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by bijowo1676 23 days ago
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.

2 comments

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

This effect is certainly real, likely even the default, but it's not inevitable.

I had great results using AI to help my son study for his final exams in chemistry and math. We went through the review guide the teacher provided, he did the problems, I checked them, and I had Claude generate additional targeted problems as permutations of the ones he had difficulty with. He worked them and got more practice in exactly the areas he was weak.

I could have set these problems up myself, but it was much smoother to have Claude set them up and I validate them. It let him get a lot more reps in, in exactly the areas he _needed_ more practice, than he would have otherwise.

The key is that to learn you have to do the work. AI can help you figure out where you're weak and provide the wherewithal to get additional practice, and there's huge value there. But you have to lift the mental weights yourself.

I can (and do!) pay the power company a pittance to run a surprisingly strong local model on a little box next to my keyboard, that does a fine job. Maybe not as fine as the billionaires thinking machine, but good enough and often better. Given that fact, I consider reliance on LLMs as much of an "issue" as reliance on a computer.
not really sure how you're imagining AI sidesteps education and experience