We really need an AI Moonshot in Education

We will soon have robots with embodied human level intelligence and hundreds of thousands of hours of educators’ time is being invested in how much of a paper a student should write with AI....

Today, Nvidia’s Jim Fan announced Nvidia’s “moonshot” efforts to develop embodied AGI, which would be human-level intelligence in robots. We’ve already seen a bit of this in Figure-1.

On Linked In, Jim Fan wrote:

Today is the beginning of our moonshot to solve embodied AGI in the physical world. I’m so excited to announce Project GR00T, our new initiative to create a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robot learning.

The GR00T model will enable a humanoid robot to understand multimodal instructions, such as language, video, and demonstration, and perform a variety of useful tasks. We are collaborating with many leading humanoid companies around the world, so that GR00T may transfer across embodiments and help the ecosystem thrive…Project GR00T is a cornerstone for the “Foundation Agent” roadmap of the newly founded GEAR Lab. At GEAR, we are building generally capable agents that learn to act skilfully in many worlds, virtual and real. See if you can spot "GEAR" in the video ;)

The word “moonshot’ struck me more than “embodiment.”

Why? Because Fei Fei Li used it when calling for greater investment in public AI models. The Godmother of AI Calls for US ‘Moonshot’ Investment in the Technology

Dr. Sabba Quidwai and I called for a “moonshot” to help today’s students and teachers adapt and thrive in an AI World, arguing that we can’t only invest in machine intelligence (see below).

AI is getting hundreds of billions of dollars of investment. More will likely come with this announcement.

What’s the answer been to our call? Crickets. Even basic AI literacy initiatives are not being funded. And it’s not just because we aren’t public figures. Public figures have made these calls as well. The response? Crickets.

Of course, educators can’t just blame outsiders. Many educators are ignoring this exponential growth in artificial intelligence, which is now becoming embodied, and are focusing on such questions as —

*The exact definition of AI literacy.

*Exactly how much of a paper someone can write with AI and not get in trouble.

*How to identify AI writing by looking for words like “delve” in the paper.

*Trying to hide invisible words in an assignment that students might lazily copy and paste into a prompt and get caught.

*The exact definition of “intelligence” and whether or not robots can meet an exact human standard rather than whether or not they will be at least as intelligent as us in most ways and do all the work factory and warehouse workers do (oh, I forgot, the human warehouse workers will get reassigned to the jobs in warehouses we currently don’t hire people for that require higher order thinking LOL).

It’s just so strange. Will soon have robots with embodied human level intelligence and hundreds of thousands of hours of educators’ time is being invested in how much of a paper a student should write with AI, with the balance of energy being invested into how to catch students writing with AI. The value of this invested time in a world of embodied AGI is?….

Good luck to us. Perhaps the robots have already outsmarted all of us; their suggestions (below) for how to adapt the education system to a world of advanced AI are better than many people are thinking of doing (see below).

We need a moonshot to save us from ourselves. Education would be good place to start.