It's definately helpful for machine learning folks to learn the classical statistical models and techniques (and terminology differences between the fields, in case you have to work with a stats major or read a stats paper), but stats models are quite different from machine learning models. The difference comes from whether or not you have to explain why the model works or whether it is enough for the model to perform well in testing. Statisticians insist on knowing the why and how - in machine learning its enough for it to get good results. Very few people (if any) know why ChatGPT works, even the best mathematicians get bogged down in unpacking the first transformer layer of the neural net, but there are like 10 of them and there are 10 feed-forward layers sandwiched in-between them. Each layer adds an exponential amount of complexity and changes everything. It wasn't "designed", it was discovered through trial-and-error - trying different things are seeing what worked - and then iterating on the best performing architectures. The algorithm evolved over time dating back to the perceptron of the 1970s and now its going to take over everything.

As for an 18 year old taking a degree in AI: I'm not so sure it's a good idea. By the time you graduate AI will be superhuman at AI research and will have taken your job before your first day. I feel a bit sorry for young people today, they are coming online into a world that's in a very weird state. I have no idea what advice to give them on what to study. Most leading AI experts say to take up a trade like plumbing, carpentry or electrician. These seem to be the last on the chopping block as manual dexterity seems to be the hardest problem for AI to solve (or humans are just very very naturally good at it for some reason).

AI is very useful for education, in particular providing a private one-on-one tutor for every student on any subject. Just because one time (out of ~100 million) it encouraged a suicidal teenager to go through with it (rather than talking them out of it), doesn't mean we should deny an entire generation of children access to a better education. I'm sure in the 80s some kid used their new pocket calculator to do the accounts of their illegal drug business. It doesn't mean we should ban pocket calculators for children. Banning AI for children would do severe damage to the future competitiveness of your country, as your next generation is going to be less-educated than the next generation of the countries that haven't.

The way the economy works is that everybody spends the majority of their time producing goods/services that they then trade with other people to get different goods/services. What happens when one person creates an army of robots that spends all day churning out those same goods/services, flooding the market with an abundance. There is no longer a need for everyone to spend the majority of their time producing goods/services, because the robot army has is already producing them all. But how does the guy with the robot army distribute those goods/services to everyone else (eg. so he doesn't get murdered by an angry mob). Why not just tax the guy 99% and divide up the cash into a universal income that people can use to buy the products/services from the robot guy? It's a little scary and weird that you only get your fixed universal income no matter how smart you are or how hard you are prepared to work, but if that universal income is high enough and you can afford all your needs/wants - then who cares? I think the problem is psychological. What we call today a "job" is what used to be called "wage slavery", and it wasn't considered a good thing.

Answering questions, writing code, writing stories - are among the most basic use cases for AI and have already demonstrated to have been solved to superhuman levels (as in well-above average human ability) by todays systems. Every benchmark shows this very clearly. Gemini 3 scored nearly 50% on ARC-AGI-2 - please find out what this means. If you're not impressed then you are burying your head in the sand.

Keep deluding yourself. If AI is not useful then why are trillions of dollars being invested in it? Or is your thesis that all the tech corporations in the world are idiots? If it hasn't massively increased your productivity then, sorry, but you ain't using it right.

The reason you need to do the work yourself is because the goal of education is for the student to learn. Using ChatGPT to write your essays is the same as plagarism. However, using AI to TEACH a course is completely different. The AI is taking the job of the teacher, just the same as AI will take all the jobs. Ultimately, what do you care if you learn from a human teacher or an AI teacher? If the teaching is the same quality, it should make no difference to you.

The culture of Chinas AI firms seems to be to open-source everything on Hugging Face, which is really awesome. That's what OpenAI was supposed to be, but instead the american firms try to keep everything closed source, proprietary and for-profit. And you have the nerve to call Chinas AI "authoritarian" and the US one "free". You've very much got it backwards.

I just listened to the track. It's really good and it doesn't surprise me that it hit the top of the charts. Normal people don't care whether something is AI-generated or not - they only care about how good it is. The pop chart will be next.

Can a sphere pass through itself? If yes, how? If no, then why didn't they why doesn't it count as the first object that can't pass through itself? Or doesn't a sphere count for some reason?

Horse breeders didn't vanish the moment the model T was put on the market. Horse breeding peaked 7 years after the model T was launched. The web took about 5 years to hit 100 million users after Netscape Navigator 1.0. In contrast, ChatGPT had 100 million users in 2 months, easily an all-time record. It's a revolution, and yes, its going to take all the jobs. Get over it.

I think what would be more interesting than using AI to do the game development (which is already happening and not news) - would be to integrate AI into the games themselves. People are already experimenting with having AI control NPCs (think in a world-of-warcraft style open world game where you can have a real conversation and develop a relationship with the NPCs). LLMs are actually very well-suited for that sort of thing (Chatbots, like ChatGPT, are actually just fictional NPCs written by the foundation model of LLMs - see this paper).

"Trust me, I'm from the future - you should move to Beijing.": YouTube Video - Looper

It's called the "demo effect", a special-case of Murphy's Law. I have no idea how Steve Jobs was immune to it.

I think I'd find it annoying to have an extra set of legs like a Centaur. The hind quarter would just get in the way most of the time, even though the extra stability would be useful in some situations - I suspect those situations would be in the minority. I think there is reason such things haven't evolved.

AI-generated art seems to be unarguably on-par with the quality of michelangelo or rembrandt (setting aside the extent to which it is derivative or truly original), but I agree manual dexterity of physical robots seems to be lagging for some reason. My sense of it is that the problem isn't computational but physical. We can't seem to develop physical robots with the same raw weight/power/dexterity/flexibility ratios that animals posess in their muslces/skeleton. If we have a computer simulation of a cat with all its different muscles/skeleton acurately simulated, I think we can get it to learn to do the same things control-wise. What we can't do is create a real metal/mechanical cat with all those same degrees of freedom. (Though corrections welcome.)