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I was talking recently to someone who teaches AI-adjacent courses at a US university (not in a computer science department) and they said that enrollment in the

by simonw 7mo ago

I was talking recently to someone who teaches AI-adjacent courses at a US university (not in a computer science department) and they said that enrollment in their class is lower than expected, which they think is likely due to the severity of the AI backlash among students on campus.

semiinfinitely 7mo ago
> they think is key
mitthrowaway2 7mo ago
What kind of AI-adjacent? If it's fundamentals of ML, I'm surprised to hear that. If it's "how to use ChatGPT for creative writing" then I'm not surprised. Why would someone take a class from a teacher who has had only just as much experience with these tools as their students have?
- 19skitsch 7mo ago
  Agree… OP said “not CS” so doesn’t seem surprising. If we’re going by anecdotes, AI classes in the CS dept have risen in popularity in the past few years.
  - acbart 7mo ago
    Where are you seeing CS classes with increasing enrollment? Everyone I know is saying they're seeing smaller classes. Maybe some upper division from the last swell, but we're all definitely declining this year and last year, from what I'm seeing.
- pibaker 7mo ago
  I actually feel the opposite. I don't think people from outside CS will have that much interest into the very basics of AI because there is usually a huge gap between "this is how back propagation works" to any AI model that is remotely useful. And if you are interested in the fundamentals themselves you would probably be majoring CS anyway. A course on how to use existing AI tools will be pointless, but if there is anything I know about college students is they love taking easy courses for easy credits.
mmargenot 7mo ago
AI applications that would help normal people in a significant way are pretty lacking, so I'm not surprised. So much conversation about AI products is cycles of "this tech will change everything" without material backup outside of coding agents.
- Aachen 7mo ago
  How much of the workforce is organising and other information dissemination or transformation? I'm more on the skeptical side than the evangelist, but I can see how large parts of such things could theoretically be shifted away from humans. Planning someone's agenda, preparing relevant documents, arranging and coordinating things, translations (speech or text), narration, grammar checking.... AI is a whole lot of hot air when considering the "second 80%" of the work involved in any of these tasks, but that's still a lot of jobs that may make little sense to start studying these years, until you have some idea how the field will develop or if there's a giant surplus of, say, French-native Spanish language experts. At least for those for whom a given study is not a real passion and they might as well choose something else
  - andrekandre 7mo ago
    > Planning someone's agenda, preparing relevant documents, arranging and coordinating things, translations (speech or text), narration, grammar checking the issue is, these things "lie" subtly and not so subtly (they make up issues, rename agendas, forget questions and change meanings all the time) and for me that is a deal-breaker for a business tool that i need to rely on
    - Aachen 7mo ago
      Yes, for me as well, but large chunks of these tasks seem within the realm of what they can do when you break it up into small enough bits and control the prompt very tightly Particularly machine translations are no worse than what an untrained native speaker would come up with, and much better than traditional translators (due to some level of context "understanding" - or simulation thereof, at least). At 50x human speed, the energy consumption is also lower than keeping a human alive for that time. There is no scenario in which this capability goes unused Or grammar checking, if you catch 98% (as even some of the weaker models seem to achieve), the editor who'd otherwise do this can do more intellectually stimulating things It's not that there's no downsides but it also seems silly to dismiss it altogether
Yokohiii 7mo ago
The biggest visible AI impact, for me, is vibe coding. For that, I am convinced that the hype will collapse and will throw back the most enthusiast companies by years. On the downside we have untrustworthy, doom or glory praising CEOs, companies slashing jobs, AI companies going into military business, hacks, spam, psychosis, general anxiety and uncertainty. Even if you don't believe the hype and know that AI is just statistics, there is nothing to be positive about. I can't blame anyone to dismiss it. Maybe it's even the best thing that can happen, big tech won't take a sane route without civic supervision and calibration.
- scns 7mo ago
  > there is nothing to be positive about Even though i'm quite anti AI, recycling in Taiwan, killing weeds with lasers and detecting cancer beg to differ.
  - Yokohiii 7mo ago
    From what I know there was progress in AI cancer detection before the hype. I consider the big tech advancements is a side show for them. I may be wrong. I heard nothing about the other stories. AI can code and write generic texts, can pull off a lot of knowledge. But the frontier models are general purpose idiots and any interesting specialization/innovation has probably nothing to do with them.
fg137 7mo ago
Meanwhile Stanford's CS336 (Language Modeling from Scratch) requires an application for enrollment. https://web.archive.org/web/20260316042004/https://cs336.stanford.edu/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260316042004/https://cs336.sta... Students don't enroll in a class for various reasons, but most likely because it's useless (or at least people perceive it as useless). At top universities, even notoriously challenging courses have a decent class size.

by simonw 7mo ago

semiinfinitely 7mo ago

> they think is key

mitthrowaway2 7mo ago

What kind of AI-adjacent? If it's fundamentals of ML, I'm surprised to hear that. If it's "how to use ChatGPT for creative writing" then I'm not surprised. Why would someone take a class from a teacher who has had only just as much experience with these tools as their students have?

19skitsch 7mo ago
Agree… OP said “not CS” so doesn’t seem surprising. If we’re going by anecdotes, AI classes in the CS dept have risen in popularity in the past few years.
- acbart 7mo ago
  Where are you seeing CS classes with increasing enrollment? Everyone I know is saying they're seeing smaller classes. Maybe some upper division from the last swell, but we're all definitely declining this year and last year, from what I'm seeing.
pibaker 7mo ago
I actually feel the opposite. I don't think people from outside CS will have that much interest into the very basics of AI because there is usually a huge gap between "this is how back propagation works" to any AI model that is remotely useful. And if you are interested in the fundamentals themselves you would probably be majoring CS anyway. A course on how to use existing AI tools will be pointless, but if there is anything I know about college students is they love taking easy courses for easy credits.

mmargenot 7mo ago

AI applications that would help normal people in a significant way are pretty lacking, so I'm not surprised. So much conversation about AI products is cycles of "this tech will change everything" without material backup outside of coding agents.

Aachen 7mo ago
How much of the workforce is organising and other information dissemination or transformation? I'm more on the skeptical side than the evangelist, but I can see how large parts of such things could theoretically be shifted away from humans. Planning someone's agenda, preparing relevant documents, arranging and coordinating things, translations (speech or text), narration, grammar checking.... AI is a whole lot of hot air when considering the "second 80%" of the work involved in any of these tasks, but that's still a lot of jobs that may make little sense to start studying these years, until you have some idea how the field will develop or if there's a giant surplus of, say, French-native Spanish language experts. At least for those for whom a given study is not a real passion and they might as well choose something else
- andrekandre 7mo ago
  > Planning someone's agenda, preparing relevant documents, arranging and coordinating things, translations (speech or text), narration, grammar checking the issue is, these things "lie" subtly and not so subtly (they make up issues, rename agendas, forget questions and change meanings all the time) and for me that is a deal-breaker for a business tool that i need to rely on
  - Aachen 7mo ago
    Yes, for me as well, but large chunks of these tasks seem within the realm of what they can do when you break it up into small enough bits and control the prompt very tightly Particularly machine translations are no worse than what an untrained native speaker would come up with, and much better than traditional translators (due to some level of context "understanding" - or simulation thereof, at least). At 50x human speed, the energy consumption is also lower than keeping a human alive for that time. There is no scenario in which this capability goes unused Or grammar checking, if you catch 98% (as even some of the weaker models seem to achieve), the editor who'd otherwise do this can do more intellectually stimulating things It's not that there's no downsides but it also seems silly to dismiss it altogether

Yokohiii 7mo ago

The biggest visible AI impact, for me, is vibe coding. For that, I am convinced that the hype will collapse and will throw back the most enthusiast companies by years. On the downside we have untrustworthy, doom or glory praising CEOs, companies slashing jobs, AI companies going into military business, hacks, spam, psychosis, general anxiety and uncertainty. Even if you don't believe the hype and know that AI is just statistics, there is nothing to be positive about. I can't blame anyone to dismiss it. Maybe it's even the best thing that can happen, big tech won't take a sane route without civic supervision and calibration.

scns 7mo ago
> there is nothing to be positive about Even though i'm quite anti AI, recycling in Taiwan, killing weeds with lasers and detecting cancer beg to differ.
- Yokohiii 7mo ago
  From what I know there was progress in AI cancer detection before the hype. I consider the big tech advancements is a side show for them. I may be wrong. I heard nothing about the other stories. AI can code and write generic texts, can pull off a lot of knowledge. But the frontier models are general purpose idiots and any interesting specialization/innovation has probably nothing to do with them.

fg137 7mo ago

Meanwhile Stanford's CS336 (Language Modeling from Scratch) requires an application for enrollment. https://web.archive.org/web/20260316042004/https://cs336.stanford.edu/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260316042004/https://cs336.sta... Students don't enroll in a class for various reasons, but most likely because it's useless (or at least people perceive it as useless). At top universities, even notoriously challenging courses have a decent class size.