I think what's taken me a bit by surprise is how many 'normal' people are leveraging AI, like you hear about all these random people using AI for writing covering letters for jobs, for creating documents etc. I'd wrongly assumed it would be a lot more nerdy and used for specific tasks under direction from others rather than individuals just randomly using AI for their tasks. I've been a bit caught on the hop, as a nerd that hasn't embraced AI yet and 'normal people' have sort of jumped ahead of me in that regard.
GPT2 was indeed very much in line with your thinking there - released in 2019, weights made available publicly, was there for nerds to experiment with etc.
Amusingly there were even fears about releasing GPT2, people worried it could be dangerous.
GPT3 was initially a bit nerdy too - for a short while it was only available via API, but as soon as they made it accessible in an easy way via the web in late 2022; "ChatGPT" - then it just blew up, it was a more powerful model than anything seen until then and it could be easily accessed.
I guess as long as they make advanced tech simple to use then it just becomes normal - we've been using AI for decades in some form or another after all - my little nephews love shouting at Alexa to request songs to play, people have been telling others to "google it" for years and even simple kitchen appliances use it - Japanese rice cookers have used AI (fuzzy logic) for many years now to ensure you get perfect rice every time.
As for the AI in education piece, I guess I have mixed views. Part of me says being able to leverage AI effectively is a good skill to have. I mean, ultimately we want a workforce that is productive and it might be that someone who is good at piloting AI delivers more/better than a smarter academic that does everything manually. In some cases AI is just being used like a very fancy search engine that can draw inference from the findings. When I was at uni 25 years ago the fears were about the internet making plagiarism too easy or detracting from traditional research skills. When I was at secondary school, research meant going down the library to find stuff and that was just inefficient.
Yup indeed - I guess similar stuff re: Wikipedia etc.
Are the worries about too much reliance on AI more of the same mentality as; "you're not going to walk around with a calculator in your pocket when you're older".
Of course, you don't typically need a calculator when it comes to much of advanced mathematics (aside from calculating numerical results in some applied or stats exams).
I'm sure UK universities can just carry on placing emphasis on examinations and setting coursework appropriately while taking into account that LLMs might be used for assistance, US universities (which are typically coursework-heavy) might need to make more adjustments.
