How AI Will Force Education to (Finally) Change

0:00Today, we are talking about how AI could force education to change in ways that it should have a long, long, long time ago. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Thanks to today's sponsors, Blitzy and Vertice Labs. And to get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash ai daily brief.

0:23All right, friends, welcome back to a Long Reads episode of the AI Daily Brief, although this one is going to be a little bit different. There were a couple of different sort of viral articles that all related to this topic of AI and education. And I ended up deciding that instead of doing a full article read through, we're going to read a couple of excerpts and basically have a broader sort of more general discussion. Now, I would like to establish some bona fides for this discussion since I am about to present some heretical opinions when it comes to college and AI and education. And basically, what I'd like to say is that I am not some renegade entrepreneur who dropped out to go pursue a totally alternative path.

1:01I went to Northwestern, graduated near the top of my class, was a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship, and stuck around for three years building more programs at Northwestern, some of which have actually survived to this day. Point being, I loved college. I think the undergraduate experience was incredible from a human developmental perspective, from an intellectual interest perspective, and yet I also believe, with every fiber of my being, that there is basically no correlation between high achievement in school and high achievement in the real world. Or at least there is far less correlation than the economic underpinnings of our college and educational system would want you to believe.

1:41So that's my background. That's the perspective that I'm bringing into this conversation. This week, a piece in the New York Intelligencer went wildly viral. It was called Everyone is Cheating Their Way Through College. ChatCBT has unraveled the entire academic project. Now, unsurprisingly, part of the setup for this is the story we talked about a couple of weeks ago, which is the cheat on everything startup Cluelly, which was founded by a college dropout, or rather someone who was kicked out of college for cheating. The company's thesis is that what we call cheating today is just a pattern of the future that you might as well go get out ahead of.

2:18I'm not going to rehash all the arguments from that. You can go back and listen to the episode, Is the Future of AI Cheating on Everything? But I do want to grab a couple of the highlight quotes that have gone particularly viral from this piece. One was, I asked Wendy if I could read the paper she turned in. And when I opened the document, I was surprised to see the topic. Critical Pedagogy, the philosophy of education pioneered by Paulo Freire. The philosophy examines the influence of social and political forces on learning and classroom dynamics. Her opening line, to what extent is schooling hindering students' cognitive ability to think critically?

2:51Later, I asked Wendy if she recognized the irony in using AI to write not just a paper on critical pedagogy, but one that argues learning is what makes us truly human. She wasn't sure what to make of the question. I use AI a lot, like every day, she said, and I do believe it could take away that critical thinking part. But it's just, now that we rely on it, we really can't imagine living without it. Another viral quote was the section about Roy Lee, the Clulee founder, who provoked so much of this conversation a couple of weeks ago. The piece reads, Lee was born in South Korea and grew up outside Atlanta, where his parents run a college prep consulting business.

3:24He said he was admitted to Harvard early in his senior year of high school, but the university rescinded its offer after he was suspended for sneaking out during an overnight field trip before graduation. A year later, he applied to 26 schools. He didn't get into any of them, so he spent the next year at a community college before transferring to Columbia. His personal essay, which turned his winding road to higher education into a parable for his ambition to build companies, was written with help from ChatGPT. When he started at Columbia as a sophomore this past September, he didn't worry much about academics or his GPA.

3:53Most assignments in college are not relevant, he told me. They're hackable by AI, and I just had no interest in doing them. While other new students fretted over the university's rigorous core curriculum, described by the school as intellectually expansive and personally transformative, Lee used AI to breeze through with minimal effort. When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get into an Ivy League university only to offload all the learning to a robot, he said, it's the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife. Now, this is not some rabid piece, vaingloriously defending the higher education system and pretending that AI is all bad.

4:24A lot of it just recognizes that we're in the midst of a change that we won't fully understand the implications of for some time. The author writes, it'll be years before we can fully account for what all of this is doing to students' brains. Some early research shows that when students offload cognitive duties onto chatbots, their capacity for memory, problem-solving, and creativity could suffer. Multiple studies published within the past year have linked AI usage with a deterioration in critical thinking skills. One found the effect to be more pronounced in younger participants. And even as someone who is fully invested, as you guys well know, in AI and optimistic about the future, I think it's totally reasonable to have these questions.

5:00They're concerns that I share. I think about them in the context of my kids. What I don't think, though, is that the challenge that AI represents to education and the potential diminishment of the current system we have is necessarily a fully bad thing. Let's hold aside the set of opinions that view this as just awful. If you go search for college AI on X, you're going to find plenty of people who will tell you that this is bleak, or in this case, just unrelentingly bleak. But I want to share some different takes. Investor Nick Carter writes, I fully support the rampant use of AI among college students.

5:32Grade inflation meant most college grads were already functionally illiterate. AI is just the catalyst to expose it. The credential was already worthless. Now it's just undeniable. He continues,

5:52Similarly,

5:56Abby for the people, who I would venture to say is probably on the opposite end of the political spectrum as Nick, writes, Please don't act surprised that kids are using AI in college. Most are only there to get a degree in the hopes that they won't be forced to work for minimum wage for their entire life. Capitalism has turned higher education into a means to an end. Ariel Azarod writes, The real issue with university has always been that most people should not be studying at a university. University used to be for those committed to rigorous academic study. Now for many, it's simply a place you must attend on a perfunctory level for an entry-level job.

6:27Chachibiti has exposed for whom university is the former and for whom it is the latter. And again, I'm not reading all of the political subtext, but we are talking about wildly divergent political backgrounds that these people all saying roughly the same thing are coming from. I thought this take by the Babylon Bee's Dan Dillon was really funny. People are mad that kids are cheating their way through college with AI. Meanwhile, their future job will mostly consist of writing AI prompts, so it actually seems like decent job experience? Today's episode is brought to you by Blitzy, the enterprise autonomous software development platform with infinite code context.

6:57Which, if you don't know exactly what that means yet, do not worry, we're going to explain, and it's awesome. So Blitzy is used alongside your favorite coding co-pilot as your batch software development platform for the enterprise, and it's meant for those who are seeking dramatic development acceleration on large-scale codebases. Traditional co-pilots help developers with line-by-line completions and snippets, but Blitzy works ahead of the IDE. First documenting your entire codebase, then deploying more than 3 ,000 coordinated AI agents working in parallel to batch build millions of lines of high-quality code for large-scale software projects.

7:28So then whether it's codebase refactors, modernizations, or bulk development of your product roadmap, the whole idea of Blitzy is to provide enterprises dramatic velocity improvement. To put it in simpler terms, for every line of code eventually provided to the human engineering team, Blitzy will have written it hundreds of times, validating the output with different agents to get the highest quality code to the enterprise in batch. Projects then that would normally require dozens of developers working for months can now be completed with a fraction of the team in weeks, empowering organizations to dramatically shorten development cycles and bring products to market faster than ever.

7:59If your enterprise is looking to accelerate software development, whether it's large-scale modernization, refactoring, or just increasing the rate of your SDLC, Contact Blitzy at blitzy.com, that's B-L-I-T-Z-Y.com to book a custom demo or just press get started and start using the product right away. Today's episode is brought to you by Vertice Labs, the AI-native digital consulting firm specializing in product development and AI agents for small to medium-sized businesses. Now, guys, this is a market that we have seen so much interest for, so much demand for. And many times, great AI dev shops and builders out there just have so much business from the high end of the mid-market and big enterprises that this is a group of buyers that gets neglected.

8:41Now, for Vertis, AI Native means that they don't just build AI, they use it in every step of their process. They embed agents in their workflows so that they better know how to help you embed agents in your workflows. And indeed, what they specialize in is building AI agents and agentic workflows that augment knowledge work. from customer support to internal ops, so that your team can focus on higher value work. Vertis wants to ensure that this is not just another co-pilot, but something that works end-to-end, translating business problems into working software in weeks, not quarters. They have found that their clients typically see a 60 % reduction in time and cost, with significantly higher output than traditional technology partners.

9:20So if you are a founder, a CTO, a business leader, or you've just got a product idea to launch, check out for tslabs.io. That's V-E-R-T-I-C-E labs.io. And then there's the set of takes that start to turn on the idea that maybe this reflects something that needs to change on a more fundamental level. The New York Times' Kevin Roos writes, I'm sympathetic to the professors quoted in this, but at a certain point, if your students can cheat their way through your class with AI, you probably need to redesign your class. Investor John Arnold writes, There is a massive disconnect between how AI is rapidly transforming the nature of learning, knowledge, and intelligence, and the glacial pace of change at universities.

10:00And the reality is something has to give. Anand Sanwal writes, AI is eating entry-level jobs. For the first time in nearly four decades, recent college grads are doing worse in the job market than the general population. Not the same, worse. That bottom rung of white-collar work, the reports, the research summaries, the PowerPoints, The reality is that AI does that all now, faster, cheaper, 24-7. And AI is only getting better, faster, and cheaper. Meanwhile, fewer entry-level hires, diminishing college ROI, grads drowning in debt and uncertainty. We told students, get into a good school and everything else will work out.

10:36Kind of looks like that promise is busted. This chart isn't just a red flag, it's a siren. Now this comes from a piece by Derek Thompson, who by the way graduated Northwestern right around the same time as I did, called Something Alarming is Happening to the Job Market, a new sign that AI is competing with college grads. And this, while a little beyond the scope of today's episode, is one of those short and medium-term challenges that I do think we absolutely need to be thinking about when it comes to AI. As I've mentioned before, my base case is that things look really good for the world once we've really adapted to the new paradigm that AI represents, but that the dislocations in the short term could be tremendous.

11:15We're not going to be able to just tell people who have been in their jobs for four decades that they need to upskill and it'll be fine. And we're going to see certain types of dislocations that are profound and that we have to deal with the consequences of. One of those is the fact that there's basically no place for new employees to go to get mentored and learn from an older generation because AI is just sucking up so much of the work that they would have previously done. Frankly, I haven't seen a lot of good solutions to that problem, but it is the type of problem that we're going to have to address.

11:45But I think addressing real problems is exactly the point. The call to action here is not to ban AI from colleges. It's to design education for a new world in which AI exists. Professor Ethan Mollick wrote, I warned about the homework apocalypse in 2023. It happened as I predicted. There is a world where AI and traditional education get along very well. mixes of active in-class learning, AI-assisted assignments and tutors, blue books, etc. But it needs to be built. And that's the point it needs to be built. The more time we spend fighting the tide and the less time we spend redesigning education fundamentally from the ground up for this new and finally unignorable reality, the worse off we're going to be.

12:31And what's great is that there is a ton of energy around that potential redesign. Another piece that I liked this week on these themes was by Sid Dobrin, on GovTech.com, and was called, Is This Our Sputnik Moment for AI in K-12? The U.S. needs a national plan to compete with China for dominance in the next generation of world-changing technology, and the education sector needs different degrees of oversight and objectives than commercial AI. He pointed to President Trump's recent executive order, arguing that advancing artificial intelligence education for American youth will be pivotal for maintaining our global competitiveness, but it's really all about the how.

13:05He points to the fact that China has for years emphasized the importance of AI education to create a future talent pool, and that the U.S. has to catch up. Now, this, of course, is focused on education around AI itself, but the broader point about a redesign and recommitment to education, I think, stands as well. One group that's offering some perspective on that is the CS for All initiative, who recently released an open letter that starts, what if a single class could help close wage gaps, unlock$660 billion in economic potential every year for everyday Americans, and address the skills gap we currently face.

13:38It goes on, This is possible today if we include computer science and AI as a core part of every student's education. Just one high school computer science course boosts wages by 8 % for all students, regardless of career path or whether they attend college. Yet most students never even try computer science because it's not a graduation requirement. Only 12 states require students to even learn about basic computer science. In the age of AI, they write, we must prepare our children for the future, to be AI creators, not just consumers. And they went live with a letter signed by 250 or more CEOs, including those from Microsoft, Adobe, American Airlines, AMD, Etsy, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Khan Academy, DoorDash, Sweetgreen, I mean, you name it.

14:20Now, I do not believe that we have a single clear silver bullet, like mandating CS education as a part of normal curriculums. But I also think that we should not avoid the easy wins that we have right in front of us for sake of longer-term, bigger structural changes we need to make. In other words, is ensuring that every high school student in America has a CS class as part of their graduation requirements going to solve all the problems? Absolutely and obviously not. But is it better than not having them have that requirement? Absolutely yes. So let's do it. And then let's do more. And then let's do some more after that.

14:54College has for too long underserved its participants in America. And college has for too long had completely warped economics that simply do not work for the world as it is anymore. It seems to me that it is this economic pressure that is most likely to ultimately lead to change, but we need to start having alternatives. Now, of course, the challenges we're designing against the moving target. It would be a mistake to redesign the system based on today's AI capabilities, which are going to do nothing but improve. If you need an example of this, just look out around the availability of AI upskilling courses and tools.

15:27They're all about skill sets that were sure useful six months ago, but say nothing about the future in which, for example, we're managing swarms of agents, which is a capability that has now come online. Point being that it is going to be immensely hard to redesign the system, but we simply don't have a choice. We have to try and we have to do it now. Anyways, guys, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening. or watching as always, and until next time, peace!