BILLIONAIRE STUDENTS BOULEVARD : !WOW! IMPORTANT ESSAY

THE FIRST TIME our college class gathered together was for a convocation ceremony in late September 2022. As one of the speakers droned on, I remember looking around and seeing a number of my classmates slumped over in the shade and dozing off.

One of those kids is going to become a billionaire soon, it occurred to me. I wondered who it would be and how. At first the answer seemed to be cryptocurrency and then it was A.I.

ABOUT halfway through freshman year - some coding classes started requiring students to sign a declaration - '' I did not utilize ChatGPT '' - to submit each assignment.

During the first term these attestations began to appear. I watched a freshman I knew sign the declaration that he'd done his homework without A.I. as ChatGPT was still open in the next window -while on the deck of the yacht party financed by venture capitalists.

The incentive structures were not aligned toward honesty. One could get ahead, quickly, by cutting corners, by focusing on self-presentation.

The money is a big part of it. A.I. has merely accelerated a trend that was already underway at Stanford and has been reflected by many of the country's most corporatized universities : Education itself can be seen as a secondary goal to enabling future success, frequently defined as a future windfall.

Most of my friends remember where they were and what they were doing when ChatGPT came out on Nov 30, 2022. I was nearing the end of my time in Stanford's infamous computer science '' weeder '' course., CS107

Like organic chemistry for pre-nerds, this was the class that filtered out the true coders from those without the requisite hustle. [ with lots of shameless public tears involved ].

The velocity of change that began on the day ChatGPT entered our lives was stunning. A friend texted me a link to the research preview of OpenAI's latest demo : '' Have you seen this yet? It's INSANE. ''

We began kicking around silly prompts, reveling as ChatGPT explained the bubble-sort algorithm '' in the style of fast-talkin wise guy from a 1940s gangster movie.

'' IT'S very good. Very very good,'' I messaged my friend. Still, neither of us understood that this would mark the transformation of A.I. from a technology to a product.

STUDENTS were probably the earliest wide-scale adopters. After all, it was far and away the quickest route to an A.

When I took CS107, the only viable way for people to cheat was to seek out a student who'd gone through the class before and beg for solutions to the notoriously difficult problem sets.

There was no alternative to putting in a large amount of work. Even if one did obtain the answers from another student [ engaging, by the way, in a social act, if nothing else ], the students I knew who did this still spent hours sculpting their stolen code so as not to be caught.

Few cheated in this most overt action fashion back them. But a month later, any student could instead turn to a chatbot, plugging in a prompt alone in a dorm room and mindlessly regurgitating the result.

'' I remember the first time I used it feeling an immediate sense of guilt, '' a friend recently told me. '' Now it's just normal. ''

Half of the laptops in any lecture seem to be open to ChatGPT or Claude. In the beginning, experimenting with models was a status symbol, and people would come pleading for your authorization keys to try out for themselves 

In just a few short years, however, A.I. has become a fact of life. '' It's all we talk about, '' my ancient Greek art history professor remarked recently.

!WOW! thanks most profoundly The New York Times and Theo Baker. This Master Essay continues.