"He said it seemed like breakthroughs in AI would be exponential to the point where "it will just do research for us, so what do we do?" He said he spent a lot of time talking with students at the PhD level about how to organize themselves, even about what their role in the world would be going forward. It was "existential" and "surprising," he said. Then, he received another surprise: a student-led request for a change in testing."
"AI as catalyst for change Leskovec, a prominent researcher at Stanford whose expertise lies in graph-structured data and AI applications in biology, recounted the pivot with a mixture of surprise and thoughtfulness. Historically, his classes had relied on open-book, take-home exams, where students could leverage textbooks and the internet. They couldn't use other people's code and solutions, but the rest was fair game."
"But two years ago, as the latest wave of artificial intelligence began reshaping education, Leskovec told Fortune he was rocked by the explosion of his field into the mainstream. He said Stanford has such a prestigious computer science program he feels as if he "sees the future as it's being born, or even before the future is born," but the public release of GPT-3 was jarring."
Jure Leskovec is a Stanford computer science professor, longtime machine-learning researcher, and co-founder of Kumo with $37 million raised. The public release of GPT-3 and subsequent LLM developments triggered deep student uncertainty about researchers' future roles as AI capabilities expanded. That uncertainty became an "existential" concern among PhD and undergraduate students. Student teaching assistants proposed switching assessments from open-book, take-home formats to in-person paper exams. Historically, take-home exams allowed textbooks and internet use but forbade others' code; large language models undermined that model and prompted reconsideration of testing formats to preserve academic standards.
Read at Fortune
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