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Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

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Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#51

Post by danielbln »

pjc50 wrote: post #44
phkahler wrote: post #13

Maybe employers are just believing the hype from companies like OpenAI. The student responses seemed spot on to me. They need to learn the material and how to do their job, not chat with a bot.

There's a long history of schools teaching hyper-specific skills, like how to use a particular version of Word. Then the technology changes. Does anybody think that the state of AI is sufficiently stable that things taught to high school students will be valid by the time they enter the workforce? Is there even anything generalizable to teach? The big pitch for AI is that it's supposed to be able to understand natura…

The generalizable part is to not just trust blindly any information you come across, but to cross reference, disseminate, validate and evaluate. Students shouldn't be learning how to specifically use ChatGPT, but they should absolutely learn why auto regressive transformer expert systems will confidently lie, and how to avoid pitfalls while making use of the things that LLMs are actually good at. In the same way how we learned that Wikipedia alone is probably not a great source to rely on.

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#52

Post by jillesvangurp »

mschuster91 wrote: post #31
jillesvangurp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I expect people to know, be proficient with, and use all relevant tools available to them. Including AI; but not just AI. There are a lot of people trying to argue why they don't want/need to use certain tools. A job interview would be the wrong place to have that argument. A good, open interview question these days would be asking candidates how they are using AI in their work and what challenges they are f…

> Bonus points for generating most/all of the endpoints. Swagger has solved that one for years now. In any case I think it's foolish to have multiple competing "sources of truth"... in the worst case you have stuff written on your website/Confluence/wiki, some manually written docs on Dockerhub, a README in the repository, an examples folder in the repository, Javadoc-based comments on classes and functions, Swagger…

> Swagger has solved that one for years now.

I was referring to both the implementation and generating good/complete documentation strings for that, which is tedious and repetitive work. Obviously, I'm using openapi (aka. swagger); support for that is built into fastapi. That's one of the reasons I picked that.

The tests are also generated but I screened them manually and iterated on them with chat gpt (also test this, what about that edge case, etc.). I know how to write good tests. But generating them is a way better use of my time than writing them manually. Especially spelling out all the permutations of what can go wrong and should be tested and asserting for that. AIs are better at that sort of thing.

These are simple crud endpoint. I've written loads of them over the years. If you are still doing that manually, you are wasting time.

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#53

Post by danielbln »

pjc50 wrote: post #50
danielbln wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no need to be snide and dismissive. It is absolutely necessary to learn how to find, disseminate and evaluate information. If the tool of choice is a book index,AskJeeves, Google or ChatGPT - all of these require specific knowledge to get the most out of them. Where do you acquire that knowledge?

From the tool itself? Especially when the tools are so liable to change at zero notice. It's not the responsibility of the public education system to do product training for megacorps. (People who disagree with this: let's see your syllabus for AI 101 with the guarantee that all its contents will still be valid in 5 years time?)

That's where you generalize and teach students higher level concepts while merely referencing the tools de joure (same as Wikipedia before).

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#54

Post by EraYaN »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #21
u20241003 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn, I would be sending AI-generated pull-requests your way all day! Closing tickets left and right.

As long as those are good pull requests, more power to you. Why aren't you?

Mostly because most project ban you if you start auto generating PRs and patches or even issues. Most LLMs are just not good enough yet. We have seen this with curl and a bunch of other projects where LLMs were used to do security issue reporting and well the maintainers were not too happy talking to a bot that didn't know what the hell it was doing.

It's essentially a DoS attack on the maintainers.

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#55

Post by omg7584 »

kolinko wrote: post #22
kachapopopow wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are just really good without AI so I wouldn't immediately hard pass on them.

Perhaps if they are super specialised in one narrow niche. The moment they need to write code in a new language/framework/algorirhms/domain, they benefit tremendously from chatgpt. Or even just redacting their documentation entries. I’d say the main devs that don’t benefit is mid-level ones. Good enough to do some programming, but not good enough to figure out how to benefit from gpt.

It's interesting most of you equate being "good" with being able to close a lot of tickets.

I'd take a collegue with knowledge of the fundamentals and that knows how to ask the right questions - and when not to - over "produces a metric shit ton of code, but when asked doesn't actually know anything".

The first one might be slow and might be editing his, horrors or horros, documentation entries by hand, but that's because he is thinking and refining while he is doing it. He is not an automaton spitting out "work units".

After some contemplation he will wipe the whole project off the table, because in the grand scheme of things it doesn't pan out while collegue number two was busy generation a metric shit-ton of work units and being happy about his productivity.

No LLM will tell you that or more specifically, no LLM will tell you that if you don't know what to ask for in the first place.

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#56

Post by TrackerFF »

Also, the way I see it:

"AI skills" is comparable to what using a search engine was before.

You'd be absolutely amazed how many people still can't use search engines, other than the absolute bare basics of typing something into google, and giving up if the result isn't on top of page 1.

I've worked with plenty of (non-tech) people that are like fish out of water, when trying to find information. Just learning stuff like boolean opeators, searching for words in quotation marks, specifying which sites and dates to search for, is way beyond what most people know, or do.

Some goes for LLMs. There's a difference between prompts, and knowing what to ask for, and how to structure your questions.

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#57

Post by omg7584 »

lordnacho wrote: post #24
charlieyu1 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still remember people said fusion energy will be available in a few decades, in a few decades ago.

On the other hand, we actually do have a computer, with access to all knowledge, in our pockets, right now. EDIT. The point of the comment is not to say that you will in fact have all knowledge available. There's guidelines about how you're supposed to read here on HN. The point was that this device that people could only dream of a few decades ago actually became available. Maybe it's worth reminding people that you…

Yes and as it turns out, access to information wasn't the problem..

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#58

Post by DiscourseFan »

pjc50 wrote: post #48
DiscourseFan wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not that the language was "problematical," its just that the contents were more sensitive then I think they realized, and so they were held to account for the specificities of the language they used.

Like the Air Canada case? https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatb... You are potentially liable for the contents of your work emails. This includes if you put a stupid disclaimer at the bottom. People have gone to jail over the contents of chat . It's one thing to take notes on a criminal conspiracy and another thing to have the AI make one up and drop you in it because you didn't read the email…

Obviously I can't talk specifics, but no it wasn't that stupid. More like general negligence on their part.

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#59

Post by salawat »

TrackerFF wrote: post #56

Also, the way I see it: "AI skills" is comparable to what using a search engine was before. You'd be absolutely amazed how many people still can't use search engines, other than the absolute bare basics of typing something into google, and giving up if the result isn't on top of page 1. I've worked with plenty of (non-tech) people that are like fish out of water, when trying to find information. Just learning stuff l…

Most search engines don't even actually do raw boolean searching anymore in favor of NN powered NL voodoo that takes an entire planets worth of internet and reduces it down to maybe 200 of the wrong site. All because we can't have a representative index exposed to the public anymore.

Re: Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

#60

Post by dxbydt »

Onavo wrote: post #2

For the STEM students, what they need is statistics (with a focus on high level Bayesian and statistical learning theory, not just frequentist regression tricks) and differential equations. Then they can build AI. AI, or specifically deep neural network enabled machine learning, isn't some sort of magical black box solution with no weaknesses. (I will however admit that it is the best universal function approximator…

Throwing out units 6,7,8 is a horrible, horrible idea. That’s the only useful part of the curriculum. In fact, most of the rest of the sections are not even stat. They are just plain math. Rest of your suggestions are just plain wild. If there is some unicorn high schooler out there who meets your wild template - knows no calculus but knows rejection sampling and MH - I would like to see which foolish employer hires this clown.
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