A CS Professor on Why Slow Learning Wins in the AI Era | CU Boulder, Tom Yeh
In a Nutshell
Tom Yeh argues that foundational skills like matrix multiplication and patient, deliberate learning remain valuable in the AI era because they are evergreen and allow rebuilding expertise as tools change. He emphasizes that ownership of knowledge comes from investing personal time and effort, not from quick answers provided by AI. Yeh warns that cheating persists because of misaligned incentives and that employers should prioritize work ethic and problem-solving over tool-specific knowledge, since AI cannot instill these human qualities.
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My name is Tom Yeh. I'm a professor of computer science at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I'm also a founder of AI by Hand. It's a global education initiative to make AI inside a black box accessible and approachable. Writing out all the math with hand, in doing so, understanding that AI is not a big mystery. It's something we all can understand.
Having an answer doesn't mean you know it. People can buy degree, buy certificate. Do you have ownership of this to take idea core and foundational that doesn't change. It's evergreen. AI cannot change people, but you can change AI.
A transformer is meant to process individual words in your sentence. We are at the token number four in my sentence. Each token actually has multiple numbers. In this case, simple case I say three numbers.
Unfortunately, while I was a student, I missed deep learning entirely. I was a bit too old. So, I studied support vector machines, traditional machine learning method. So, right then I became a professor. All of a sudden all these people are doing deep learning. I have to learn deep learning all over again.
What I'm doing today with AI by Hand is to share my learning journey. How I, as an old professor, trying to learn deep learning from scratch. All of this I'm sharing this being about to show my own struggle with understanding AI model math and algorithms. Only way I can get it is I get to draw or write on the paper. This is where all I actually get it. So, I want to share my drawing, share my way to map out the math.
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