For this group using LLMs makes a lot of sense.
I know when I was a student doing a course I was not particularly interested in because my parents/school told me that was the right thing to do, if LLMs had been around, I absolutely would have used them :).
I think the professor here presented them with a "special" case which can not be generalized outside of the exam context.
If you're presented with the choice of "Don't use AI" and "Use AI, but live with the consequences" (consequences like mistakes being judged harsher when using AI than when not using AI), I do not think chatbots will be a desirable choice if you've properly prepared for the exam.
It will be very interesting to see what will happen when LLMs start charging users for their true cost. With many people priced out how would they cope?
May happen, but I suspect not in the way implied by that question.
Hardware is still improving, though not as fast as it used to; it's very plausible that even the current largest open weights models will run on affordable PCs and laptops in 5 years, and high-end smartphones in 7.
I don't know how big the SOTA close-weights models are, that may come later.
But: to the extent that a model that runs on your phone can do your job, your employer will ask "why are we paying you so much?" and now you can't afford the phone.
Even if the SOTA is always running ahead of local models, Claude Code could cost 1500 times as much and still have the average American business asking "So why did we hire a junior? You say the juniors learn when we train them, I don't care, let some other company do that and we only hire mid-tier and up now."
(Threshold is less than 1500 elsewhere, I just happened to have recently seen the average US pay for junior-grade software developers, $85k*, which is 350x cheaper, and my own observation that they're not only junior quality but also much faster to output than a junior).
* but also note while looking for a citation the search results made claims varying from $55k to $97.7k
They would fall behind in the world just like people from developing and poor countries do today.
Very few people fall behind at the moment due to lack of access to information. People in poor countries largely have access to the internet now. It doesn’t magically make people educated and economically prosperous.
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It's not that expensive unless you run millions of tokens through an agent. For use cases where you actually read all the input and output by yourself (i.e. an actual conversation), it is insanely cheap.
Yeah in my last job, unsupervised dataset-scale transformations amounted to 97% of all spending. We were using gemini 2.5 flash in batch/prefill-caching mode in Vertex, and always the latest/brightest for ChatGPT-like conversations.
What do you think the "true cost" is?
Google destroyed search and replaced it with that dippy LLM box.
Are you sure student desire is the driving force here?
> ... is growing really exponentially.
Or geometrically?
Please, you don’t need to counter-narrative everything. Maybe talk about what the professor did here and why students didn’t trust the output in an exam context in this particular subject.
> Second, I learned that cheating, however lightly, is now considered a major crime. It might result in the student being banned from any university in the country for three years. Discussing exam with someone who has yet to pass it might be considered cheating. Students have very strict rules on their Discord.
This has also something to do with it. Hard to make very accurate conclusions.