From Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg, billionaires with no education expertise keep using their big names and big dollars to hype LLMs for classrooms. Promising ‘comprehensive AI tutors', or just ‘educator-informed’ tools to address understaffed classrooms, this hype is just another round of Silicon Valley pointing to real problems -- under-supported school systems -- but then directing attention and resources to their favorite toys. Former educator and DAIR research fellow Adrienne Williams joins to explain the problems this tech-solutionist redirection fails to solve, and the new ones it creates.

Adrienne Williams started organizing in 2018 while working as a junior high teacher for a tech owned charter school. She expanded her organizing in 2020 after her work as an Amazon delivery driver, where many of the same issues she saw in charter schools were also in evidence. Adrienne is a Public Voices Fellow on Technology in the Public Interest with The OpEd Project in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation, as well as a Research Fellow at both (DAIR) and Just Tech.

References:

Funding Helps Teachers Build AI Tools

Sal Khan's 2023 Ted Talk: AI in the classroom can transform education

Bill Gates: My trip to the frontier of AI education

• Background: Cory Booker Hates Public Schools
• Background: Cory Booker's track record on education

Book: Access is Capture: How Edtech Reproduces Racial Inequality
Book: Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-Idealism

Previously on MAIHT3K: Episode 26, Universities Anxiously Buy Into the Hype (feat. Chris Gilliard)
Episode 17: Back to School with AI Hype in Education (feat. Haley Lepp)

Fresh AI Hell:

"Streamlining" teaching

Google, Microsoft and Perplexity are promoting scientific racism in 'AI overviews'

'Whisper' medical transcription tool used in hospitals is making things up

X's AI bot can't tell the difference between a bad game and vandalism

Prompting is not a substitute for probability measurements in large language models

Yet another 'priestbot'

Self-driving wheelchairs at Seattle-Tacoma International Airpot

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Emily

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Alex

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/@alexhanna
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Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

The company behind ChatGPT is back with bombastic claim that their new o1 model is capable of so-called "complex reasoning." Ever-faithful, Alex and Emily tear it apart. Plus the flaws in a tech publication's new 'AI hype index,' and some palette-cleansing new regulation against data-scraping worker surveillance.

References:

OpenAI: Learning to reason with LLMs

• How reasoning works
• GPQA, a 'graduate-level' Q&A benchmark system

Fresh AI Hell:

MIT Technology Review's AI 'AI hype index'

CFPB Takes Action to Curb Unchecked Worker Surveillance

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Emily

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Alex

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/@alexhanna
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Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.

Technology journalist Paris Marx joins Alex and Emily for a conversation about the environmental harms of the giant data centers and other water- and energy-hungry infrastructure at the heart of LLMs and other generative tools like ChatGPT -- and why the hand-wavy assurances of CEOs that 'AI will fix global warming' are just magical thinking, ignoring a genuine climate cost and imperiling the clean energy transition in the US.

Paris Marx is a tech journalist and host of the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us. He also recently launched a 4-part series, Data Vampires, (which features Alex) about the promises and pitfalls of data centers like the ones AI boosters rely on.

References:

Eric Schmidt says AI more important than climate goals

Microsoft's sustainability report

Sam Altman's “The Intelligence Age” promises AI will fix the climate crisis

Previously on MAIHT3K: Episode 19: The Murky Climate and Environmental Impact of Large Language Models, November 6 2023

Fresh AI Hell:

Rosetta to linguists: "Embrace AI or risk extinction" of endangered languages

A talking collar that you can use to pretend to talk with your pets

Google offers synthetic podcasts through NotebookLM

An AI 'artist' claims he's losing millions of dolalrs from people stealing his work

University hiring English professor to teach...prompt engineering

You can check out future livestreams at https://twitch.tv/DAIR_Institute.

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Emily

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Alex

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/@alexhanna
• Mastodon: https://dair-community.social/@alex
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/alexhanna.bsky.social

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park.
Production by Christie Taylor.