Mark Cuban is Wrong About Public Schools and AI

Public schools can prepare students for today's world where AIs can plan and build websites from single prompts.

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“(W)e recognize that teaching kids about cutting-edge technologies is not the strength of most public schools.” — Mark Cuban

In an article discussing his pro bono AI Bootcamp Initiative, Mark Cuban states that teaching about cutting-edge technologies is not the strength of most public schools.

I can imagine public school educators reacting to that in different ways.

(1) You’re right.

(2) You’re wrong; our district is teaching students about and with these technologies.

(3) This isn’t our job.

All of those are probably fair reactions.

Numbers 1 & 2 are both true. Some districts are teaching students with and about these technologies, but the ones that are doing so are stand-outs.

Number 3 persists, but it is a school’s job, now more than ever. And many of the strengths of public schools can be drawn on to teach students about cutting-edge technologies. This instruction plays to the strengths of most schools, but they do need to actualize it.

It’s hard to think any school can continue to ignore it and be relevant.

We are entering a new industrial era that will be driven largely by cutting-edge technologies, and perhaps even humanity’s full integration with them. One’s ability to understand the foundations of these technologies, to use these technologies, and to have the skills needed to think critically and work with others will be essential to everyone’s livelihood.

Anyone who regularly uses these technologies to support their work understands. Articulating the impact, one LinkedIn user wrote yesterday —

Yesterday, Cognition AI emerged from stealth and released Devin, a virtual assistant that can complete multi-step complex tasks when given goals such as building a website.

In this demo, Devin, acting from a simple prompt, creates a plan to build a website, does its research, and codes, fixes bugs in the code, and builds the website, all without any interim human interference after the initial prompt.

According to Emma Hanslan Kahn, “(it) built an entire Chrome extension from scratch with just a prompt… everyone from the CEO of Stripe to Perplexity is raving about it.”

This demonstrates growing reasoning abilities, and, I believe, it is the first agent or model that has demonstrated the ability to plan.

Devin isn’t available to the public yet, but there have been some independent reviews.

Devin does appear to be well ahead of the other coding assistants in many respects. You can give it jobs to do with natural language commands, and it will set off and accomplish them. As Devin works, it tells you about its plan and then displays the commands and code it’s using. If something doesn’t look quite right, you can give the AI a prompt to go fix the issue, and Devin will incorporate the feedback midstream. Most current AI systems have trouble staying coherent and on task during these types of long jobs, but Devin keeps going through hundreds and even thousands of tasks without going off track.

In my tests with the software, Devin could build a website from scratch in 5 to 10 minutes, and it managed to re-create a web-based version of Pong in about the same amount of time. I had to prompt it a couple of times to improve the physics of the ball movement in the game and to make some cosmetic changes on its websites, all of which Devin accomplished just fine and with a polite attitude.

Silas Alberti, a computer scientist and co-founder of another stealth AI startup (of course), has tried Devin and says the technology is a leap forward. It’s less like an assistant helping with code and more like a real worker doing its own thing, he says. “This feels very different because it’s an autonomous system that can do something for you,” Alberti says. Devin excels at prototyping projects, fixing bugs and displaying complex data in graphical forms, according to Alberti. “Most of the other assistants derail after four or five steps, but this maintains its state almost effortlessly through the whole job,” he says.

Exactly how Cognition AI made this breakthrough, and in so short a time, is something of a mystery, at least to outsiders. Wu declines to say much about the technology’s underpinnings other than that his team found unique ways to combine large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 with reinforcement learning techniques. “It’s obviously something that people in this space have thought about for a long time,” he says. “It’s very dependent on the models and the approach and getting things to align just right.”

While AI is still far from having the intellectual capacity of the human brain, there are plenty of examples of companies working to develop the capabilities of human brains in machines. Other companies such as Conjecture (see video), Physical Intelligence, Boston Dynamics, and Tesla are working to equip robots with these brains.

The world our graduates enter will be infused with these cutting-edge technologies, and they will only continue to improve rapidly, as I think there is universal agreement that we are living through exponential technological development, with many (Kurzweil, for example) arguing that machine intelligence will be competitive with human intelligence by the end of the decade.

The employment opportunities our graduates have will be different than ours. There are estimates that AI will be able to handle 95% of marketing work. Perhaps that is why IBM is slashing 95% of jobs in marketing and communications and focusing on retraining its remaining workforce to use AI.

But what can schools do and how does teaching them about cutting-edge technologies draw on their strengths?

First, students need to learn about how society is going to change and that the change will be faster than any technological change in human history. While the details of how this will unfold are not known, the overall picture of where this is headed is known. As some of the adult students in my AI course noted, there needs to be more awareness of what is occurring. Schools teach students about the world around them.

Second, while the specifics of the technologies will change, gaining experience interacting with the technologies — learning to work with machines that are as or more intelligent than us in many ways — is important. At a minimum, schools should avoid blocking access to these technologies. Students who are using them and learning to use them are racing ahead. Schools have been supporting students’ use of technology for decades.

Third, while the specifics of these technologies will change, learning underlying lessons about using technology to solve problems, the types of technologies that are available, and foundational concepts such as how data is used and analyzed are all essential for students to understand. Schools excel at helping students develop problem-solving skills and can in these instances as well.

Fourth, students need to develop basic durable skills. Students need to learn how to think through what problems exist and how technology can help find and produce solutions. Students need to learn how to make judgments related to decisions AI systems that are capable of analyzing more data than any human, could make strong decisions about what actions to take. Students need to learn how to think critically when making those decisions. Students need experience with working creatively to come up with new products and ideas. Students need to learn how to communicate and collaborate with others and machines. Schools are always working with students to develop these skills.

Fifth, students need to think more about their strengths and what it means to be human. This will enable us to best use AI in a way that complements us, something we will all be judged on soon. These are important questions covered in English and philosophy classes.

These are not only things that any school, public or private, can do, but in many instances, they draw on the strengths of the educational system.

It will require efforts by educational leaders and teachers just need to upskill themselves and apply those strengths to the world of exponential technological change. It’s something they can do if they want to, they just need to do it.

As the students point out, they are all already using the technologies, but they want more guidance from their teachers and professors as to how to do it appropriately and how to do it well.

Will they get it, or will they be forced to learn the most relevant 21st-century skills outside of school?

Will the gap between what the students know about the world they live in and what the teachers know about it grow or decline?

Will schools take advantage of their strengths to help students learn about this new world or will they cede that to the private sector and student’s luck?

Will they apply their commitment to equity to education about the AI world? The new world we are living in.

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These are important decisions to make.