Andreessen Horowitz Launches AI/Company-Building School As a College Alternative (cbsnews.com) 119
TechCrunch quipped it was like if startup school Y Combinator and Peter Thiel's build-a-company-instead of-college Fellowship Program had a baby. Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is investing $35 million to launch a private school in San Francisco "aimed at turning high school graduates into founders," writes the SF Standard.
Or, as CBS News describes it, "One blue-chip Silicon Valley investor has a proposal for young people who are questioning whether to attend college — enroll in AI school instead...." Specifically, the academy will provide instruction geared to subjects such as designing AI systems, fundraising for startups, selling businesses and storytelling. Students won't take tests or be assigned homework but will instead focus on building real projects. Courses will be taught by tech entrepreneurs, with the academy naming OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as either an instructor or guest lecturer.
From the SF Standard: "There will be no traditional grades, tests, or homework," said the announcement. Instead, students will be encouraged to "build" in SF and work with partners from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, and other firms. They'll be encouraged to live in campus housing in San Francisco. "The #1 goal is to help students learn to build, which is the most important skill in the AI era," Gagan Biyani, chief executive of the academy, wrote on X. Biyani cofounded the ed-tech startup Udemy...
The school is opening applications for a Founding Class Fellowship a one-year, tuition-free program for around 50 students... The academy said it will bring in notable Silicon Valley names, like OpenAI's Sam Altman, as guest speakers and faculty. Students in the founding class will receive about $50,000 worth of computing credit — the sought-after currency in Silicon Valley to run AI models — as well as a $5,000 travel and research budget. The school is receiving funding from tech executives, including Fidji Simo, formerly of OpenAI and Instacart; Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator; and Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify.
"In the AI era, it's more important to come out with a portfolio of projects that you worked on and work experience than it is to have a diploma or certificate," Biyani told the San Francisco Chronicle: Biyani said the academy plans to grow its enrollment and open a two-year program, pending regulatory approval, starting in the fall of 2028. Tuition is expected to be on par with the cost of an elite private university...
The academy raised $42 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. The ten founding partners are Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit and Stripe. A network of hundreds of instructors, hiring partners and guest speakers includes OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, neuroscientist Andrew Huberman and Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, according to the academy's website.
The FAQ describes a typical week by saying "Most of your time is yours to build. Each week, you share your progress with peers and practitioners, get direct feedback, and decide where to take your work next."
Q: Can I use AI to help with my application?
A: Yes. Use AI the way you'd use it on any project: to move faster, test ideas, and get past a blank page....
"The best assignments now are problems so hard they cannot be solved without AI," Andreessen Horowitz argued on X.com. "The Academy courses follow the same logic and will be taught by world-class leaders... The next generation will not be taught the way the last one was. The Academy is built for that world, and it begins in San Francisco."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the news.
Or, as CBS News describes it, "One blue-chip Silicon Valley investor has a proposal for young people who are questioning whether to attend college — enroll in AI school instead...." Specifically, the academy will provide instruction geared to subjects such as designing AI systems, fundraising for startups, selling businesses and storytelling. Students won't take tests or be assigned homework but will instead focus on building real projects. Courses will be taught by tech entrepreneurs, with the academy naming OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as either an instructor or guest lecturer.
From the SF Standard: "There will be no traditional grades, tests, or homework," said the announcement. Instead, students will be encouraged to "build" in SF and work with partners from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, and other firms. They'll be encouraged to live in campus housing in San Francisco. "The #1 goal is to help students learn to build, which is the most important skill in the AI era," Gagan Biyani, chief executive of the academy, wrote on X. Biyani cofounded the ed-tech startup Udemy...
The school is opening applications for a Founding Class Fellowship a one-year, tuition-free program for around 50 students... The academy said it will bring in notable Silicon Valley names, like OpenAI's Sam Altman, as guest speakers and faculty. Students in the founding class will receive about $50,000 worth of computing credit — the sought-after currency in Silicon Valley to run AI models — as well as a $5,000 travel and research budget. The school is receiving funding from tech executives, including Fidji Simo, formerly of OpenAI and Instacart; Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator; and Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify.
"In the AI era, it's more important to come out with a portfolio of projects that you worked on and work experience than it is to have a diploma or certificate," Biyani told the San Francisco Chronicle: Biyani said the academy plans to grow its enrollment and open a two-year program, pending regulatory approval, starting in the fall of 2028. Tuition is expected to be on par with the cost of an elite private university...
The academy raised $42 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. The ten founding partners are Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit and Stripe. A network of hundreds of instructors, hiring partners and guest speakers includes OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, neuroscientist Andrew Huberman and Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, according to the academy's website.
The FAQ describes a typical week by saying "Most of your time is yours to build. Each week, you share your progress with peers and practitioners, get direct feedback, and decide where to take your work next."
Q: Can I use AI to help with my application?
A: Yes. Use AI the way you'd use it on any project: to move faster, test ideas, and get past a blank page....
"The best assignments now are problems so hard they cannot be solved without AI," Andreessen Horowitz argued on X.com. "The Academy courses follow the same logic and will be taught by world-class leaders... The next generation will not be taught the way the last one was. The Academy is built for that world, and it begins in San Francisco."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the news.
If a Blank Page Makes You Freeze (Score:5, Insightful)
Q: Can I use AI to help with my application?
A: Yes. Use AI the way you'd use it on any project: to move faster, test ideas, and get past a blank page....
If you can't handle a blank page, maybe, just maybe, you're not founder material.
Re:If a Blank Page Makes You Freeze (Score:4)
The short cut to avoid writer's block is stop being creative. The block is because you are attempting to come up with something in your own head. When all you really need in business are the ideas in other people's heads.
Vibe education (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vibe education (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vibe education (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Vibe education (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget to add this part in:
"There will be no traditional grades, tests, or homework,"
So... you're going to charge "elite university" rates, but hand out... two year tech certs? Not even an associate's degree? Nothing that can be leveraged into a later degree or an MBA?
Might as well drop that $200k of tuition (oh, plus fees and living expenses in their company dorm) on Beanie Babies or Furbys. Those at least are more wildly recognized.
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This reminds me of the opportunity in the 70s to get in on the ground floor of a new "Air Filtration System". I could elect to be paid salary or, the better option they said, by commission. Just attend the free training and sign up.
I found this was a tactic to recruit door-to-door salespeople for "Rainbow Vacuums".
** Rainbow vacuums basically married a shop vac with a bong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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The kids going to these schools will have parents so rich that they wouldn't need a degree to land a job at their daddy's company.
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" An expensive way to vibe educate yourself.
I dunno. It sounds like a pipeline to the Silicon Valley world. If that is the case, it is worth the tuition.
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" An expensive way to vibe educate yourself.
I dunno. It sounds like a pipeline to the Silicon Valley world. If that is the case, it is worth the tuition.
Maybe, but the whole thing reads more like a grift. At best, a very expensive associates degree.
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Reality (the stuff people are taught at regular universities) has a known left-wing bias, it's true.
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Reality (the stuff people are taught at regular universities) has a known left-wing bias, it's true.
Ummmm... Reality has a well known left-wing bias.
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Reality (the stuff people are taught at regular universities) has a known left-wing bias, it's true.
Ummmm... Reality has a well known left-wing bias.
I agree. But when it gets too far left, the ideology required starts getting as nutty as the far right.
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Reality (the stuff people are taught at regular universities) has a known left-wing bias, it's true.
It is more complicated than that. First, you have to define reality. But let's go with that first. What goes for left wing reality today is denial of physics. People who cannot tell what is a man, and what is a woman. Before people start going Reeee!, this denial of science, biology, and physics is the left wing equivalent of MAGA's immunization rejection for ivermectin treatments and shining UV light up one's anus. Where we have teh minister of health now looking at "chemtrails", actually contrails, prod
Re: Vibe education (Score:2)
Lolol you think your junior high school understanding of biology makes you qualified to determine who is reee? Your fear is the very definition of reeeeeeeeeee
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Lolol you think your junior high school understanding of biology makes you qualified to determine who is reee? Your fear is the very definition of reeeeeeeeeee
This isn't fear, it is the results of DNA biology. and by the way, you just went reeeee!. Not me. I have no issue if a person wants to dress and act as what they consider the other sex. Not my problem, and I won't bother them. But it is still playing dress up, Just the same as if I wear a toga, and that makes me a 100 AD Roman. So your understanding of biology trumps mine? Tell me that a man is the same thing as. a woman, and that if he says he is a woman, he is legally a woman.
You see, your ideology
Re: Vibe education (Score:2)
Ahhahahahhahah you appeal to biology while proving your ignorance of biology, please do double down so we can all point and laugh some more
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Ahhahahahhahah you appeal to biology while proving your ignorance of biology, please do double down so we can all point and laugh some more
And you appeal to your narrative, and engage in the pointless tactic of shaming. You Drinkypoo, are allowed to have your narrative, and if you want to believe you are a horse, or a seal, or anything that gives you purpose, but you are none of those, and trying to claim I am clueless about DNA, merely points out that you are perhaps not the juggernaught of knowledge you like to portray yourself as.
It really isn't rocket science, to use another hackneyed term, but it boils down to this as a nickel tour:
DN
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Are you going to make a RWNBA once the WNBA fills up with men? And then a ReallyReallyWomenNBA? Where does it end?
Is it not odd that many feminists demand genetic males in women's sports?
After all the years of trying to get away from the "tyranny of men", they are demanding to be placed under male domination and tyranny, with the only metric being the male saying he is a woman. Then he is a woman, and can play on their team.
The sad part is that while women do not have the athletic ability of men - as a generalization - sports are a wonderful thing for women. So what if they aren't quite as fast, or strong, or let'
Trading Grades for Slaves. (Score:5, Insightful)
"There will be no traditional grades, tests, or homework," said the announcement. Instead, students will be encouraged to "build" in SF and work with partners from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, and other firms. They'll be encouraged to live in campus housing in San Francisco.
"Encouraged" sounds a lot like mandated here. Speak honestly and clearly. Attendees either have a choice, or they do not.
I wonder how quickly those "founders" will realize all of a students rights to any "encouraged" ideas, designs, or products will be owned by the actual founders here.
You're more like..founder fodder.
"Founder Fodder" (Score:2)
The parent poster asks the most important question of all: How will the student's intellectual property rights be protected, or will they be protected at all? If the AI gets me off the "blank page", does it get a piece? Does this "school" for having provided it? Do the councillors for their suggestions?
The show Silicon Valley had an episode on "brain rape" (theft of intellectual property). This sounds like the same thing, but on a factory-farming scale.
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It doesn't matter what you can prove regarding ownership.
It only matters what you can afford to defend in court. And win.
At the speed of current litigation, your own defense lawyer would be coming back from their third Betelgeuse vacation by the time your court date would arrive to prove *you* in fact invented and own the rights to warp-speed travel.
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The parent poster asks the most important question of all: How will the student's intellectual property rights be protected, or will they be protected at all?
Better check the contract you signed at work. Every place I worked at had a place where you sign over rights to any invention of yours in perpetuity.
Now what does this mean? It means that if you invent something really worthwhile, there's going to be a hell of a battle. You can fight it pretty good if you can prove you developed it on your own time in your own place, without employer resources, But you better keep good documentation.
Now in reality, that doesn't happen too often. But it is there.
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This is not an employee/employer work relation, if anything the students are hiring the "school". If I rent space in a workshop they don't own what I build.
Kinda depends on what you sign, my man. We had student interns, and everything they worked on was contractually bound.
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Founder Fodder is Correct.
And potential students will likely not have to the critical thinking skills to avoid indoctrination into the cult.
Let's burn some karma here (Score:5, Insightful)
Specifically, the academy will provide instruction geared to subjects such as designing AI systems, fundraising for startups, selling businesses and storytelling. Students won't take tests or be assigned homework but will instead focus on building real projects.
I see this as mere indoctrination. Those who "succeed" after the course will support and renew the next generation of elitist anti-democratic oligarchic parasites ruining our societies and our planet. Those who make it all the way to the end and then don't end up as high-profile founders may nevertheless have been brainwashed into the master-slave mindset of the broligarchs. Those who drop out may or may not be useful members of society.
This isn't education at all - it's sane-washing, brain-washing, and hand-waving. Fuck Marc Andreessen and his fellow misAnthropic tech bros - not gently, sideways, and with a running chainsaw.
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That nicely sums it up.
Freedom to screw weaklings (Score:1, Flamebait)
I think you're making a good point, but Subjectively focusing on the karmic impact on yourself is too meta... You're taking too much credit because so many Slashdot identities have a minor reality problem these years?
So I want to tilt it to go for Funny-not-really.
There is more to education than learning how to love money harder and longer. Education is now learning to love money longer and harder.
I think the funniest part of Libertarianism as a fake philosophy is their lack of understanding of their own wo
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There is more to education than learning how to love money harder and longer. Education is now learning to love money longer and harder.
What happened to the "un-cut"? :-] (Not quite right for South Park, but close enough).
I think the funniest part of Libertarianism as a fake philosophy is their lack of understanding of their own worship words. At least I've yet to detect any deep understanding, but maybe it's my own confusion showing after too many decades of trying to understand such things. What it seems to come down to for Libertarians is something like "I should be free to do whatever I feel like doing to get more money and the only legitimate purpose of 'government' is to make sure the victims can't complain about any of my negative externalities."
Speaking as a former Libertarian, I think your analysis is pretty much correct. (What can I say? I was very young, and Rand was persuasive). Eventually I came to understand that she was not a philosopher by any stretch. She merely pulled a clever con: she turned a personal esthetic into an ersatz philosophy, then engineered a disingenuous inversion by claiming that the esthetic was the product of the pseudo-philosophy she
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There are several senses in which free beer should not be confused with freedom. The number kept changing as I thought about different angles, but I finally settled on four as "good enough".
But Slashdot in 2026 has no way to display the not equals sign. I've tried every trick I could think of. Time to ask the AI?
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Computer scientists, usually write "not equal" like this: !=
Or you could write !(a == b).
Works in most C-ish programming languages. Pascal uses a less sign and greater sign, I do not remember Apple Soft Basic :P
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Yep, nothing there. (Or in the Japanese bit down here...) There was actually a Japanese version of Slashdot for some years. Basically the same website, but with full Japanese capability.
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I think the Japanese web site is still there.
Did not visit it since 3 or 5 years, though.
Ooops: nope it is not.
Active Period: May 2001 â" March 31, 2025.
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I bet an AI told you that. I'm pert' shure it was shut down well before 2025. However that seems to be another special class of AI hallucinations. I recently asked several of them about when someone died, and I'm pretty sure the "most definitive" answer was off by about ten years, but it had tried to disguise the error by fudging the date of birth, too.
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I have been on it a bit more than a year ago. But I do not remember around when.
I doubt "AI" told me that, as you have to click "AI mode" to activate AI mode, which I only do when I do something that requires AI -I have a "free token pass", but no reason to abuse it.
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If an AI didn't tell you that, then I think your memory is playing tricks on you, because I was pretty sure that it was much more than a year ago when I first saw the domain squatting reply when I tried to visit slashdot.jp. That was my initial reaction, but...
So I decided to look into the topic with formerly reliable websearch. As regards the google, I don't think you are really avoiding AI by not asking for the explicit escalation. I'm convinced that all google search is now AI-contaminated to some degree
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No idea what your point with AI is.
In my mind: I was recently on slashdot.jp.
In reality it is about 2 years ago - and right now the site does not exist anymore.
So, somehow I lost track what you actually are about.
Well, I never used a a password on slashdot.jp, as I only glanced on it to check how much I can read - which is basically 10% of the Kanji :P
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I suppose my main point about AI would be that people want oracles and AI is just the latest version of that. I'm saying (or trying and failing to say) that's a bad idea, but don't feel like it's writing another summary of my latest experiment with Pearl Harbor and Midway... However, the AIs are changing so rapidly and one of the main objectives is to make them appear to be better oracles.
On slashdot.jp I could sort of read most of it, especially since it was largely echoing this website, but I can't write
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c/it's writing/it's worth writing/
Re: Freedom to screw weaklings (Score:1)
Sure, seems like with the blessedly secular higher education driving themselves crazy we will have all these different schools of thought dedicated to their own peculiar name for and interpretation of the nameless one popping up all over. Conservatives have been coming up with their own private education institutions for a while.
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Conservatives have been coming up with their own private education institutions for a while
And this is majorly because they abandoned those existing institutions due to not wanting to have to put their ideas up to scrutiny anymore, easier to just cry "bias! indoctrination! liberals!" instead of debating anymore. Conservatism was a core part of academia for a long time, the bedrock of conservative thought leadership was in academia, your Milton Friedmans, John Birch Society types, William F Buckley types. It wasn't really until Reagan brought the evangelicals to the forefront that it fell off so
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And this is majorly because they abandoned those existing institutions due to not wanting to have to put their ideas up to scrutiny anymore, easier to just cry "bias! indoctrination! liberals!" instead of debating anymore. Conservatism was a core part of academia for a long time, the bedrock of conservative thought leadership was in academia, your Milton Friedmans, John Birch Society types, William F Buckley types. It wasn't really until Reagan brought the evangelicals to the forefront that it fell off so much.
Tell two generations that academia and the arts and teaching is all useless and stupid and just for ivory tower egghead elites and then wonder why in a few decades you are a minority in all those areas.
I work in a University environment. The far left have significant power. They accuse the rest of the University of being far right. There are indeed far right people, They accuse the University of being communist breeding ground.
So while the standard accusations fly, y'all in here sound like taking your cynicism to completely unworkable levels.
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All I am doing is providing an explanation for why that is the case. It wasn't always this way and it doesn't have to stay that way, a monoculture of thought is never good but conservatives have to stop carrying around boulder sized chips on their shoulders and not participating.
You're the cynical sounding one here.
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All I am doing is providing an explanation for why that is the case. It wasn't always this way and it doesn't have to stay that way, a monoculture of thought is never good but conservatives have to stop carrying around boulder sized chips on their shoulders and not participating.
You're the cynical sounding one here.
No, your narrative simply cannot figure out what to do with me. Define conservative first, Let's make no mistake. Rather than having a narrative of what I am told I believe, I think about exactly what I am told to believe. So some of my opinions are decidedly left sounding, I support abortion, I support universal healthcare. Sounds leftist, amirite?
Then again, I believe there are three sexes, male female, and a small group of intersex people. DNA serves as proof, and people of one sex demanding they a
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"No, your narrative simply cannot figure out what to do with me."
We're good here.
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"Let me tell you liberal circle-jerkers a thing or two"
*Proceeds to do every conservative circle-jerk talking point about colleges*
Nothing you said refutes what I said, in fact, it heavily reinforces it. Look at you you are bought-in, this could be a segment on Fox News anytime over the past 30 years.
Anti-intellectualism is the conservative brand. That and being weak "Wahh wahh, too many liberals, we can never be smart again"
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They're offended by everything while being unable to grasp the concept of building a career not starting at the top.
Oh - you mean the way DJT started out with nothing and clawed his way to the top?
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Agreed. Fuck the whole founder ideology. Kids have been duped into thinking they can become Instagram/TikTok influencers and be successful/sane/satisfied with life. Probably the same kids will fall for this whole founderism nonsense. When I accidentally stumble into a TED talk that I thought was a Tech Talk and the speaker asks "how many founders in here blah blah ... " I just have to watch to see what kind of bullshit they're selling.
A person CAN run a company and title themselves "CEO @ Self-Employed" but
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Nintendo Digitech 2.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm an oldhead programmer (still) in the games industry. You're thinking of DigiPen. (I didn't go there.)
Re:Nintendo Digitech 2.0 (Score:4, Interesting)
Not the OP but you are right, I also as a kid thought it would be wild to go there (parents did not agree with the costs so I didn't).
DigiTech is the guitar pedal company famous for the Whammy pedal (used in like every RATM solo)
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There were a few private for-profit universities that most professionals looked down on. DigiPen and Full Sail are the only ones I remember. Games companies could be pretty snooty about who they would bother to interview. Most hires were from other studios with games already published. I was also in the music industry and Full Sail was seen as a place for people who didn't have the intelligence or creativity to figure out how to use computers and machines without instruction. Do you want to be a mix enginee
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Yeah, I know what you mean. I just did it the easy way - dropped out of university, eventually move to Montreal where it was almost *difficult* to be a programmer and not end up at a game studio. Thankfully the industry grew in Toronto as well and I was able to move back after some lovely years there.
that doesn't bode well for the future (Score:2)
it's just a pipeline for techno-oligarchs
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Sounds like a very bad idea (Score:4, Insightful)
But I am sure some people will think this is just excellent and they totally have to do it.
Re:Sounds like a very bad idea (Score:5, Funny)
"But I am sure some people will think this is just excellent and they totally have to do it."
A bit like Trump university.
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Yes, exactly.
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a one-year, tuition-free program for around 50 students [...] Students in the founding class will receive about $50,000 worth of computing credit [...] as well as a $5,000 travel and research budget.
That said, let's be serious for a moment - The real implied payoff here is access to "A network of hundreds of instructors, hiring partners and guest speakers includes OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, neuroscientist Andrew Huberman and Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella".
Of course, that's really just going to be for the "Founding" class hand-picked (and largely sired) by those same big names. By the time suckers are signing up to pay for that access, the school will be just an
Pinocchio Pleasure Island Business Model? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pinocchio (Pleasure Island): [wikipedia.org] A mysterious Coachman hires Honest John to find disobedient and naughty boys for him to take to Pleasure Island, a notorious and infamous place. Honest John, despite the legal risks and the Coachman's implication of what happens to the boys, accepts the job out of fear, and finds Pinocchio, persuading him to take a vacation on Pleasure Island. On the way to the island, Pinocchio befriends Lampwick, a delinquent boy. At Pleasure Island, without rules or authority to enforce their activity, Pinocchio, Lampwick, and many other boys soon engage in vices such as vandalism, fighting, smoking and drinking. Jiminy eventually finds Pinocchio in a bar smoking and playing pool with Lampwick, and the two have a falling out after Pinocchio defends Lampwick for his actions. As Jiminy tries leaving Pleasure Island, he discovers that the island hides a horrible curse that transforms the boys into donkeys after making "jackasses" of themselves, and they are sold by the Coachman into slave labor.
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Hey you're right, the parallels are uncanny. The visceral horror I felt when I first saw that scene is very appropriate for this whole endeavor.
I remember the infomertials (Score:2)
Back in the day, there were so many TV ads seminars on how to get rich the same way as the presenter/author.
We have done the younger generation a huge disservice making them believe that anyone can be rich and successful by simply wanting it bad enough.
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Back in the day, there were so many TV ads seminars on how to get rich the same way as the presenter/author.
We have done the younger generation a huge disservice making them believe that anyone can be rich and successful by simply wanting it bad enough.
Ain't that the truth! We see a lot of that embittered crowd in here. Utterly damaged young people, so cynical they aren't going to ever be successful. So angry, yet they have forgotten the only constructive outlet for anger is the revenge of becoming successful.
Affirmations and manifestation, which is what they were taught was the path to success, is actually kind of a lazy concept.
They've been focussed on the exceptional tiny minority of people who became wealthy at a young age as the standard. The
It's a class on how to (Score:5, Informative)
suck up to venture capitalists.
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Venture capitalists don't want a suck up. They want you to say the right words to convince them that they can make a lot of money off you.
P.S. name drop time, I once drank scotch with Marc. I brought Balvenie PortWood 21 and DoubleWood 12 to celebrate a release milestone with my team, and he was able to stop by and hang out with us. (I don't recommend Caribbean Cask 14, I almost brought that and glad I waited to try it first)
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And then the TOOL became the thing (Score:5, Interesting)
A tool is an item used to in some way ease the required function. A jack lifts the car so a wheel with a good tire can replace the bad one without waiting for Arnold to come by and lift the vehicle. A table-saw cut a 2" x 12" into 2" x 4" and gets you less knotty non-warped boards for a better cost and better product. A cordless drill let's you pre-drill (that's "drill before you drill") and then drill for the head (countersink), then power a screw into it -- all without picking up a screwdriver.
AI, like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreeson are TOOLS. They are of no value until used, must be handled carefully because they can overpower the wrist, and must be properly prompted to get useful results.
However, the tool is not education. Learning to use a tool does not educate beyond exactly that. If you want to be a woodworker, for example, knowing how wood grows, is lumbered, felled, milled, etc. will explain that whole twoby thing and knots. Learning how to run a woodmill or be a tool like Thiel or Andreeson won't.
So yeah, maybe it's time to dumb down America (really the US pretending it's a continent) further. Instead of teaching about slavery, Jim Crow laws, emancipation, LGBTQ+, SCOTUS, the US Constitutions, and our laws... let's just teach how our current ubermasters want us to use their tools.
Peter Thiel is a forum-shopping free-speech hater who killed Buzz because he's gay and hates himself.
Marc Andreeson has money from once backing a good pony (Mozilla) with money he didn't earn. Now he tells others how awesome he is.
Why not just call Donny Trump (Jr or Sr) to join in this miserable group of losers? Remember, group, they may have money, but they're still tools.
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While I might not particularly like Thiel, killing Gawker and it's variants was general plus for humanity.
Trade school for the AI age? (Score:1)
But expensive.
This guy invested in my previous company (Score:3)
Spoiler: It didn't go so well due to unchecked narcissism.
I'm tired boss (Score:2)
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I'm so tired of everyone trying to scam me. Everyone trying to get me to work harder for less and give them what little I have for nothing... /. has video ads now and they're scams because of course they are...
Such a victim.
Coding Boot Camp 2.0? (Score:5, Interesting)
This sounds a lot like the coding boot camps that were all the rage ~10 years ago. The initial ones were rigorous and funded by outside money that made them cheap. Eventually, you got a bunch of dodgy copycats charging too much money to turn out people with very questionable abilities.
Given the high-profile names associated and zero costs, it's probably a good deal for the initial class. A few will probably get rich. The rest can just go to college later. But let's not pretend this sort of model will be a sustainable alternative to college for the masses.
So... (Score:2)
Where do I sign up?!?!?!
Silicon Valley Reinvents College, but worse? (Score:2)
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Sounds like CEO school. (Score:2)
Year 2: Build the same thing, but use your networked investors (who also use someone else's money) to get to the point of a public IPO so you and your investor network can sell that 100x over valued slop to the public for a profit. At that point you can walk away or keep it going while issuing yourself stock.
If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score:5, Insightful)
AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.
This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.
Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.
But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.
Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.
In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.
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At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.
This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situat
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Maybe writing a Shakespearean play with psychologically complex protagonists requires a creative human author who truly understands what what being human means, and not merely probabilities?
good wage slave (Score:2)
That's right, that's a good wage slave, keep the money printer running and bathroom breaks on your own time from now on.
How about something more useful... (Score:2)
Like spending that same money to build vocational schools for the skilled trades that are in short supply. I know...not as cool and exciting, but I think we need 10,000 more welders a lot more than we need 10,000 more tech bros.
Accreditation... I'm reminded of ITT... (Score:2)
Thie key thing is accreditation. Ages ago, even ITT was accredited. When that was lost with the "show cause", the money earned for the degree becomes worthless.
Same with this AI school. You can teach what you want, but without having the seal of approval by some internationally vetted boards, the degree or certificates are not worth much, and we already have had students pummeled into the ground by one wave of student loan debt, so people are not really looking to go into the educational sector for anyth
Bringing back the 'guild' concept? (Score:2)
This sounds like an apprenticeship program.
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This sounds like an apprenticeship program.
Apprenticeship's are actually a very good thing. Or it might be said that not having a pipeline is a very bad thing. Once upon a time, I could have had an apprentice to learn about what I do. After the bean counters took over (seriously, we went from there of them to the largest single department in the institute, around 150 Bean counters) they just sucked up all the overhead.
So 5 years before I retired, I told them I was retiring at 55. That they better figure out what to do post me. Every year I told t
Trump U, 2.0? (Score:2)
That's what it sounds like. You pay, you get to play around with AI that you could have played with not paying, and get a useless piece of paper that means that you paid, and no prospects of a job.
As opposed to every other private school (Score:1)
Priority inversion (Score:2)
I have no idea what Biryani is on about, but if the goal is for the student to actually learn something, 50k for research and 5k for tokens would make far more sense.