The "McKenzie"-style lady and Schmidt from Google (who really seemed to resent the pushback and chided graduates), can go to hell. I'm happy that someone is telling the young people who are likely to suffer because of this tech that they matter. I can't imagine how much angst much exist after taking on debt to get an education and then this is the job market.

But perhaps whether or not his stance is correct, the students needed to hear this. They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.

Engineers always fought about technology - MS technology stack iterations that promised new era in development, Borland RAD tools that made everyone "GUI developer", all those had evangelists and companies who pushed it. It's a healthy competition and we see where Java EE ended up, although in 2010s it was still promised as one and only future for servers.

Will this time be different? I don't know and I'm afraid there's a critical mass accumulated to push it forward forcefully. But when I talk to my friends and students I give one advice that I follow - invest in your intelligence, not tooling and ecosystem of large corporations. Build something yourself, not for the sake of chasing venture investors with your million LOC slope, but to learn and master real skills. When one student implemented Paxos for his thesis and followed my advice, the feedback was that not only he learned and built a mental model of the algorithm and all corner cases, but also led to novel algorithm development, just because his brain was into it, not on top of AI.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak

Stark contrast to other tech leaders...

Kids want to learn, they value learning, they get a sense of pride and accomplishment when they learn new things and concepts.

My first impression is that floods of articles do not accurately reflect the real world, but just show some facet of it. But if they are both correct and both are to be taken as real, should we expect that students will agree with academia and not use AI in their education? Might we see the return of traditional learning?

(Education is different than our industry. In our industry, most of those using LLMs are forced to by the powers to be. In education, the powers to be do not want the students to use LLMs.)

He's a genuinely nice guy, not one of those hard-as-nails business types like most IT CEOs. I'd love to work for a company he'd run. It might not be as successful as the others but you would know you're actually doing good things for people. Unlike other companies that put Don't be Evil in their mottoes but are evil as hell.

Aren't students, at least anecdotally, outsourcing a lot of _their_ work to LLMs? And upon graduation when they're told that it's their future they don't like it?

Everyone was hating on the Google CEO but I really almost had a crash out of how out of touch Scott Borchetta sounded on stage too. Glad there's one good Apple out there.

"I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering."

so I COULD take over by hand again like I did the decades before just fine, but I refuse to and instead play a codebase like a RTS - lots of stuff happening in parallel but at all times a understanding where is which thing going on and have the next steps in mind (sometimes directly queued as follow up instructions). For me vibecoding is a strict speedboost and literally gamified projects I work on, and the guardrails not only in textfiles but much more in executable code (linters, tests, dependency checks, playwright, ...) as feedback loops agents can spin on on their own made it all click together to the point my main bottleneck is stuff like the Codex app itself using high CPU and memory on my local mac.

AI stands for artificial intelligence. Trying to give it an opposite meaning just is going to confuse everyone.

>Is there a way we can duplicate a routine a trillion times and have it work like a brain? AI is one of those attempts.

AI is not trying to recreate a brain. It is trying to implement intelligence. GPT works nothing like the brain works.

This is typical for a university though. All they do is teach you things that are not really true. If you asked AI what AI stood and what it means you will get a much better answer than this Steve guy.

* Here I'm using the alternate definition of elite - someone with money, power, position, or privilege - and not the conventional "barista with hair colour".

I was young once and naive, and I read a bunch of sci-fi. I could never have imagined having these LLMs or coding agents during my lifetime. Never. It was unthinkable to me that something like this could even happen.

And yet, here we are.

Even if you think it’s just a statistical trick, you should still be blown away.

You should also be optimistic, because that’s what we need young people for. We used to be able to convince young people to get on boats and migrate halfway around the world to die on some godforsaken land. Or get on boats and go fight some ideological war somewhere else (not saying that was a good thing). But now we can’t even get them excited about technology?

What have we done?

People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today.

This is propagating the Dunning Kruger effect.

Anyone with a sub 100 IQ should be using AI nearly blindly for questions and life decisions. However, these exact people don't realize AI is smarter than them.

I think we are going to witness a division on a monumental level in our lifetime. People willing to use AI, and people not willing. (However, people not willing will be able to get to speed in literal seconds).