Anjney Midha

No, I am quite strongly opinionated about this one, which is that technical literacy should be non-negotiable.

It's the reason I spend so much time teaching this class at Stanford, putting it up online.

And the idea of the Frontier Systems class is that end-to-end, it's a full...

simple, but first principles breakdown of how these AI systems are built from scratch, from land, power, shell, like the energy, where do we get them, the data centers, then how do we train the models?

And the final project, the class with the kids was actually the one person frontier lab, which is at the end, they're creating their own models and so on.

Because the idea is that a person with the right tools today can scale themselves infinitely, but they need to know how to use the tools, what the limitations are, when to lean on them versus not.

And I think this is a generalizable piece of technical literacy that all leaders should have.

It's like saying, you know, I, in the 90s, I imagine if you knew, you could use the internet without really knowing how it worked.

But, you know, on the margins when like the page doesn't like refresh or you're like this, this cookie thing is annoying me.

Like over time, people who are more technically literate just realized sometimes you got to debug something.

you know, the browser.

And those of us who've learned over time to do knowledge work are more adept at leaning on them versus not.

Like just now when I was trying to get onto the internet, I realized, okay, there's this, you know, wifi password, whatever.

And then you don't end up

Relying on them in ways that they can't fulfill your need anyway.

And what's a little bit more dangerous with these systems is because we tend to anthropomorphize them without the technical literacy that I wish all leaders had about reasoning about how these systems were built.

What you end up doing is projecting out in your mind what the capabilities are in ways that are inaccurate.

You project out their impact on society that are not accurate.

You project out their business models in a way that are not accurate.

I mean, the very fact that when you started this conversation, I don't blame you for it.