I was chatting with my kids about ai around the dinner table tonight. I mentioned we had recently added vision to our cloud.
Elena wanted to try to write a math problem on the board and see it would be able to see and help solve it. That led to a discussion about prompt engineering, what Ai is and isn’t, and why understanding how to talk to it is critical. I was honestly impressed with the depth of questions my kids had. They dug in. They intuited out that there must be separate processes for both training and inference without knowing what they are. Its my personal belief that keeping Ai out school out of fear of cheating is a disservice. If you listen to Elena, who is 12, she was able to see the value of this as a tool for enabling accessibility in new ways. That alone was remarkable to me. The other thing I found really interesting was the flexibility when Elena was unsure of how to use a keyboard to express an exponent. I allowed her to take a guess and learn unaided. That says there is value. This is a lesson that stuck and was fun. We both enjoyed it and sure there were problems but we learned together about what this new capability, that she is almost certainly going to use in her adulthood and career, can and can’t do in very surprising ways.