Jensen Huang says kids shouldn’t learn to code — they should leave it up to AI.::At the recent World Government Summit in Dubai, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made a counterintuitive break with tech leader wisdom by saying that programming is no longer a vital skill due to the AI revolution.

  • @[email protected]
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    16810 months ago

    Producer of calculators says kids don’t need to learn maths, they just need a calculator

    • @[email protected]
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      1210 months ago

      I mean, we aren’t exactly teaching kids how to hand calculate trig anymore. Sin, Cos, and Tan operations are pretty much exclusively done with a calculator and you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who graduated in the last 25 years who knows any other way to do it.

      • @[email protected]
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        1310 months ago

        For a younger age range you might be right, but in general that’s not true; the approximation via a Fourier series is definitely something we teach kids. We don’t generally expect people to be able to actually calculate it at the speed of a calculator, sure, but at least it’s tested whether they can derive the expansion.

      • @[email protected]
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        810 months ago

        I haven’t graduated high school yet and even I know how to calculate sin and cos with the taylor series maclurin expansion. I am still in grade 11 and I assume they would be teaching it next year when I take my calculus class? Do they not teach it anymore?

    • JackGreenEarth
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      410 months ago

      Well, a lot of maths can be done with a calculator. They don’t need to learn to actually understand the maths unless either they actually want to, or they’re going into something like engineering.

      • Skvlp
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        6410 months ago

        I disagree. They need to understand math, but not being able to calculate math problems in their head.

        • Dojan
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          2910 months ago

          Absolutely. The calculator is a tool to help you solve a problem. If you don’t understand the problem, then at best you can’t confirm if the answer is correct or not, and at worst the entire exercise is completely lost on you.

          The same applies to LLMs. Sure you can get them to spit out code, but unless you understand the code it might be tough to verify that it does what you want. Further, if the code needs adapting (as it often does) then you are shit out of luck if you don’t understand it.

          Sure you can ask the LLM to make changes, but the moment something goes wrong in the prompt you have an error sitting there polluting all future output.

        • @[email protected]
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          10 months ago

          As an autist i can it agree more, understanding something is a requirement for me to do well.

          So much of my struggles in school where based on using formulas without knowing why or whats behind them, not understanding the broader practical implications and intended goals of assignments, i was just told to just do them, the way it is asked with the formulas i was given (or was forced to remember). Lost motivation, my will to live even, spiraled and crashed hard in the end.

          I got better, now i am sitting here scribbling all kinds of math in my little black book as a way to relax. I dont watch “tv” but i wont miss a kurtzegesagt or a veritasium.

          I inherently love science, in major contrast to my later high school grades.

          • Skvlp
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            410 months ago

            Absolutely. If one just “does as told” without understanding without understanding there is no way of knowing if one is lost or not.

            I’ve had similar experiences in school myself, and they truly are detrimental to both learning and the joy of learning.

            I’m glad you are doing better, and thanks for sharing your story :)

      • HeavyDogFeet
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        1310 months ago

        This is objectively stupid. There are tonnes of things you learn in maths that are useful for everyday life even if you don’t do the actual calculations by hand.

      • @[email protected]
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        1110 months ago

        In many engineering professions you really need to understand the underlying math to have a chance in hell to interpret the results correctly. Just because you get a result doesn’t mean you get an answer.

      • @[email protected]
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        10 months ago

        Scientific calculators can do a ton of stuff, but they’re all useless if you don’t know anything about math. If you don’t know anything about the subject, you can’t formulate the right questions.

      • @[email protected]
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        810 months ago

        And that’s why people don’t understand that I’m not magic. Seriously, no you should know how to do math, understand how it works. Just like how as an engineer I need to understand how stories work.

      • @[email protected]
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        510 months ago

        They aren’t going to catch the typo or order of operations error they made on their calculator if they don’t understand the math

      • Annoyed_🦀
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        210 months ago

        You need to learn what is addition subtraction multiplication division and also how it works to do anything meaningful with it in calculator…

    • r00ty
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      710 months ago

      Well, he’s put the writing on the wall for his own developers. So, even if it isn’t AI that writes them, the quality may well go down when those that can easily do so, leave for pastures new :P

      • @[email protected]
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        2210 months ago

        Linus Torvals talk at the Aalto University. Specifically a segment where he talks about how hard it is to work with Nvidia when it comes to the Linux kernel.

  • Annoyed_🦀
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    4210 months ago

    I thought coding skill is mostly about logical thinking, problem solving, and idea implementation instead of merely writing code?

    Even then, who’s gonna code to improve the AI in a meaningful way if everyone not learning to code? What if AI write their own update badly and no one correct it, and then the badly written AI write an even worst version of it? I think in biology we called that cancer.

    • @[email protected]
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      1110 months ago

      Coding, like writing scientific papers, or novels, is only about randomly generating strings, silly human.

      • @[email protected]
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        10 months ago

        Coding, like writing scientific papers, or novels, is only about randomly generating strings

        See also, litigation, medical diagnoses, creating art that evokes an emotional reaction in its audience, etc.

        It turns out that virtually all human advancement and achievement comes down to simply figuring out what the next most likely token is based on what’s already been written.

        (/j incase it’s not obvious)

    • @[email protected]
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      310 months ago

      It is, but you should note that the CEO of NVidia is a manager, and software developers haven’t been able to sufficiently convey your point to managers for about 50 years, so we’re certainly not going to get any better at it in the next few years.

  • Psaldorn
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    2910 months ago

    I asked ChatGPT to show me how to do some Godot4.2 C# stuff the other day as I transition from Unity, it was 70% incorrect.

    Good times. (It was probably right for an older version, but I told it the actual version)

      • @leftzero
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        10 months ago

        Not with LLM’s it won’t. They’re a dead end. In their rush for short term profits so called AI companies have poisoned the well; the only way to “improve” an LLM is to make it larger, but most of the content in the internet is now produced by these fancy autocomplete engines, so there’s not only no new and better content to train them on, but since they can’t really generate anything they haven’t been trained on doing so on LLM generated text will only propagate and maximise any errors, like making photocopies of photocopies or JPEGs of JPEGs.

        It’s all a silly game of telephone now; a circular LLM centipede fed on its own excrement, distilling its own garbage to the point of maximum uselessness.

        • @[email protected]
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          210 months ago

          Mhmm, give it another year or so. You are like people in the 90’s saying while the internet may be useful for emails, that’s the limit of what it can accomplish.

          Forgive me if your claims of a glass ceiling ring hollow considering all the previous glass ceilings people have claimed about AI.

          “An AI will never be able to write in a human like way” Check.

          “An AI will never be able to generate a coherent image” Check

          “An AI generated image could never be better than a real artist” Check

          “AI will never be able to generate a whole video without messing it up” Check

          I’m not sure how you can just flippantly say it’s not going to advance or progress in any more meaningful way. This is still a very new technology and it’s already shattered the limits of what people thought was possible.

          • @leftzero
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            10 months ago

            Oh, AI is going to progress. LLMs, which are merely applied statistics and no more AI than Markov chains, are not, at least in any significant way (sure, they might get bigger, which won’t really change them qualitatively, but as I pointed out there’s no unpoisoned content to train them on, so making them bigger is moot anyway, other than as a means to temporarily inflate the bubble).

  • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin
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    2910 months ago

    Even if AI were able to be trusted, you still need to know the material to know what you’re even asking the AI for.

    It’s a ruler to guide the pencil, not the pencil drawing a straight line itself, you still have to know how to draw to be able to use it in a way that fits what you want to do.

      • THCDenton
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        10 months ago

        Guarentee he wears it to hide his manboobs on stage.

        • @[email protected]
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          310 months ago

          Yeah, I can respect / relate to that too. I just don’t like that he’s giving those of us with boobs a bad name by publically being such a dumbass.

  • ProxyZeus
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    2110 months ago

    If Nvidia driver quality goes down in the next couple years, we know why.

  • @[email protected]
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    1610 months ago

    And who will code the code for ML/AI models ? I mean for Jr. Developers this is going to be a better way to learn than "did you Google it? " And maybe have precise answers to your questions. But it sounds more to me like “maybe you should buy more of our silicon”.

    Sounds a bit like “640kb is more than enough” oneliner. But let’s see what it will bring.

    • @[email protected]
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      710 months ago

      But it sounds more to me like “maybe you should buy more of our silicon”.

      gotta drum up that infinite demand to meet and grow their insane valuation bubble when they already can’t even produce enough to fill all orders.

  • ???
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    1610 months ago

    And I say I don’t even know this person and he should just stfu and leave those kids alone.

    • VaultBoyNewVegas
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      410 months ago

      He’s the CEO of Nvidia one of the largest GPU manufacturers in the world and also a trillion dollar company.

      • ???
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        10 months ago

        Good for him. I like Nvidia and use one, but I have the rest of his company to thank for that.

        I think for me it was a combination of:

        < Name of person I don’t know > says < big unhinged sweeping generalization > for < reason that makes no sense to anyone in the field >

        My first instinct is not to click stuff like this altogether. I also think that anyone trying to preach what kids should or shouldn’t do is already in the wrong automatically by assuming they have any say in this without a degree in pedagogy.

        • Dojan
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          1110 months ago

          He’s also obviously biased since the more people use LLMs and the like the more money he gets.

          It’s a bit like “lions think gazelles should be kept in their enclosure”.

  • @[email protected]
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    1510 months ago

    You still need the fundamentals. You still need to understand problem solving and debugging.

  • @[email protected]
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    10 months ago

    While large language models are impressive they seem to still lack the ability to actually reason which is quite important for programmer. Another thing they lack is human like intuition that allows us to seek solutions to problems with limited knowledge or without any existing solutions.

    With the boom bringing a lot more money and attention to A.I the reasoning abilities will probably improve but until it’s good enough we’ll need people who can actually understand code. Once it’s good enough then we don’t really need people like Jensen Huang since robots can do whatever he does but better.

    • ???
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      1510 months ago

      GPT4 (the preview) still produces code where it adds variables that it never uses anywhere… and when I asked one time about one variable, it was like, “Oh, you’re right, let me re-write the code to put variable X into use”, then just added it in a nonsensical location to serve a nonsensical purpose.

  • @[email protected]
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    1410 months ago

    “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time…when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…”

    Carl Sagan, Astrologist/Horposcopist from ancient times.