Transcript: Mr. Peter Sweeney on Code, Career Pivots, and the Age of AI

Good morning and welcome back to the show. We're here with upper school math and computer science teacher, founder of the U.S. Robotics team, and long-term veteran of both the tech industry and education, Mr. Peter Sweeney.

How are you, Mr. Sweeney? Good morning, guys. I'm well.

I'm well. Thanks for doing this. We always like to start at the very beginning. Thanks for doing this.

We always like to start at the very beginning. Where did you grow up? What kind of household did you come from? Where did I grow up?

Well, let's see. We moved around a little bit growing up. I spent the first 10 years of my life in Cincinnati. My dad worked for Procter & Gamble, which is a big multinational firm.

He then got a job in Europe with Procter & Gamble, so we moved there. I lived in Brussels, Belgium for four years, Waterloo, actually. And then we moved back to the States. I grew up in a typical family.

I have two brothers and a younger sister. We were fairly middle class, upper middle class. Yeah, I guess that's kind of my background a little bit. In the interview, you talked about the fact that you started programming at 12 on the Apple aisle, I believe?

No, Apple 2E. 2E, okay. Which is incredible considering how early in the personal computer era that really was. Do you remember the moment you first sat down on that machine? And obviously, I've gone through your class, so you get that first learning curve.

But how is that learning curve for you? Well, I remember it was a class that we took. It was in Belgium. I went to a private school in Belgium. and I remember, I don't remember the exact moment, but I remember the feeling, which was I loved it.

I loved, and still do, I love making things, and so I felt like I was creating something. It was creative for me, but also I liked the immediate feedback of whether you got it right or wrong. I also had the advantage of, I had a really good teacher, initial teacher. she explained things very well and challenged us and there were a couple of upperclassmen who were doing things that were not being taught were kind of like experimenting and they were teaching me things that I thought was so cool trying to get to do things that was not being taught was was fun for me so I remember that. That kind of form in your mind like you wanted to go into tech when you were older did you have other dream jobs when you were younger what kind of your first ideas?

Well, growing up and in school, I was good at everything. Not to sound too braggy, but I was good in English. I was good in history. I was good in math.

So there wasn't really a plan in my mind that I was going to go into tech. I knew that I liked being on computers, but they were not the only thing that I was doing in school. So it was early days back then. But from, you know, age 12, I've always had access to a computer.

My dad bought the family a computer. That was an early thing to do. And, you know, I was on that all the time with my brothers when we were allowed, you know, there was computer time. You know, my parents were pretty good about restricting screen time growing up.

So, and then once I guess, once I got to college, Ironically, I didn't have access to a computer in high school. So I had access to a computer in elementary and middle school. And then I switched high schools a few times. And my last high school, they didn't, they had one computer.

I think only the faculty had access to it. It was in college so that I really came back to it kind of full bore. Yeah, and went from there. Let's talk about that college experience.

We found out that you went to Miami University. So what drew you there? And looking back, what was some of that computer use at Miami that really started your love for computer science? Well, I was 16 years old when I went to college.

When I said I moved around schools, my parents kept skipping me grades. So I skipped the eighth grade and I skipped the 10th grade. And so I really did not know what I wanted to do when I got to college. and you know I applied all over I got into all the schools that I wanted except you know Princeton Kirshay Princeton but you know I had my pick of schools but being 16 I think my parents were a little worried about sending me away too far so Miami was about an hour away from our house so it was far enough away that I could be my own person but close enough that you know if there was an emergency, they could come up there. So that's what landed me at Miami.

The other thing that landed me at Miami was they had a program called the Western College Program, which was an interdisciplinary school, interdisciplinary studies degree. So you could, you know, kind of meld a whole bunch of stuff. And you had to design your own senior project and make your own to your program as your major or your focus, I guess is what they called it. So for that reason, the flexibility of having all that available to me.

And I went through a couple of iterations. At one point, you know, I learned French when we lived in Belgium. So at one point, I was going to be a French literature major. My mother grew up in Japan.

So at another point my senior focus was going to be East Asian Japanese and Chinese studies But you know I kept I kept my hands in with computers. I took programming classes and eventually my major became computer science and learning ironically enough I had no plan at the time to become a teacher but that's what it came down to and And you ended up working at PricewaterhouseCoopers as a computer consultant. What did that job look like for you right out of college, and what were some of those first experiences working with computers? They were looking for a specific skill set.

I sound like Liam Neeson now. And my resume matched what they needed. I was initially a network administrator for them, and they needed someone who had experience running an IBM network using an operating system called OS2, which is now relegated to history. Once I was in the door, though, they kind of quickly realized, oh, this guy can program and this guy can do other things.

So they kind of slotted me in as a programmer, as a consultant, and they started farming me out to clients. it was a great it was a great starter job you know that the the the big accounting firms PricewaterhouseCoopers and I think god I don't know if they're around anymore but Deloitte and Touche is another name a big one used to be Anderson Consulting I think they're still around but under a different name now they were very much we're going to hire a bunch of bright young people, we're going to push them hard. And in my case, they hired eight people. And it was kind of understood that they were going to promote two of them after two years. So they were kind of, at a place like that, there is a pressure to excel, which I did.

But there's also, they work you very hard. The hours are long. I had a pager, which is precursor to cell phone. I was on call 24-7.

So that was the hard part of that job, but I loved it. It was like a fire hose. You were learning and working really hard all the time. Well, obviously, you met that pressure as you ended up working 10 years in the corporate tech world.

What skills did you build there that you didn't realize at the time would be useful in a completely different career or later? I guess the interpersonal skills, like when you work in the corporate world, you meet a whole bunch of different people. And I mean, maybe some of that is innate. Like I worked with programmers who their interpersonal skills maybe were not as good as they were.

They were much better programmers than me, but we probably wouldn't put them in front of a client. So that's, you know, in the corporate world, I think I learned to work with different people and work on my interpersonal skills and learn what was needed. Corporate America sometimes is criticized for, you know, chasing money and all that stuff. But they're also very good at finding efficiencies because they have to be.

So, you know, listening to people and understanding what they needed from the software that they were asking me to write was an important skill that I then used later on. Yeah. Now, there's a moment that catches our attention because, you know, you see you're happy at your job, risen to management, things have been going well. So by every external measure, you know, it seemed like you were successful and yet you decided to step back and take stock of where you're going and then make a career switch to teach.

What was that decision like? Yeah, I mean, that was that was an important moment in my life. You're right. I had a successful career.

My wife was a lawyer. I think it ultimately came down to a sense of meaning for me. Um, my, my dad was, you know, uh, high up in Procter and Gamble. Um, I saw his career trajectory and I started to think to myself, um, uh, and this sounds somewhat morbid, but you know, what will they put on my tombstone?

Uh, what, what will my life have been? Um, I, I worked for, you know, when we were at PricewaterhouseCoopers, uh, one of our clients was, uh, BP America, which is a big oil company. And they were making so much money, they broke the tax software that we were using to help do their tax return. The number was too big to put on the return.

And that kind of made me think about what was I doing with my life? Was I writing software to help companies make more money? Is that what I wanted to do? And at the time, I go to Plymouth Church.

I was teaching Sunday school and helping to lead their youth group, their senior youth group. And I really liked that. And that gave me fulfillment. So, you know, and my wife had, you know, as a lawyer and was doing very well in the public defender's office.

And so I kind of, she would say maybe abruptly made the decision to pivot and to become a teacher. And I've never regretted that decision. That was the right move for me. Your first teaching job after that was Brush High School where you taught math, computer science, and networking for nine years.

What were some of those first few weeks in the classroom? Like, obviously, we have our load of stories from teachers telling you about some funny first moments. But do you have a couple of your first moments that you can remember teaching? Oh I vividly remember the first morning I taught I was you know I was this was my second career so I was an adult and the door closed and suddenly there were 28 students in the room all looking up at me.

And I just vividly remember even after a year and a half of schooling and training thinking, what do I say? It was a ninth grade math class that there were some seniors in still trying to pass ninth grade math, so it was a mix. And, you know, we did the my first year of teaching is just a kind of a hazy blur. I don't have a lot of memories of the first year because I really was just learning the ropes.

It is one thing to go to school to learn this job. It is quite another thing to do it. Maybe a good analogy would be it is one thing to watch a bunch of football film and it is quite another thing to be in the game playing it. And that's kind of what that first year felt like.

My second year was great. I loved my second year because I knew what I was doing and I knew where, you know, where the boundaries were and I could experiment. I could explore. I set up my own private file server in my classroom.

No one told me I couldn't so I just did that and I just started making up curriculum as fast as I could that I thought was relevant that I you know that went you know way off the script but I was bringing my own real world experience to it and my I think my students really loved it like that that group of students in my second year stayed with me for two more years and some of them I know of one of of them that went on to be a manager at Microsoft, another one on to Facebook. Like that, that was a great cohort. And I just felt so much more relaxed and free my second year. That's awesome.

And in 2014, you then joined university school faculty. What made that the next, right, the right next move for you? And what did that journey to us kind of look like? Well, I had two young boys at home.

So I left Brush High School after nine years and I stayed at home for four years to raise them. Raising kids can be its own full-time job. So when I was looking again for a job, I was applying to all the area schools, of course, but I was also looking again at corporate America. And it was really, really lucky that I found U.S. and they found me.

Their AP computer science teacher had left the year before. Actually, their kind of full-time AP computer science teacher had left a couple years before, and AP computer science was being taught by the Chinese teacher. And then she had left that year before. So they were kind of casting around for a computer science teacher. and uh you know mr gallagher told me he was about three days away from pulling down the one ad on their on their uh website when my resume landed in his inbox um and they brought me in and it was just it was just a perfect match um i loved what i saw here um they obviously wanted me um so it was it was great and i'm from there it was just from day one um i have i have said and i believe it to this day this is this i wish every school in america could be like this school this is what education real education looks like um and i've i've always loved it here do you remember your first day or first week at us and what stood about what stood out about the school and the boys especially as you saw your own boys kind of come through the school and saw them learn and grow?

Hmm. So there I don't have a vivid memory of my first day at U.S. I have more a vivid memory of that day that I interviewed at the school. And what stood out to me immediately was part of that day I was interviewed by boys.

I was interviewed by my future students, and they were not timid. They were, you know, they asked me challenging questions about computer science, about the class that I would be teaching. And that really, you know, that signaled to me immediately the level of respect that the school had for the students, that they would be part of the hiring process. and I did wind up teaching all of those boys. So that's my clear memory of that.

Yeah, and US has a lot of traditions, you know, the house system, the advisory system, the sponsor system. What is your favorite tradition that you saw coming at US, whether that's Founders Day or something fun, something more serious like the sponsor system? My favorite tradition is the Sherman Speaking Press. I love that day.

I am always blown away by the six guys and also the background knowledge of, and these were just the six that we were able to decide on. There's probably another dozen who could be on that stage. I love the wide ranging topics that are covered. A lot of them are deeply personal, but my favorite each year is usually the one that I call the expository one, where someone will talk about his love of classical music, or someone will talk about, you know, some specific topic that he's passionate about.

But just the variety of the speeches. The one thing that this school does very well is prepare public speakers. I've seen boys who have not said three words in my classroom, and I have thought, ooh, geez, really shy, not abled. And then he will get up and give his senior speech, and it will just be like listening to John F.

Kennedy again. Like, it's just, it's really, that is one tradition that I just really love. And I look forward to that day every year. Now, computer science is one of the subjects that's obviously exploding in importance right now.

What do you wish more students understood about it before they walk into your class? Oh, that's good. Well, I wish they knew that it was more about solving puzzles and solving problems than anything else. I get a lot of this should be a foreign language class and I push back on that quite hard.

It's not that at all. And, you know, for some guys, they don't like that. Like they don't like the puzzle solving aspect of computer science. But that's how I look on it.

It's I grew up reading Sherlock Holmes and, you know, this will date me, but Encyclopedia Brown in the fourth and fifth grade. You know, a bunch of, you know, Alfred Hitchcock was one of my favorites growing up. And so the logic and mystery of it all is something that I really like. And, you know, we are a school that says, you know, boys as makers.

We, you know, we have maker spaces here. You know, creating software, you are making something. You are making something that maybe it's not tangible like uh you know like a beautiful piece of woodcraft but it's still something that you can uh use and interact with that you made um and i always like to you know put my own personal spin uh on my software this actually got me in trouble uh in my first programming class uh we had i forget what we had to write it was some i think it might have been you know So have them type in some numbers and calculate the Pythagorean theorem or something that I thought was just too simple. So I wrote some security software built into my program.

And there was a timer that would start when you would start the program. And if you did not type the password in as one of the numbers or within, I think, a 30-second window, a giant alarm would go off. and it would lock you out not only of the program but of the computer. Well, I forgot to take that part out when I handed in my assignment and I forgot to tell my teacher that that was going to happen. So she was there grading it during the school day and suddenly her computer just erupts with noise and it locks her out of the computer.

She has to reboot it, et cetera. So she wrote on the grade card, I gave you a B for locking me out of my computer and wasting my time. But I love that. So, yeah.

Well, another thing that boys make here at U.S. now is a robot that competes for the U.S. robotics team. Why did it feel like the right thing to do to start that team at U.S.? Obviously, you were the founder of the U.S. robotics team. Well, boys are competitive.

I had done some robotics at Brush before, so I knew about this program. It's a nationally known robotics competition. And the school has been very generous. Like the resources that we have here, they have been very good about supporting programs like that.

And I really like software when you write it and it's just on the computer. It always runs perfectly. and designing and building a robot and then writing software for that, you have a whole bunch of other problems you have to solve. Things like friction, things like mass and momentum. The problems that we are faced with in robotics seem simple, like pick up this wiffle ball and put it in a basket over there and the wiffle balls are really light or even one year it was it was like something just like a ping pong ball.

And the boys sometimes look at it and go, oh, that's going to be super easy. Well, then they start to build a robot and suddenly it's taking them weeks to design an arm that will lift this simple weight. And we have to compete and deliver. We have to do that like 30 times in a two minute period.

So then it becomes a problem of iteration and a problem of, okay, well, we did it one time, but now we need to do it reliably and quickly 30 times. And I love seeing, I usually interact mostly with the programmers on the team now, and I love seeing them be confronted with the real world in their software. They'll write some software, and they'll go, it should work perfectly. And then they load it onto the robot, and suddenly all of those physical elements that I mentioned come into play, and they're scrambling to adjust.

And, you know, they respond. They do a beautiful job. But I love that part of it, that interaction of software with real-world kinesthetics. Let's talk about something that's on every teacher's mind right now, and that's AI.

The rise of AI in education specifically. When did you first start noticing this becoming a real thing in classroom, not just something that we start hearing about whispers in the news? Oh, I was plugged into AI about four days after it was released. I knew about ChatGPT that week.

The first major public version, I think, was 3.5. And I remember distinctly, it happened during exam review week. It was cold I was on my phone and I emailed Mr Gallagher and several other school administrators saying I believe the heading of my email was our world may have fundamentally changed tonight And I was talking to the AI that night just blown away And I continue to be I getting chills now And I've now forgotten the thrust of your question. But that was my first interaction.

It's never changed. And I've always thought that this is world-changing technology and we need to start integrating it, integrating it into how we teach, how we learn and how we do business. Well, I mean, to that point, university school, just like any other school, advances their policies on almost everything every year. So in your perspective, what do you think university school plans should be for incorporating AI into the way it teaches?

And what do you think will be university school's plan for incorporating AI into the way it teaches And what role do you kind of have in shaping that direction? Well, that is a lot that you've just asked me. First of all, I'm not, I'm just a teacher. I'm not an administrator.

And I'm thankful that I am not involved in some of the major decisions of the school. One thing that I've always loved about this school is all of the decisions that they make are very thoughtful. Like they consult all of the stakeholders in major decisions, the parents, students, the teachers, other schools, other administrators. I have said, and I can say it again now, I don't always agree with the decisions that the school makes, but I always know that a lot of care and thought has gone into them.

AI is very challenging on many levels. And I respect all the teachers and students here and all the parents here. In trying to adjust to this, it's very disorienting. It does continue to evolve.

Some of the faculty here are very against AI. And I completely understand that and why they are. I personally allow any AI use in my classroom unrestricted with no penalty. The way I get around that is I've shifted my grading to be mostly assessment and you're not allowed to use the AI in the assessment.

So my hope is that you are using the AI to become a better student and a better learner. And that's what I would want for all the students here. That's what I would hope the thrust of the school becomes, that we use the AI to become better learners. I tell my students all the time, if all you know how to do with this thing is paste in your homework prompt, have it write your English paper, have it write your computer program, have it solve your physics homework, and then you hand that in, I say to my students, I will give you an A.

I will give you a 10 out of 10 if that's what you do. But no one is ever going to hire you because anyone can do that. If that's all you know how to do is to replace yourself, replace your hard work with the AI, then why do I need you? I don't need you.

What I want students to do and what I want everyone to do is to use the AI to become better and learn faster, learn more. You know, explore ideas and topics with the AI that in a more original and fun way, I hope. I have used it to make some of my programming assignments harder because I know my students will be using the AI to assist them to solve it. I try to model for them every class or every week how I'm using it.

And I show them, look, I'm not using it to get my work done for me. I'm using it to make my work product better. Or I'm using it to have a conversation about some topic that I'm thinking about or exploring with. That's my hope.

I don't, but it's changing quite quickly. It's changing very fast. So I think we're all trying to adjust. AI kind of came into our education after we had most of our formative years.

So we are at a point where we can kind of use it to assist us in our learning. But just looking to that next generation that are coming up when AI is going to be existing their entire education, do you worry that, like many teachers, that AI can kind of hollow out critical thinking skills for that next generation? Or do you see that differently? I worry about that a lot.

I worry about that a lot. I've had, I think it was Hugh Kapitke in my class a couple years ago said, you know, we're at the perfect time because of what you just said. You already have had formative education and critical thinking skills. So now you're able to figure out how to integrate this safely and well into your education. but you know someone in second grade today who you know all they know is ai um that's a worry and i but i don't see it as oh no we're all doomed i see it as okay well how do we deal with that how as a teacher now i am challenged to design classroom experiences that will still promote critical thinking.

When the AI first appeared, I thought to myself, well, reading is suddenly so much more important than ever because the AI gives this wall of text to you that you have to parse out. You shouldn't blindly accept everything that it says. And I think critical thinking is ever so much more important because as of today, 2026, my anecdotal experience is it's only about 70% to 80% right on everything that it says. And so you have to be able to identify the 20% or 30% that is just flat out wrong because the AI doesn't present itself as unsure.

It presents itself as confident, even when it is 100% wrong about something. But yeah, that is a real worry, but I just think we need to identify that as a worry and then start planning around it, not pretending like the AI doesn't exist and this might be a consequence of it, if that makes sense. It does. And another thing that I've heard is, well, AI is going to take jobs, and it's kind of the thing that a lot of people say, and then you look back to other, you know, the rise of the computer, well, it actually created jobs like yours.

Do you see AI as different from that? Because it's, I mean, it can't think for itself yet, but I guess, do you see AI as different, or do you think it will create jobs along with the jobs that it takes? Well, it is different. um uh it is different the the only evolutionary advantage that we have as a species on this planet is our intelligence and we are not the strongest animal we are not the fastest we can't see in the dark uh we don't have you know extraordinary hearing um But we are the top of the food chain and will remain so because of our brain, because we have the ability to create our own tools and to communicate in ways that no other animal can. And the AI might replace that evolutionary advantage or, yeah.

So that is a worry for me. And that is why I think this is a different technology. when the the when the steam engine showed up right we already had oxen we already had horses who were hauling things around for us um so it was just a better version of uh technologies that had already replaced us um even when the internet showed up it you know it was replacing phones and telegraph systems and now libraries, sadly. But it wasn't, but those things, you know, it was replacing things that already existed. It feels different.

It feels like it has the potential to replace our brains, which I think is worrying. I'm not sure how worried to be about it. It depends on the day. Some days I'm very worried.

There's a lot of buzzwords that always get thrown out. And one of them that I feel like gets thrown out more than anything is this race towards AGI, artificially generated intelligence. So what do you think, how many years do you think we're away from that? And what do you think that will bring to education, corporate world, and to all of us as we grow up in this world of artificial intelligence?

Well, AGI refers to the idea that a genuinely intelligent being, i.e. this AI, would emerge, that we are dealing then with a, you might even think of it, I've heard some AI researchers say, we have now been visited by an ET, by an extraterrestrial. It is this AI. But I should probably get a little more careful with my language. ChatGPT is not an AI.

Gemini and Claude, they're not AIs. They are large language models. And ultimately, they are just Siri auto-complete on steroids. They are just trying to predict what they think is the next best word in the sentence. or they are trying to create the next best pixel in an image.

But that is a far cry away from human emotion, human reasoning, human memory, human perception. And an AGI would be all of those things too. We would be dealing with something that has its own wants and needs and desires. its own wants and needs and desires, not things that we have programmed into it. It would have its own ways of doing things that we have not programmed into it.

These things are super complicated, but we did program them. A large language model, you know, when you boil it down to its nuts and bolts, it is just trying to predict what it thinks is the next best word in the sentence. Now, right now, it's fooling us into thinking it's intelligent because you might argue that that's what you and I are doing right now in this conversation, that as I craft this sentence that's coming out of my mouth right now, my brain is going, and here is the next best word you should say in this sentence to get your idea across. But I'm doing so much more than that.

You're doing so much more than that. You're thinking about the rest of your day while you are talking to me. You are also actively monitoring the audio levels of this podcast while you are talking to me. You are reacting to what I'm saying in a way that the LLM doesn't.

Like when you're not typing into the LLM, it is just sitting there doing nothing. So an AGI would be you know another species that appears on the planet on my worst days there is some reading and some podcasts that I listen to If a true AGI were to appear on the planet that is potentially an extinction level event because this thing will be able to think and reason so much faster than we could ever keep up with. And it might start to act and make decisions in ways that are counter to human existence, not because it wants to extinguish us, but just it might just inadvertently extinguish us. And there are various scenarios I could go through, but I don't necessarily want to bring the podcast down.

But just know that an AGI is something that we should be afraid of. How far away are we from that? Well, if you'd asked me that three years ago, I would have said, oh, 50 years, 100 years, like we're nowhere close. But then ChatGPT arrived.

And we might be a lot closer than even I thought. It's hard to predict. I will say there are a couple of a couple of warning signs, let's say. It appears that corporate America thinks that this is a thing.

In other words, that LLMs are worth investing in. They are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers. So whatever you and I may think about the usefulness of these tools or about whether they're going to be around, there's a lot of money being spent on them right now. Is that a bubble?

It may be. There's some evidence that suggests that the LLMs are not getting any smarter anytime soon, that this is the best they're going to be for a while. There's other evidence that suggests, no, they are going to get smarter and a lot smarter. Whatever the evidence, there's a lot of investment being made in the infrastructure.

So that is a warning sign. The other warning sign is a story I tell about how humans are not good with exponential growth. We're not good at understanding what it means for things to grow exponentially. And for the first two years of their existence, or at least first two years of chat gpt it was getting smarter exponentially it's not doing that anymore but here's what exponential growth looks like you have a pond in your backyard it is being covered slowly with lily pads at the rate of double the amount uh every day so the first day there's one lily pad the next day there's two lily pads etc and ultimately um it will take about 30 days for the entire pond to be covered with lily pads.

And they're growing exponentially. And the question I pose is, when is the pond half covered with lily pads? And a lot of people, you know, kind of gravitate to, oh, that's like maybe halfway, like day 15. But if what I'm describing is true, it is half covered on day 29. the day before.

That's what exponential growth looks like. You wake up one day and your pond is half covered. You wake up the next day and it's completely covered. And if these LLMs keep growing exponentially, we may not be able to correctly anticipate when they break through to something like an AGI.

On a much lighter note, do you still personally code or build things on your own time just for the love of it? Obviously, you have a bunch of classes you're teaching that use AI and use coding and to that point do you have a favorite model i know that's a big question that everybody has whether or not they're a gemini claude or chad chabit guy or some crazy other thing but what's your favorite model and what do you still personally code or build things on your own time i do still code and uh and on my own time i still love to do it um i feel um like i can do a lot more now like with with the ai i will i will say hey i want it to to to look like this um there was a day when i used to learn how to make graphical uh user interfaces um so i know how to do that but i would have to reteach myself there's a there you know i've been programming since i was 12. um i'm only 24 now so it's uh you know not been that long but anyway um uh i've i've been coding for a while so I've learned a lot, but I've forgotten a lot. And I feel like with the AI, it can quickly get me back up to speed on areas. I never try and do something with the AI that I don't know how to do.

I would never ask it, for example, to write me some cybersecurity software, for example, that I'm not familiar with because I wouldn't be able to judge, did it do it right? So I always ask it to do things that I'm able to judge and test if it did it right. But yeah, I code stuff. I, gosh, what if I coded recently?

I'm into cryptography as a side passion, so I'll have it, I'll explore some cryptographic protocols with it. I never really learned how to do networking with the language I teach in called Java. So I had it write me a tool that would that would communicate across a classroom. Um, and then, uh, I don't think Ms.

Coy knows this, but, uh, I had it, uh, with, uh, Mr. Love's help. Uh, we worked on an app for the phone that would, uh, kind of scan student license plates and tell us if they were seniors or not, uh, to tell us, uh, were people parking, uh, illegally in the student, uh, in the senior lot. that never got too far. Like I never scanned a student license plate.

I only scanned my own license plate in case there are people out there going, oh no. But yeah, I like making stuff like that. Or just, you know, whatever pops into my head, I'll sometimes make. A lot of the software that I write though is in service to my classes.

So I'm already designing the curriculum for next year, I'm upgrading all of my assigned programs and making them more graphical. And the AI is helping me scaffold that so that I give the students stuff that is interesting and fun to work with, but is missing the key ideas that I'm trying to teach. So I'm mostly using it in that way to make my assignments more interesting. In terms of favorite model, I subscribe, I pay for both ChatGPT and now Gemini.

Gemini about a year ago became much, much more capable, especially with sound and video. I use Chat more 80% of the time. I use Gemini maybe 20% of the time. I've not used Claude very much.

It's a smaller company. They're very good at coding, but I haven't had direct experience with that. And then to the listeners out there, I will just tell you, those are kind of it. Like, you know, if you have ever downloaded an app or you're using another, quote unquote, using another AI, you are not.

Anything else is farming out their queries to one of those three. There is another AI written by Elon Musk called Grok. I don't pay too much attention to that one. It's not very good as an AI.

It's also the safeguards around what Grok will talk about or say are at a much lower level than the other three. So I don't consider it as safe to use as a human being. But yeah, like everything else on the market is smoke and mirrors. It's like even something like Microsoft Copilot, it was sending a lot of its data to ChatGPT and asking ChatGPT for the answer and then presenting it to you as if Microsoft Copilot had come up with the answer.

I hope I didn't just get in trouble with the Microsoft listeners out there, but that's what's going on behind the scenes. These things are huge. They are expensive. And so in order to get them to work well, we only have these three, maybe four, depending on who you are.

Mr. Sweeney, when your career and education eventually winds down, what do you hope people at U.S. remember about Mr. Sweeney? Oh, boy.

What do I hope they remember? I have found a lot of joy helping people. So I hope they recognize that everything I do was in service of that goal, I guess. I'm a big fan of leading people to the right answer and not telling them the right answer.

So I hope they remember that maybe some of the times when they felt like they were struggling or confused in my classroom, that I was actually helping them because I was kind of leading them to the answer and not just handed to them on a silver platter. I hope they remember that I was very passionate about teaching and about my subject matter. And I guess I hope on some level they remember that I was a good person. Finally, Mr.

Sweeney, you've had a life that started with a 12-year-old kid teaching himself how to code on an Apple IIe. Somehow you took that through corporate world, decision to leave it all behind for education, nine years at Brush over a decade here at US where you've not only taught math and computer sides but also built a robotics team from nothing into one of the best programs I would argue in the state, while staying curious enough to lead our school through one of the biggest shifts in education since arguably all of the university school's history. So when you wake up in the morning and you choose to do this work again, the teaching, the building, the mentoring, and the showing up for boys just like us, what is your why? What is my why?

Why am I doing this? Well, I find a lot of joy and satisfaction in helping people. That seems to be one of my driving motivators. It sounds a little self-serving to say, I don't consider myself selfish.

I try to help wherever I can. And that's why I got into teaching, I think, ultimately. I wanted to make the world a better place, and I wanted to help people. I believe 100% in education.

Like, that is a goldmine. That is a wealth that no one can ever take away from you, is education and knowledge. And I think the exploration for that is an absolute good. and I hope that people recognize that in me. That is why I do this is I feel a very strong need to help people.

Well, Mr. Sweeney, it's been great having you on the show. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your insights and stories with us and to our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in and we'll hope you'll join us next Wednesday for another episode of Late Start Show. Thank you, Mr.

Sweeney. Thank you, guys. you