August 5, 2026
Degree of Drama
Universities would prefer no AI
Campuses slam the brakes on AI — and the comments section is at war
TLDR: The article says universities are slowing the move into the AI age while companies dominate the field. In the comments, people split hard between calling AI a cheating tool, mocking colleges for resisting change, and arguing that healthy caution is not the same as fear.
Universities may want a timeout on artificial intelligence, but the comment section showed up ready for a cage match. The article argues that while big tech races ahead building ever more powerful AI systems, much of higher education is stuck in panic mode, acting less like a leader and more like a hall monitor. The big stat hanging over the whole debate: more than 90% of major AI models in 2025 came from companies, not universities. That gave critics plenty of ammo to say campuses are being left in the dust while arguing about yesterday’s problems.
But the readers? Oh, they did not agree on what that means. One side basically shrugged and said, of course schools hate AI — they literally assign homework. As one commenter joked, this is just an “institution that assigns homework” not wanting students to use a machine to do it. Another went even harder, saying most colleges “also suck,” which is the kind of drive-by insult that can keep a thread alive for hours. On the other side were the anti-AI purists, insisting the chatbot boom is just an “infinite cheat machine” and that real learning still comes from old-school books, lectures, and grinding through assignments the hard way.
The spiciest drama came from the middle: people pushing back on the article’s all-or-nothing tone. One commenter wondered if any skepticism at all now gets dismissed as backward thinking. Another mocked the dreamy claim that libraries and AI are the two best places for answers, asking what planet that’s true on if even books may now be written with AI help. In other words: the real campus crisis might not be AI itself — it’s that nobody can agree whether it’s a calculator, a cheat code, or a cultural disaster.
Key Points
- •The article says most notable AI models released in 2025 were produced by industry rather than universities.
- •It reports that global AI compute capacity has grown 3.3x annually since 2022, with expansion driven by hyperscalers and large data-center investments.
- •A New York university consortium is described as spending two years and $340 million to obtain about 400 GPUs, contrasted with xAI deploying 100,000 GPUs in Memphis in 122 days and a site in Abilene reaching 500,000 GPUs over two years.
- •The article says Chinese companies such as DeepSeek, Alibaba, ByteDance, and Moonshot develop models outside universities, while Chinese universities contribute significantly to AI talent and research aligned with national goals.
- •The author argues that AI will alter higher education’s curriculum, learning pace, research, teaching, assessment, and business model, while noting that only a few university figures are prominent in public AI discussions.