If you ask 10 people how artificial intelligence will affect education, you’ll probably get 10 different answers. It’s one of the most important questions of our era—and one for which there is absolutely no consensus. Which is why, here at The Free Press, we’ve covered it from many different angles: from the school integrating technology into every step of the learning process to the high school English teacher who banned AI in her classroom altogether.
But has AI’s breakneck pace outrun education altogether? Do tech-minded students even need school—particularly higher education—at all? If you ask tech titans like Peter Thiel or Alex Karp, you’ll get an answer that’s pretty close to “no.” Indeed, they’re already founding alternatives to college. That’s why it caught our eye this week when Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz announced that, rather than encouraging students to drop out of college, it is starting a new one. We wanted to know more. So, we asked Erik Torenberg, one of the school’s co-founders, to explain why he’s betting big on a university built for the AI age—and the change he hopes it will bring. —Jillian Lederman
This should be the best time in history to be 18. The distance between imagining something and building it is shrinking. A teenager can now turn an idea into working software, or a film, for a fraction of what it would have cost just a few years ago. Yet when we discuss what artificial intelligence means for the next generation, the conversation so often begins with what young people might lose: their first job, their career prospects, the value of their education.
Some of that anxiety is about the technology itself. Some of it, I suspect, stems from an education system designed for a different world.
The modern university developed when access to knowledge was far more limited. It brought libraries, experts, and students together in one place. But since then, the internet and AI have made knowledge widely available. What remains surprisingly rare is the ability to turn that knowledge into useful work. We need to teach this.
I am a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, and I’ve invested in dozens of influential tech startups over my career. What these companies repeatedly tell me is that they need new hires who can solve problems and work with other people. These abilities cannot be learned in a lecture hall alone; they require practice, feedback, and experience in the real world.
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