tech
Universities should arm students with AI ‘eval’ powers
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TL;DR
- Young people feel they have little say in the concentration of power within AI companies.
- Universities are restricting AI in classrooms, hindering students' ability to understand and wield the technology.
- A better response is teaching students to use AI through a "loop" process of combining expertise, testing AI, and optimizing models.
- This "loop" offers a new kind of sovereignty, allowing organizations and individuals to stay in charge of their destiny in an AI world.
- Teaching this "loop" in classrooms builds real skills, such as systematic testing of model output, and holds AI models accountable.
- Students can create "evals" to measure AI model performance against their personal criteria, demonstrating their understanding and passions.
- The ability to design an eval requires existing expertise in a subject matter.
- The goal is for every student to leave university having built at least one eval of AI systems.
- The divide in the AI age is between those who can measure and bend AI to their purposes and those who cannot.
- Knowledge empowers people to be their own governors, and the "loop" is how individuals arm themselves with AI knowledge.