Visited the old computer lab at my old college in Austin and the difference hit me

They used to have rows of bulky desktops running basic simulations. Now it's just a quiet room with a single terminal connected to a cloud cluster, running a real-time protein folding model through DeepMind's AlphaFold. Students aren't learning to code the basics anymore, they're learning to ask the right questions. What's the first AI tool that made you feel like the ground had shifted under your feet?

3 comments

3 Comments

black.laura12d ago

Changes what we mean by making stuff" feels like a stretch. People said the same thing about digital art and photography. It's just a new tool, not a whole new reality.

jason_stone12d ago

Seeing that empty computer lab would be a weird feeling. My own moment was when I first used a text-to-image generator. I typed a silly, detailed sentence about a robot eating a taco in a rainstorm, and it made a real picture in seconds. It wasn't about the quality, but the fact it existed at all. The idea that anyone can just describe a thing and have it appear changes what we even mean by making stuff. It made me wonder what skills my own kids will need to learn.

cooper.nathan12d ago

Honestly, it was the first time I got a real answer back from a chatbot. I asked it to explain a weird error in my garden sprinkler timer code, and it just fixed it. Felt like asking a ghost.