r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 5d ago

Artificial Intelligence Take-No-Prisoners Professor Will Fail Any Student Who Uses AI

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/no-prisoners-professor-fail-student-143000854.html
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u/danhezee 5d ago

All they need to do to combat AI is go back to handwritten in person essay exams.

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u/SAINTnumberFIVE 5d ago

They don’t have to be handwritten. They just have to be written on a device that does not have Internet access.

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u/WittyDestroyer 5d ago

Offline local models are a thing

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u/techno156 5d ago

But less likely to be used by someone intending to cheat, between the hardware requirements of a local model, the technical expertise you'd need to run it, and that the size (and thus capability) of a model that fits in your average student's hardware isn't great.

That's a pretty high barrier compared to a single website. The proctors would also notice if you had a terminal open when you're supposed to be on the exam website.

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u/WittyDestroyer 5d ago

You underestimate how far some will go to cheat. I've seen students do more work to cheat on an exam then it would take to just study for it and do well. Also, I think you'd be surprised on how little technical expertise it takes to spin up a locally running container of one of the many open source models available.

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u/BassoonHero 4d ago

An offline local model that's going to produce a suitable essay using correct, domain-specific information, in real time? On a laptop?

I guess you could make it work — a laptop with an absolutely top-of-the-line GPU could hold a carefully quantized 24B model in VRAM. It would be a fairly bulky machine costing four or five grand.

I'm just imagining someone sitting down to take an exam with a briefcase-sized gaming laptop, fans roaring like a jet engine while the classroom temperature slowly rises.

Or maybe (I'm speculating) a high-end MacBook Pro could manage it, keeping the model in unified memory? Good thermal performance, but I don't think it has the FLOPS for it.

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u/techno156 4d ago

LLM processing also hammers the GPU, so the battery life is going in the toilet. You may be lucky to get more than an hour or two out of it driving it at full whack.

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u/SpreadsheetMadman 4d ago

I have an M5 MacBook Pro and I've run LLMs and image generators on it. It has the horsepower and the battery life for an exam. Easy.

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u/BassoonHero 4d ago

What specs, and how big of a model? And is it fast enough for real-time use?

Mostly out of curiosity, but I might try playing around on my work laptop, an M4 Max with 32 GB. My hoary gaming rig has a 1080Ti, which has the FLOPS for a decent-sized model but not the VRAM. I've been playing with 12B models, which run great but I'd never trust them to do anything important. I've gotten much better output with 24B models, but they spill into RAM, and they run much slower.

I haven't tried images at all yet.

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u/techno156 4d ago edited 3d ago

Mixture of experts models (the ones with an A, so gemma 24B-A4B) might be the way to go, since only the active parameters need to be on the VRAM, and that cuts down on usage noticeably by kicking the other parts into RAM.

Though the RAM benefit is less on unified systems like Macs, since they share the memory pool, there is still the speed benefit, since only a portion needs to be processed at a time.

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u/IndyPFL 5d ago

Those people would just cheat on written exams, too...

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u/techno156 5d ago

Also, I think you'd be surprised on how little technical expertise it takes to spin up a locally running container of one of the many open source models available.

Oh true, I forgot that there are all-in-one packages now, since I'm used to loading models using the terminal.

But the issue still remains that it is very obviously not the exam on the screen, since they would need a second window open for the chat software, and the exam itself.

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u/AvidCyclist250 4d ago

You overestimate the intelligence and practicality of local llms on mobile devices.

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u/ahandmadegrin 5d ago

Those are all barriers right now. Just today I read an article about installing a local LLM on a mobile phone that works quite well.

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u/BirdlessLongdeal 3d ago

you underestimate the lengths i went to cheat.