Natasha Singer

And I just did a story last month about how AI has become like the hot new major on many college campuses.

Mm-hmm.

It's interesting because you see schools like MIT, where computer science was the number one major, they began offering a separate major in AI.

It's now the number two major at MIT in the course of a few years.

And like one of the questions is like,

The tech industry is really excited about AI, and they're telling us we're going to have an AI-driven future and an AI-driven economy.

There is a massive interest among students in learning how to use these AI tools, both for themselves and for their potential careers.

But there's also this huge potential for the AI bubble to burst, for some of the valuations of these AI-heavy companies to come down, and also for AI to be a fad.

And that maybe you don't want an AI plus something degree because four years from now, there'll be some other technology that you'll need to know.

I think in public schools, AI is the new coding.

And we're seeing Microsoft and Google and OpenAI and others, you know, promote their chatbots, Google, Gemini, OpenAI, ChatGPT, EDU, Microsoft Copilot for schools, for teachers, for students.

And the difference between the push for coding and the push for AI is, like, computer science was an established discipline.

It's decades old.

We know how to teach it.

And also, it has value.

Like, it's just an important thing to study computer science to understand the world around you since we're so...

tech-infused in everything we do.

We want kids to know how the internet works or how their cell phone works or how algorithms show us things and can manipulate us.

The difference with the push for AI is that computer science was a discrete subject, whereas the tech industry is pushing to get AI into every subject in every classroom.

I've talked to college students who are thinking, well, I like to build things.