5 ms·
Universities would prefer no AI
- alephnerd 2mo ago> The elite research layer of higher education (Stanford, Berkeley, MIT) is still an AI accelerant. But across the country, as Scott Latham told me, “the vast majority of institutions are in a state of AI paralysis.” Tbf, the vast majority of institutions also suck. State flagships and some of their second rung, a couple ivies and ivy tier privates, and military academies provide the bulk of talent that you need. And these universities have dedicated pipelines for people who start off at community colleges. These universities are also much larger - UC Berkeley's and UCLA's 2025 undergrad population is almost double it's 1960 population [0]. And those who had skill or educational deficiencies can remediate them via non-trad or working professionals masters like GT, UT Austin, and CU Boulder's OMSCS for less than $15k. [0] - https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-center/historical-enrollment https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-...
- tgv 2mo agoAh, sure, they train enough people to serve all needs. What a load of poppy cock.
- alephnerd 2mo agoThey do. The top 20 CS/EE/CE/ECE/EE degree programs (MIT, CMU, Stanford, Cal, UIUC, GT, UT Austin, Purdue, UW, UCLA, UCSD, Ivies, UChicago, NYU, UNC Chapel Hill, Duke, USC, UMinn, UMich) graduate around 15k-20k undergrads a year. Throw in the next rung of well respected universities (eg. the rest of the state flagships like ASU or IU, the respected regional public programs like CalPoly, NCSU, or SUNY Buffalo, and the handful of regionally respected privates like WPI, Cincy, or both Rochesters) and that number likely doubles. If you're graduating almost 50k grads a year from target programs, there just isn't enough room for the rest. Choosing to go to (randomly choosing two universities to pick on) USF or TCU for CS straight out of HS instead of going to your local CC and then transferring to UC Davis or UT Dallas is dumb. In 1980 you had a little under 2,000 4-year colleges in the US. In 2010 you had almost 3,000 4-year colleges after which the number of institutions started declining. Making more colleges while existing colleges were expanding headcount did nothing to help.
- tgv 2mo ago50k/year is not enough for a country the size of the US. Belgium produces about that number of graduates yearly.
- alephnerd 2mo agoThose 40-60 universities graduate around 50k undergraduate CS, EE, CE, ECE, and EE majors a year. Overall, the US graduates around 125k-150k CS/EE/CE/ECE/EE/EECS majors a year. Overall we graduated a little under 5 milllion college graduates in 2025 compared to a little under 4 million in 2015.
- tgv 2mo ago5M? On a population of 340M? 3.6M children are born yearly. Do they all graduate at a university? The web says 864,457.
- bigfishrunning 2mo ago"Institution that assigns homework would prefer you not have a machine do your homework for you"
- GPerson 2mo agoIt’s almost like a place focused on improving the human should operate differently from a place building commercial products.
- summarybot 2mo agoCouldn't agree more, and yet, attendance itself is a commerical product.
- bigfishrunning 2mo agoThe commercial product is the paper that says "University of Whatever says you learned Whatever". If the university loses credibility (by producing a bunch of people who cannot function without a chatbot) then the product is no longer valuable.
- GPerson 2mo agoLuckily for us all these good natured AI people will liberate us from the necessity of our own value and places like universities, which give us structured environments to participate in intellectual pursuits, will be in high demand.
- summarybot 2mo agoThis assumes every degree is valuable in the marketplace, which is simply not the case. The product is luxury attendance, the degree is secondary to that.
- d_silin 2mo agoAnd for the good reason. I have yet to see 1 (one) reason how giving infinite cheat machine to students is of any benefit to them. The secret to mastery remained unchanged for a thousand years: books, lectures and homework. All of this can be done with pen and paper level of technology.
- _aavaa_ 2mo agoA home can also be built of mud bricks and heated by dung. The issue you’re describing is a mindset/cultural one, not a technological one. The same cheating machine can be used as a tutor. Those same cheating students understand, that at the gym, they themselves have to lift the weights to get strong, but that mindset doesn’t carry over to their classes.
- d_silin 2mo agoLLMs are like anabolic steroids for the brain. Surely you can do more with them, but you are better without them. Access to them should be restricted, especially for untrained minds.
- _aavaa_ 2mo agoThat’s a bad analogy, you still have to put all the effort yourself at the gym while on steroids. Perhaps LLMs are a forklift.
- d_silin 2mo agoHa! Steroids give you muscle mass without lifting, believe it or not. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199607043350101 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199607043350101 Of course, side effects are a different story.
- NopIdoN 2mo agobut I can deal with the side effects using my free strength!
- summarybot 2mo ago>the two most reliable places to get an answer are the physical library and AI. Uh in what universe? Obviously physical books are helpful but are not most of the new ones being written with the assistance of an LLM?
- alephnerd 2mo agoDepending on the type of question being asked and the complexity, human intervention is still needed because LLMs still face an information retrieval problems.
- summarybot 2mo agoDefinitely the case that LLMs still face a "not actually rational nor conscious" problem. Einstein once said physics is like looking at the outer movement of a watch and attempting to understand its internal mechanisms. LLMs watch the outer movement of our keyboards in an attempt to comprehend our varieties of intelligence (intuitive, rational, symbolic, logical, ...)
- derbOac 2mo agoI'm not sure what to make of this? Is any healthy skepticism about AI now treated as motivated luddism? Academics has its many issues but universities are hardly the only sources of criticism about AI, and for all its benefits AI is poorly understood and often applied in relatively half-assed ways, even when it's well-intended. I would worry if thoughtful individuals weren't skeptical at all about AI. It also seems reasonable to, say, want to evaluate students on their own merits free of the influence of a "homework machine" (to borrow a phrase from Shel Silverstein). I'm reluctant to make predictions, and wouldn't describe myself as "anti-AI" but this sort of piece reminds me uncannily of the dot-com bubble.
- sajithdilshan 2mo agoThe primary use case of universities are to produce a generation that can contribute to the society in a meaningful and positive manner. Nowadays in-order to do that, AI literacy is a must for graduates just like it was 15 years ago when it was a must to have computer literacy. AI is a tool like internet was and it's the responsibility of the curriculum to teach proper usage of that tool rather than fighting against it.
- bigfishrunning 2mo ago> AI is a tool like internet was until it was overrun by unverified AI slop. Let's just get the slop from the source!
- alephnerd 2mo agoYep. That's the premise of this article. The writer used to be the dean of humanities at University of Utah (great school, much of AI exists thanks to their work on CompGraphics, HPC, and Teapots) and is basically arguing that humanites and social science (HSS) programs need to build that kind of literacy. A generation ago you saw similar resistance to the internet from HSS programs.
- crote 2mo agoWe still teach primary school children how to do addition, despite the fact that during their working life they'll have access to a calculator virtually all of the time. A decade ago posting your CS assignment on StackOverflow and handing in the top answer was considered cheating, despite professional software developers doing pretty much that any time they ran into something unusually tricky. Why teach students differentiation when they can just put "derivative of x^2" in WolframAlpha? Universities are supposed to primarily teach understanding, not basic tool use. Yes, tool use should be part of your education as well, but that's only a small fraction of it. A single "prompting AI to do X" course is probably more than enough. But if you completely skip the fundamentals and make the students fully dependent on the tools, how could they possibly contribute to building the next generation of tools, verify the output of the tools, or transcend the tools? Yeah, they should indeed be teaching proper AI use as well, but in practice the easy access to AI is making it virtually impossible to teach the fundamentals, and that's the real problem here.
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo agoIt is causing far more pain than benefit in the majority of institutions. Particularly the cheating. Many students are flagrantly using it + the detection tools either aren't configured to check for it, or, if they do have something like TurnItIn, it doesn't work, and flags legitimately created content sans AI.
- bunderbunder 2mo agoI think what we are seeing with all these AI detection tools is a whole lot of shooting the messenger. Technology made the problem of lazy students impossible to ignore, but the solution might be decidedly low-tech: have students spend some time talking about their work with the teacher, face to face.
- speak_plainly 2mo agoFor people who teach through writing, there are great tools out there like MATCHA: https://matchawriter.com https://matchawriter.com. It's a secure writing environment that verifies authorship by recording the full writing process and, when needed, can restrict copy-paste, automation, and access to other applications. In my opinion, most of Academia's pains are wholly self-inflicted.
- skywhopper 2mo agoThis author has a ton of axes to grind and a poor grasp of computing history or how industry works. Pretending like it’s strange or even bad that industrial datacenter builders with tens of billions of leveraged capital can outbuild the GPU capacity of chronically underfunded grant dependent universities whose mission is not to create industrial scale compute resources is like complaining local technical school auto-mechanic program isn’t out-producing Ford’s auto manufacturing numbers. But then as soon as the author rolled out complaints about DEI and ethics, you knew what was going on. Okay, please leave higher ed and work for the industry you love. As you say, they are doing just fine.
- ang_cire 2mo agoYep, there were multiple dog whistles in this article, including framing the very intentional attack on science funding by Trump, as a tool for political leverage against universities, as being just some kind of benign priority shift.
- outside1234 2mo agoAI is totally going to replace the university system. This is like the coal and oil guys sabotaging EVs and renewable energy. Good for them, bad for us.
- black_knight 2mo agoLots of people talk about cheating here. That is not the framing I put in my mind. Or rather, if the students are cheating anyone it's themselves. LLMs exist and are extremely useful in academia. I am currently riding a productivity wave, where I can spit out formalised proofs – not quite at the pace at which I can think of the theorems to prove, but almost. The thing braking my progress is that I have to build all the existing theory too, not just my own new stuff. But for students, who do not yet know anything, it is a danger. From observing my students, it seems to take a certain amount of willpower to do the exercises without letting ChatGPT give them (or "explain them") the answer. And reading an explanation is not the same thing as working it out yourself. You just don't learn doing it, by not doing it! Some students have this will power, some students don't. And it is also situational. Some students have stuff going (work or other factors) which makes it really hard too. Yes, they can of course keep asking ChatGPT later in life, but they will not have the fundamental understanding which is required to even use LLMs for the advanced stuff. ChatGPT cannot explain you advanced concepts if you don't understand the fundamentals! So, to test the students' understanding, we are back to having on-site exams, with the old-school supervision. And more students will fail, because there is now a way to solve exercises without learning.
- jmaw 2mo agoYes, totally agree that they are primarily directly cheating themselves. But it also indirectly cheats their peers who are being surpassed by the cheating students (at least in school). Similarly for cheating in interviews. Unfortunately the cheating students can cause a race to the bottom where the non-cheating students are pressured to cheat in order to keep up. This pressure to cheat to keep up can become an even bigger issue if teachers try to make tests longer or harder, whether to challenge the cheaters, or if the teachers don't recognize that LLMs are being used.
- logicchains 2mo ago>But it also indirectly cheats their peers who are being surpassed by the cheating students (at least in school). Similarly for cheating in interviews. This doesn't happen if they're only assessed based on well-invigilated on-paper exams.
- sabot90260 2mo agoThe $340M for 400 GPUs over two years next to 100,000 in 122 days is the whole argument in one line.
- ang_cire 2mo agoThat is either a logistics issue, or a mismatch in what is being purchased. It doesn't specify that they're the same GPUs. Given the way the author structures the article, I'm suspicious that this is a meaningful or even truthful metric.
- empressplay 2mo agoThe issue is more one of current passive, abstract forms of assessment. This is laziness on the part of instructors. They will simply have to move to more complex, project-based assessments and accompanying interviews, which is more time consuming but will be far more accurate than the more traditional system of assessment was anyway. On sum it will be better for everyone.
- jschveibinz 2mo agoThe problem can be fixed: adjust or realign the business model and incentives around the needs of the stakeholders. - Students want a credential because business and society demands a credential - Universities want income to support their missions of research, education and other "motives" - Professors want to do research, and they don't really want to teach (in general) - AI is a resource for learning, assessment and project development - Society needs educated people What ideas do you have to make everyone satisfied and maximally functional?
- logicchains 2mo agoGo back to the old approach where degrees/credentials are conferred based on discussion/debate with the professors and an on-paper exam at end of year, with no attendance or classes required. Then just have the professors provide a syllabus and potential students work through it themselves, asking an AI to explain anything that's unclear. Professors can get their funding from the government and industry; in future it won't make sense for students to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to get at most an hour of daily one-on-one time with professors, when for a fraction of that cost they could be getting 24/7 tutoring/discussion from an LLM that's at least as knowledgeable. Someone will ask, what about people who are incapable of motivating themselves to study? Well they'd feel a lot more motivation to study if it meant saving tens of thousands of dollars. As for people completely incapable of independent learning, they'd likely have little employability in the future in any case, because people would rather hire an AI than that kind of person.
- red-iron-pine 2mo agoUniversities need to host their own AI, and force students to use it. you then make sure it behaves and doesn't let them cheat too much. guide them to answers, don't just spit out code like Claude is want to do
- p0w3n3d 2mo agoThe author completely ignores the cognitive debt of using AI in my understanding. there is no high level work if you don't understand the basics, so the basics must be taught not glimpsed on
- j45 2mo agoUniversities would prefer a lot of things to remain how they want.