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Which universities aren't commercial and about cashflow?
All universities outside of the US Edit: Apparently not. Thanks for the insight, I stand corrected. I really should think twice before posting!
I just had a pretty amazing 4 hour session with gpt 5.1 going over my son's rare disease. Chat broke it all down for me in a really deep and clear way in the back and forth. Insights I've never gotten to from talking to docs, reading papers, reading bio textbooks etc. I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated, but if you want to call it a teacher/student relationship, it was pretty amazing.
Which percentage?
And how important/misleading was that particular percentage?
(As an aside, personally, I precent the term 'bullshits' to 'hallucinating'; the latter is the daft Silicon Valley term.)
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All universities outside of the US Edit: Apparently not. Thanks for the insight, I stand corrected. I really should think twice before posting!
Plenty of US colleges and universities are primarily about education and/or research, even today. Far from all, to be sure—and some are primarily about connections and the school name (primarily Ivies), rather than any of the above.
I shouldn't say it so simply, it might result in attempts to convolute it to distract from the fact that bureaucracies serve to maintain revenue/income and grow it.
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In person lectures delivered one way can be pretty non-social and non-interactive as well.
I think @exitb is referring to how it's harder to interact with other students after the lecture is over in a remote course. There's a lot less likely hood to strike up conversation.
Looking beyond it for a second, We see students carrying portable communication devices connected to social networks to follow algorithm curated feeds instead of interacting with humans.
Maybe there's a way to use an internet forum or something.
If you can't do it better than an LLM, you have no more value than one to an employer.
In short, it's shameful to provide a paid primarily-LLM-based product. People can just make those themselves with minimal effort and zero cost.
AI will continue to stratify education. The typical student will get AI generated course content by the cheapest models. Other children will spend $1000s/month on multimodal AI tutors spinning up Python code to check their math homework. Those students will easily surpass others without individualized support.
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There's no problem with that. It's when you take that conversation you just had, make it into a PowerPoint, and try to sell it for 10000x what you spent on the credits that it really becomes lazy. Why expect anyone pay for that when they could have just asked the AI themselves?
I mean, to be fair, a lot of economic activity is like that. Why pay thousands of dollar for a plumber or an electrician? Most of what they do is going to Home Depot, buying a $15 part, and replacing it. But it's one less skill for a homeowner to learn, so you delegate. The problem isn't that someone learns to prompt AI and is selling the output. The problem is that the customer thinks they're paying for human instru…
> I mean, to be fair, a lot of economic activity is like that. Why pay thousands of dollar for a plumber or an electrician? Most of what they do is going to Home Depot, buying a $15 part, and replacing it. But it's one less skill for a homeowner to learn, so you delegate.
That's not what you pay the plumber for. You pay the plumber for the training and years of experience needed to 1) correctly diagnose the issue and identify the part to replace, 2) install it correctly so it won't fail in 10 years, and 3) do it all efficiently with a minimum of collateral damage. It's not practical for a homeowner to develop that level of skill without becoming a plumber themselves. A homeowner can do a lot, but even with YouTube there will be a lot of deficiencies in all those areas compared to someone who knows what they're doing.
AI can help with content generation or scaffolding, but teaching is still a bidirectional feedback process. When the model can’t adapt to misunderstanding or context, students immediately feel the gap. It’s a UX failure more than a “should AI be allowed” issue
We don't talk enough about AI as a vehicle for what's essentially austerity.
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Are Polytechnics not considered universities in Europe? RPI (Rensalear Polytechnic Institute) or CalPoly (California Polytechnic Institute) for example in the US are just normal universities, usually with more of a technical, engineering focused. But they are essentially the same "level" as a university.
The UK collapsed the poly/uni distinction thirty or so years ago, as it was seen as a source of class discrimination.
It was more about reducing budgets. That Conservative government was not filled with class warriors. Oh, how times have changed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Further_and_Higher_Education_A...