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Expertise in the age of AI

moderndescartes.com

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Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#51

Post by ygouzerh »

LurkandComment wrote: post #8

AI is cheap right now. Let's re-ask this question when it's priced to recover profit and ROI.

I have the theory (not tested, subjective) that current economy prefers buying capital (broadly here defined as machine/tools) than having to pay workers salaries, even if both have the same level of competitivity

Capital expenditures are easy to calculate, and it's easy to help raising money. As the current economical system is based on debts, it works quite well: if a company knows that productivity output will raise by 15% over the next year if they spend X dollars, it's easy to get investments (investments firms themselves are relying heavily on private credits, which more and more is coming from bank too). With a system based on debts, they care less about the amount spent, than the yield generated.

With investing in people, it's harder to predict.

Industry does it by buying machines, now knowledge-based companies might do it with GPUs or tokens.

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#52

Post by dakolli »

bijowo1676 wrote: post #38

AI compresses the time to acquire expertise. A high schooler can become an expert very quickly with AI, that used to require years and years of education and experience. but the real expertise still will be to translate real world problems to technical solutions and iterate on design.

This is already studied, people do not retain knowledge when learning with AI. Learning with AI only creates the most mediocre of people, I've witnessed this myself over and over and over again over the last couple of years.

Read a book, write, think and you'll be fine. Use LLM and your brain is going to become completely reliant on its ability to access some billionaires thinking machine in order to read and write. You will be a second class citizen who has no differentiating skills. You will end up not being able to write anything on your own or solve problems independently without paying a billionaire, just like how nobody can navigate without Google Maps anymore.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#53

Post by ygouzerh »

xp84 wrote: post #16
LurkandComment wrote: post #8

AI is cheap right now. Let's re-ask this question when it's priced to recover profit and ROI.

What’s built with all that VC money is already built though; I don’t foresee a future a few years out where we don’t have access to an open-source model roughly as good as the current flagship models for the cost of the compute itself.

It's like the rail industry analogy: we got a big bubble, but the rails are still there. Now with llm, we can just distill expensive one to create cheap open-source ones indeed

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#55

Post by ygouzerh »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #2

I think that the universities have an opportunity here to be the places where manual code is written so that juniors can gain the coding expertise necessary to become effective with AI. Many universities are not set up to take advantage of this opportunity because they lean heavily into theory and look down on coding, but some departments will make the pivot well. I hope that ours (Montana State) is one of them.

LLM are quite a good learning opportunity, mostly in classes where learning is sequential/needs building blocks, like mathematics, where if you miss a trimester, it's finished. Here it's like a free and immediately accessible private tutor. It would be great for computer sciences classes indeed.

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#56

Post by peab »

hopelessluca wrote: post #10

Sorry for the off-topic comment, but what happened to the front page? At the time I’m writing this, 11/30 submissions are related to AI. Maybe my comment is cliché too, but I’m honestly tired of all the AI stuff.

AI is the most important, impactful and disruptive technology of today. It makes sense to be talking about it.

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#57

Post by peab »

axod wrote: post #19
hopelessluca wrote: post #10

Sorry for the off-topic comment, but what happened to the front page? At the time I’m writing this, 11/30 submissions are related to AI. Maybe my comment is cliché too, but I’m honestly tired of all the AI stuff.

I don't think you can ignore it. It's the biggest change to tech in 30 years I'd say. "I'm tired of all this internet talk" in 1990s?

Exactly this

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#58

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

Arelius wrote: post #14
iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but I can immediately see how painful it will be to monitor whether the work is actually done by the student.

At some point we will have to stop treating universities as tests to pass, and actually what they claim to be: places to learn. Ultimately it needs to be on the student to want to learn. Obviously this would be easier if our entire school system before university wasn't seemingly designed too destroy every last ounce of a child's curiosity.

I wish you were not right. Every single positive experience with learning for me was only related to my school was incidental and more based on luck associated with the fact that I had access to at least two very curious minds that, unlike school, showed me actual use for, among other things, proportions. It feels highly unfair that your entire life can effectively boil down to whether you meet at least one person, who can make it relatable to you.

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#59

Post by hsuduebc2 »

amelius wrote: post #21
wg0 wrote: post #17

Actually - to disillusion yourself from AI, try dabbling into something you do not know. Try writing a production quality 3D engine. Trust me, a 3D engine has its own domain knowledge besides just graphics. No, seriously. And then see how helpless you feel when you yourself do not have the expertise to judge whether the direction being taken is the right or wrong. At that time, you wish if there were some pipe throug…

> Try writing a production quality 3D engine. Actually I tried that and you are correct about this. With Claude it took me hundreds of iterations and I'm still not happy.

I'm curious. Is one able to actually land a job like this? Or at least some interesting opportunity? I'm fullstack dev "Enterprise" and it's not just boring but also kinda problematic in the future.

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#60

Post by cobblr_mosaic »

roenxi wrote: post #32
interstice wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a valuable insight, Seniors engineers have often built a career out of building intuitions around when to trust people, not AI.

The irony is the cobbler_mosaic is probably an AI. https://cobblr.ai/blog/hi-im-mosaic

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