> Q: Can I use AI to help with my application?

>

> A: Yes. Use AI the way you'd use it on any project: to move faster, test ideas, and get past a blank page....

If you can't handle a blank page, maybe, just maybe, you're not founder material.

"Biyani said the academy plans to grow its enrollment and open a two-year program, pending regulatory approval, starting in the fall of 2028. Tuition is expected to be on par with the cost of an elite private university..." An expensive way to vibe educate yourself.

> "There will be no traditional grades, tests, or homework," said the announcement. Instead, students will be encouraged to "build" in SF and work with partners from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, and other firms. They'll be encouraged to live in campus housing in San Francisco.

"Encouraged" sounds a lot like mandated here. Speak honestly and clearly. Attendees either have a choice, or they do not.

I wonder how quickly those "founders" will realize all of a students rights to any "encouraged" ideas, designs, or products will be owned by the actual founders here.

You're more like.. founder fodder.

> Specifically, the academy will provide instruction geared to subjects such as designing AI systems, fundraising for startups, selling businesses and storytelling. Students won't take tests or be assigned homework but will instead focus on building real projects.

I see this as mere indoctrination. Those who "succeed" after the course will support and renew the next generation of elitist anti-democratic oligarchic parasites ruining our societies and our planet. Those who make it all the way to the end and then don't end up as high-profile founders may nevertheless have been brainwashed into the master-slave mindset of the broligarchs. Those who drop out may or may not be useful members of society.

This isn't education at all - it's sane-washing, brain-washing, and hand-waving. Fuck Marc Andreessen and his fellow misAnthropic tech bros - not gently, sideways, and with a running chainsaw.

Years ago, back in 2002, when I was looking at different colleges to go to, I had my heart set on writing video games for a living. I looked at and toured several universities, but one of them was Digitech up in Seattle. A lot of their graduates went to work at Nintendo, but the school taught you how to make video games in various languages, C/++, etc..., graphics drivers, etc..., all circa 2002. The building was a small squat little thing, and the school community was very small. There was a lack of diversity, a lack of culture, and a lack of exposure to the larger world that I immediately experienced when I visited the larger traditional university campuses. University isn't just about what is taught or how, but also what your other college peers are being taught, what is going on around you, alongside you, and not just the explicit skill you end up with at the end. These smaller places fail to be immersive and are always very focused on a narrow band of related vocational skills. For me, it felt limiting and like I would have been missing out on the wider world.

it's just a pipeline for techno-oligarchs

But I am sure some people will think this is just excellent and they totally have to do it.

[1]Pinocchio (Pleasure Island): [wikipedia.org] A mysterious Coachman hires Honest John to find disobedient and naughty boys for him to take to Pleasure Island, a notorious and infamous place. Honest John, despite the legal risks and the Coachman's implication of what happens to the boys, accepts the job out of fear, and finds Pinocchio, persuading him to take a vacation on Pleasure Island. On the way to the island, Pinocchio befriends Lampwick, a delinquent boy. At Pleasure Island, without rules or authority to enforce their activity, Pinocchio, Lampwick, and many other boys soon engage in vices such as vandalism, fighting, smoking and drinking. Jiminy eventually finds Pinocchio in a bar smoking and playing pool with Lampwick, and the two have a falling out after Pinocchio defends Lampwick for his actions. As Jiminy tries leaving Pleasure Island, he discovers that the island hides a horrible curse that transforms the boys into donkeys after making "jackasses" of themselves, and they are sold by the Coachman into slave labor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinocchio_(1940_film)

Back in the day, there were so many TV ads seminars on how to get rich the same way as the presenter/author.

We have done the younger generation a huge disservice making them believe that anyone can be rich and successful by simply wanting it bad enough.

suck up to venture capitalists.

A tool is an item used to in some way ease the required function. A jack lifts the car so a wheel with a good tire can replace the bad one without waiting for Arnold to come by and lift the vehicle. A table-saw cut a 2" x 12" into 2" x 4" and gets you less knotty non-warped boards for a better cost and better product. A cordless drill let's you pre-drill (that's "drill before you drill") and then drill for the head (countersink), then power a screw into it -- all without picking up a screwdriver.

AI, like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreeson are TOOLS. They are of no value until used, must be handled carefully because they can overpower the wrist, and must be properly prompted to get useful results.

However, the tool is not education. Learning to use a tool does not educate beyond exactly that. If you want to be a woodworker, for example, knowing how wood grows, is lumbered, felled, milled, etc. will explain that whole twoby thing and knots. Learning how to run a woodmill or be a tool like Thiel or Andreeson won't.

So yeah, maybe it's time to dumb down America (really the US pretending it's a continent) further. Instead of teaching about slavery, Jim Crow laws, emancipation, LGBTQ+, SCOTUS, the US Constitutions, and our laws... let's just teach how our current ubermasters want us to use their tools.

Peter Thiel is a forum-shopping free-speech hater who killed Buzz because he's gay and hates himself.

Marc Andreeson has money from once backing a good pony (Mozilla) with money he didn't earn. Now he tells others how awesome he is.

Why not just call Donny Trump (Jr or Sr) to join in this miserable group of losers? Remember, group, they may have money, but they're still tools.

But expensive.

Spoiler: It didn't go so well due to unchecked narcissism.

I'm so tired of everyone trying to scam me. Everyone trying to get me to work harder for less and give them what little I have for nothing...

/. has video ads now and they're scams because of course they are...

This sounds a lot like the coding boot camps that were all the rage ~10 years ago. The initial ones were rigorous and funded by outside money that made them cheap. Eventually, you got a bunch of dodgy copycats charging too much money to turn out people with very questionable abilities.

Given the high-profile names associated and zero costs, it's probably a good deal for the initial class. A few will probably get rich. The rest can just go to college later. But let's not pretend this sort of model will be a sustainable alternative to college for the masses.

...business school, but without any pesky professors, accreditations, or quality control? AND I get to give my best ideas to Andreessen (and other VC types) who will then make a bunch of money on my idea and my work?

Where do I sign up?!?!?!

"College is lame! If only there were a way I could teach people useful stuff instead. Maybe a large set of buildings? With individual rooms, where groups of people learn the same things together, all at once? My god, I'm brilliant!"

Year 1: Learn how to build things on the backs of others, using someone else's money. Then sell it for 100x the actual value.

Year 2: Build the same thing, but use your networked investors (who also use someone else's money) to get to the point of a public IPO so you and your investor network can sell that 100x over valued slop to the public for a profit. At that point you can walk away or keep it going while issuing yourself stock.

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

That's right, that's a good wage slave, keep the money printer running and bathroom breaks on your own time from now on.