AI will make our children stupid

AI will be a super-tutor for the curious and a tool to outsource all thinking for the incurious.

The job doesn't pay you to be curious. It pays you to get stuff done. Curiosity makes you jobless. Most of the Silcon Valley people who frequent this website larp as curious people, but are basically incurious status seekers.

Amen.

We need some curious people. Otherwise nothing gets discovered, including solutions to future problems.

We do. But the would-be modern nobility are quite happy with being a sort of feudal lord.

I don’t necessarily think you’re wrong, but I’m skeptical that the curious will really meaningfully learn from LLMs. There’s a huge gap between reading something and thinking “gee that’s interesting, I’m glad I know that now,” and really doing the work and deeply understanding things.

This is part of what good teaching is about! The most brilliant engaged students will watch a lecture and think “wow nice I understand it now!” and as soon as they try to do the homework they realize there’s all kinds of subtleties they didn’t consider. That’s why pedagogical well crafted assignments are so important, they force students to really learn and guide them along the way.

But of course, all this is difficult and time consuming, while having a “conversation” with a language model is quick and easy. It will even write you flowery compliments about how smart you are every time you ask a follow up question!

Fully expecting to get banned for my comment, but I'll just go on. Look at the silicon valley heroes and they're all business types. There's a few rare exceptions.

Curiosity as your only trait makes you jobless. Curiosity enough to learn something new can help you remain employed.

I mean, its totally possible to be curious about some things and less curious about others.

There's few things more annoying than a human that thinks it has the most accurate and up-to-date AI-level knowledge about everything.

> The job doesn't pay you to be curious.

YOUR job doesn’t pay you to be curious.

Well, you could say mine doesn’t either, literally, but the only reason I am in this role, and the driving force behind my major accomplishments in the last 10 years, has been my curiosity. It led me to do things nobody in my area had the (ability|foolishness) to do, and then it led me to develop enough improvements that things work really well now.

I find LLMs useful for quickly building mental models for unfamiliar topics. This means that instead of beating my head against the wall trying to figure out the mental model, I can beat my head against the wall trying to do next steps, like learning the lower level details or the higher level implications. Whatever is lost not having to struggle through figuring out the mental model is easily outweighed by being able to spend that time applying myself elsewhere.

This is assuming the current AI business model (losing lots of money). As with the internet as a whole, AI companies will probably be incentivized to waste your time and increase "engagement" as they seek revenue. At that point, AI will only be a good tutor if you're extremely diligent at avoiding the engagement bait.

yes and it will mostly depends on the culture / economy. if you create incentives for kids to explore ideas through LLMs they'll become very knowledgeable (and maybe somehow confident). otherwise it will be the tiktok of cognition.

10 bucks there will be a law to enforce exponential backoff so that you need to get good after a few questions before the LLMs delays things by an hour

I mean, think of all the people getting paid eight-digit compensation right now because they were curious about this dead-end deep learning stuff 15 years ago for no good reason!

Calm down. Hardly any drama except yours.

I'd be curious if jobs like yours are not on the tail side of the distribution. It's very common that in work groups, curiosity / creativity gets ignored if not punished. I've seen this even in small techies groups, there was a natural emergence of boundaries in which people don't get to think beyond (you're overstepping, that's not your role, you're doing too much). It seems a pavlovian reflex when leadership doesn't know how to operate without assigning roles.

I have some success by trying to explain something to an LLM, having it correct me with its own explanation that isn’t quite right either, correcting it with a revised explanation, round and round until I think I get it.

Sort of the Feynman method but with an LLM rubber duck.

You're right. Signing off for the day.

I couldn't resist... Like the kid at facebook who's buddies with Altman so gets to be a billionare? Like Altman himself (when did he enter the field again? Oh yea he was a crypto huckster). Like everyone I've ever met in the machine learning department? 95% of the people in that field are just following trends and good at winning that game. Call it sour grapes, but I'm just observing reality here. And everyone who thinks following fads = being curious is just doing the larp I described earlier. Moreover, everyone who thinks following fads keeps them safe from AI is deluding themselves. The AI of 2026 can do it better than you can.

Didn't Sam Altman write a "friend locator" app that sold for millions after (angrily) refusing to disclose how many users it had? Then it was summarily shut down after acquisition ... and turned out to have never had more than 500 DAU (though appreantly more registrations)

"Loopt"

> 95% of the people in that field are just following trends and good at winning that game.

That's the curiosity the parent was talking about. Like it or not, that's what got them to millions.

That's the larp I was talking about. Following fads and being a scammer is not curiosity in my book.

Quite telling that you're calling AI research scientists (which is who this thread is about, not Altman and friends) scammers, sour grapes indeed.

Yea, because I actually know many, and they're not good people. Also good job missing that this thread is about Altman and friends in addition to every one involved in it. Satvik here just thinks nobody on the internet with a grievance could possibly have any merit to their feelings.

No, you're the only one who brought up Altman (literally, ctrl-F "Altman" and your comment is the one that starts mentioning him), and either way, the vast majority of AI scientists are not personally connected to Altman or Zuck or whoever else you're talking about. If we're swapping anecdotes, I also know many and they're perfectly fine people, not sure what's bad about them, unless you literally think anyone working on AI is bad, in which case, I can't help you there. Just because you have a grievance doesn't mean it's justified, seems like it's some personal vendetta you have instead.

How are you trying to help me lol? I brought up Altman because he's one of the heroes of the AI movement. For some reason anything I add to the conversation isn't a part of it though.

So I know many bad people involved in it and you know many good people. I guess that's the end of it because I have no reason to trust what some random guy on the internet says over my own extensive real life experience.

> I guess that's the end of it because I have no reason to trust what some random guy on the internet says over my own extensive real life experience.

Yes, you are right, and that is the same for me when replying to you. Have a good day.

I stepped away from the keyboard to cool off and I just wanted to apologize for being a bit mean here. I am sorry. I did have a bad experience, but not everybody in any field is bad. Have a good day as well.

Thank you for apologizing, I appreciate it, this level of candor is why I stick around on Hacker News.