Comment by simonw
3 days 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.
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.
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
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
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You make it sound as if "coding" was a distinct thing with clear boundaries in the technical world. But this critically misses the fact that coding agents dramatically lowered the barrier to controlling everything with a microchip. The only thing that exists "outside [the reach] of coding agents" is purely the analog world and that boundary will get fuzzier than it is perceived to be.
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?
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.
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.
Meanwhile Stanford's CS336 (Language Modeling from Scratch) requires an application for enrollment.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> they think
is key