This is still pointless though. I mean it's valuable from a learning perspective but the parent is saying they want to contribute somehow. You can only learn so much from toy examples
Opportunity knocks, but you have to build the door first.
For the rest of us, the sense of discovery that we get from training and running toy models is a big part of the reward. This stuff is not an exact science, at least not yet, so time spent building intuition with small-scale models is an incredibly important part of the learning process. Not pointless at all.