Or other people who just kept their research dataset private and milked it for years training incrementally better ML models on the same data. Then similar datasets appeared openly and they threw a hissy fit.

Usually there are a million little tricks and oral culture around how to use various datasets, configurations, hyperparameters etc and papers often only gave the high level ideas and math away. But when the code started to become open it freaked out many who felt they won't be able to keep up and just wanted to keep on until retirement by simply guarding their knowledge and skill from getting too known. Many of them were convinced it's going to go away. "Python is just a silly, free language. Serious engineers use Matlab, after all, that's a serious paid product. All the kiddies stacking layers in Theano will just go away, it's just a fad and we will all go back to SVM which has real math backing it up from VC theory." (The Vapnik-Chervonenkis kind, not the venture capital kind.)

I don't want to be too dismissive though. People build up an identity, like the blacksmith of the village back in the day, and just want to keep doing it and build a life on a skill they learn in their youth and then just do it 9 to 5 and focus on family etc. I get it. But wishing it won't make it so.

Talented, skilled people with good intuition and judgements will be needed for a long time but that will still require adapting to changing tools and workflows. But the bulk of the workforce is not that.

If you prompt with little raw material and little actual specification of what you want to see in the end, eg you just say make a detailed breakdown dashboard-like site that analyzes this codebase, the result will have this uncanny character.

I'd describe it as a kind of "fanfic", it (and now I'm not just talking about this website but my overall impression related to this phenomenon) reminds me a bit like how when I was 15 or so, I had an idea about how the world works then things turned out to be less flashy, less movie-like, less clear-cut, less-impressive-to-a-teenage-boy than I had thought.

If you know the concept of "stupid man's idea of a smart man", I'd say AI made stuff (with little iteration) gives this outward appearance of a smart man from the Reddit-midwit-cinematic-universe. It's like how guns in movies sound more like guns than real guns. It's hyperreality.

Again this is less about the capabilities of AI and it's more connected to the people-pleasing nature of it. It's like you prompt it for some epic dinner and it heaps you up some hmmm epic bacon with bacon yeah (referring to the hivemind-meme). Or BigMac on the poster vs the tray, and the poster one is a model made with different components that are more photogenic. It's a simulacrum.

It looks more like your naive currently imagined thing about what you think you need vs what you'd actually need. It's like prompting your ideal girlfriend into AI avatar existence. I'm sure she will fit your ideal thought and imagination much better but your actual life would need the actual thing.

This relates to the Persona thing that Anthropic has been exploring, that each prompt guides the model towards adopting a certain archetypal fiction character as it's persona and there are certain attraction basins that get reinforced with post training. And in the computer world, simulated action can be easily turned into real action with harnesses and tools, so I'm not saying that it doesn't accomplish the task. But it seems that there are more sloppy personas, and it seems that experts can more easily avoid summoning them by giving them context that reflects more mundane reality than a novice or an expert who gives little context. Otherwise the AI persona will be summoned from the Reddit midwit movie.

I'm not fully clear about all this, but I think we have a lot to figure out around how to use and judge the output of AI in a productive workflow. I don't think it will go away ever, but will need some trimming at the edges for sure.

Still, 40% of young adults have a tertiary degree (https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/09/education-at-a-...) while it's 47% in the US, so I wouldn't say it's a huge difference. And its not just a US thing, Denmark stands at 45%. So I wouldn't spin too big of a narrative around this.

Education is a field where decade after decade they try some new fad which is basically the old fad re-dressed and never really learn much. That's because teachers and their methodologies don't really have that big of an effect. A stable non-chaotic learning environment and access to the learning material though any kind of presentation, and books gets you to pretty much as good as it gets. To have a real effect, you need private tutoring for the gifted or very small groups of talent nurturing, which goes far beyond the default curriculum. But again, these don't fit the current zeitgeist, so they will keep on pushing "critical thinking" and "how to think", no matter how much they fail.

That is, it's very precious and interesting to you, but it really isn't to anyone else. This is true about generated text, images and songs. I've generated a lot of what I think of as bangers with Suno but learned quickly that they have zero value to anyone else. Part of the value to me is the thrill and dopamine hits of having generated it. This simply doesn't translate to anyone else. It will take a while until society internalizes this.

This is not to say that AI can't have any role in the creative process. But the effort will be still high and original human thinking and intent and input is still very important.

Alternatively,if you don't care about scale, as in rolling out a system to the population at large, then yeah, this kind of advanced education exists, it's just very selective and is in advanced extracurricular or obtained through private tutors.

It's tending more and more towards pushing the user to treat the whole thing as a pure chat interface magic black box, instead of a rich dashboard that allows you to keep precise track of what's going on and giving you affordances to intervene. So less a tool view and more magic agent, where the user is not supposed to even think about what the thing is even doing. Just trust the process. If you want to know what it did, just ask it. If you want to know if it deleted all the files, just ask it in the chat. Or don't. Caring about files is old school. Just care about the chat messages it sends you.