Recently, I was really annoyed by the education liar who misunderstood my children!
The thing is, on June 11, at the 2023 Open Atom Global Open Source Summit, I met a teacher who came to Beijing from Guangdong to attend the conference.
The teacher revealed that he comes from a vocational and technical college with good teachers. It can train undergraduates in vocational education and also has a master's degree. He hopes to teach students some cutting-edge software technologies so that he can be successful in the job market in the future. There is relatively good development. In the past two years, HarmonyOS came out, and localized substitution became the trend. The school specially set up a laboratory to explore the development and teaching of the new operating system, but the development board bought was actually fake!
It turned out that some merchants on the market disguised old technologies as new technology products and sold them to teachers and students.
For example, the "one-touch connection" of Hongmeng system, each single device is combined into a super device, and these are basically realized by soft bus technology. Through the soft bus, the capabilities of different devices can be extracted on demand, and all devices can be managed with the same system and driver.
And how do these development board suppliers do it? Traditional connection methods such as NFC and Bluetooth are disguised as soft buses to connect hardware one by one. It seems that the smart devices developed can indeed be connected with one touch, but the core does not rely on soft bus technology. The devices are still connected to each other. Isolated, so developers can't just write code once and run it on all screens.
Students write codes and debug repeatedly, but what they learn is not the real Internet of Everything operating system at all, and it is naturally difficult to adapt to related positions.
This teacher traveled thousands of miles from Guangdong to Yizhuang, Beijing. It was because he had been fooled and made a lot of hard work. Therefore, he hoped to listen to the most authentic technical information on the spot and connect with real open source software professionals. .
His experience made the audience feel indignant.
And if we pay attention to observation, we will find that the educational products that use emerging high-tech concepts to deceive people in the past two years are not the only ones. Quantum computing and AIGC have all served as tools for scammers, and they will post whatever vocabulary is popular. Talents who are really eager to learn new technologies and new technologies that urgently need a large number of talents have been ruined in advance.
Therefore, we sorted out for you, what are the current scammers who deceive people under the banner of cutting-edge technology. The education market needs to be less flickering and more sincere, so that young people and new technologies can really take a step forward.
trick one
Fraudulent Content
The deception encountered by this college teacher stems from a major feature of emerging technologies, that is, the cognitive barriers are too high, and technology is changing with each passing day. Most people (including professional practitioners in this field) may not be able to understand, while many teachers and parents He and students also hope to seize the opportunity to gain more possibilities in life. This gives the liars room to display their "talent".
Take the most popular AI artificial intelligence as an example. AI-themed training courses emerge in endlessly, but many courses are filled with outdated information or incorrect materials, or the content is very superficial, just to taste it. Unrealistic courses with little AI-related educational value.
Some artificial intelligence education for children captures the psychology of parents who "don't want to lose at the starting line" and "general AI can't be understood", which is almost a "fake at first glance".
Walking into some children's intelligence education training classes, you will find that every child is playing with a humanoid robot in his hand. Robot programming is indeed one of the very popular STEM courses at home and abroad, but it has little to do with real "artificial intelligence".
In the "robot programming class", children master more mechanical structure principles, sensor technology, graphical programming software, etc., and understand the mathematical foundation necessary for artificial intelligence, such as probability theory; biological knowledge, such as neural networks ; information technology, such as computer systems, are rarely involved.
You might say that even if "robot programming" is not equal to "artificial intelligence", there is no harm for children to get in touch with it, cultivate their interests, and expand their thinking.
Indeed, learning is always good, but the problem is that the sieve is leaking from all directions. It is impossible for a liar to deceive people only on one thing. It is easier to use "AI" as a gimmick to discount the intuitive and visible course content. Can fake teachers be guaranteed to be authentic?
The routines of children's robot programming training classes that have been exposed so far include false teaching aids. The so-called intelligent dialogue robots are just toys with pre-programmed programs and do not have AI capabilities; Teachers with no programming experience will start working after more than 20 days of training; quality control is useless. A training institution with thousands of teaching centers may only have a supervisory team of 10 to 20 people. It is almost impossible to control the quality of teaching in every aspect.
Such "selling dog meat with sheep's tricks" may disappoint the hearts of parents who want their children to become dragons.
Educational programs for children are relatively simple and are only used as extra-curricular interests, and the harm caused by them is not very great. As for the AI continuing education for adults, if the professional knowledge is not up to standard, it may directly affect the mastery of new technologies and tools, and cause direct harm.
As mentioned earlier, the disciplines involved in AI are very diverse. "Simulating human intelligence" requires a very large and complex technical system, and new technologies and methodologies are constantly emerging. For example, the latest advances in brain science may bring great benefits to AI. Earth-shaking changes. Therefore, AI skills training must constantly update the content.
Unfortunately, the field of AI is currently filled with a lot of hype and fake technology. Tesla CEO Elon Musk released a picture not long ago, satirizing the phenomenon that AI is not worthy of its name: a passer-by on the way asked the artificial intelligence wearing a "marchine learning" mask: "Hey, artificial intelligence. Why? You always wear that mask?" When the mask was lifted off, "statistics" was actually written on the face behind it.
The boundary between statistics and machine learning has always been vague. Many people call the artificial intelligence supported by machine learning "the extension of statistics", but statistics is only one of the knowledge points to really master AI. However, some training courses on the market package traditional subjects such as statistics, linear algebra, and computer foundation, and start recruiting students as AI courses.
Some industry insiders bluntly stated that the proportion of pseudo-artificial intelligence on the market may be as high as 90% or 99%.
The public's high enthusiasm for learning, the knowledge barriers in emerging fields, the "blank zone" of supply and demand gaps, and the course content that is not worthy of the name, the result is that educational scammers who "make a fool of themselves" make a lot of money, while those who are willing to learn The bamboo basket fetches water in vain.
trick two
Inflated profiteering commodities
Of course, there are also cutting-edge technical trainings on the market, such as the recently popular "AIGC Engineer", "Reminder Engineer", "ChatGPT Crash Course", etc. This kind of tool-based training can quickly master some skills and get started with them. of practical value.
However, such courses often explode rapidly due to the popularization of cutting-edge technology concepts, so that the market is mixed with good and bad, and the prices are inflated, and most of them can be participated online. Compared with offline training with a limited number of people, virtual classrooms can harvest more leeks surge.
How hot is AIGC? Even in a traditional cultural group I belong to, some people have started to spend a lot of money on classes.
An online course for training AIGC drawing, because it is aimed at zero-basic students who do not understand AI at all, and it packs added value such as "AI business communication", the fee is nearly six figures.
This young lady in class didn't even have a clear idea of the concept of "AI and robots". It seemed that she just experienced the basic functions of AIGC, and she just said "this little money is worth it", which made me start to doubt whether it was me who didn't Do you understand the world of the rich, or is this actually a "hidden advertisement for a pyramid scheme course".
It can be seen that AIGC has indeed brought infinite value and possibilities to the other party's business, and the relevant training has also exceeded the possibility of my imagination in terms of price. The dangers of such online courses are:
1. It is difficult to verify the level of teachers. Many courses are aimed at zero-basic students. They do not have much knowledge and know little about the industry. They are easily confused by some packaged lecturer titles, qualification certificates, and industry identities, and it is difficult to distinguish the real level of teachers.
2. The quality of courses is difficult to grasp. Generally speaking, online courses only provide a small amount of trial listening content, and some do not even provide trial listening and class withdrawal services. The content is completely blocked before payment. After purchasing all more expensive courses, it may only be a single lecture. , lack of participation and sufficient practical guidance, and the follow-up courses may not be of high quality, and some deliberately design the courses relatively simple to make students feel relaxed, resulting in students not learning a lot of dry goods.
3. The cost of trial and error is too high. The characteristic of this type of training is that it puts up a bunch of gorgeous signs, packs a lot of emerging concepts and abstract rights, and the tuition fees are astonishingly high, often tens of thousands of yuan, and the cost of trial and error and rights protection is high.
trick three
Impossible job promises
"After taking this course, you can earn a high salary of 30,000 yuan per month."
"You can learn with zero foundation, and become an artificial intelligence engineer in three months."
"Guaranteed internal promotion, seamless connection with employers, 100% employment."
You heart it? Take it easy.
You can make a lot of money without experience. Why don’t you finish these course sales and then get a job? Don’t you like high salaries?
The answer is of course: no one can guarantee that you will make a lot of money through a training.
A monthly salary of 30,000? There are many jobs in the field of artificial intelligence. The monthly salary of data scientists, algorithm engineers, and prompting engineers can even be as high as one million, but they are not masters and doctors in related majors. Don’t even think about it without strong academic achievements and R&D experience. Data labelers and AIGC plotters can quickly get started and get started through training, but their monthly salary is generally only a few thousand yuan.
Zero foundation crash? It does. As a large number of AI platforms and tools are open-sourced, and the level of industrialization is improving, it takes less than three months to start with a zero foundation. You can learn to start training models such as computer vision in as little as a week, but it is far from enough to enter the job market. of.
The training time for this type of crash training course is limited, and it only teaches some basic knowledge and applications, but the real development of AI requires strong mathematical thinking, programming aesthetics, and algorithm understanding, all of which require time and experience to accumulate. There are many "older" programmers over the age of 40 in the field, because many things at the thinking level require sufficient practice and a solid mathematical foundation to go further in this profession.
Such training slogans often blur the true growth path of a career, attract people through low or even zero thresholds, and do not mention the difficulties and efforts that may be encountered in subsequent career development, which may mislead people to change careers blindly .
Guaranteed employment? In the Internet age, countless people have been fooled by software training packages for employment, and the rhetoric of changing to AI has made a comeback. First of all, many training schools that promise to "introduce" employment packages have not obtained joint training with related technology companies. The so-called recommendation promise is just a means to attract applicants. "Guaranteed" one said. The so-called "payment after employment" is generally just a word game that delays or installs the payment process. In the end, if you don't find a job, you have to repay the loan.
I wanted to take a shortcut, but ended up taking a big detour—many students only learned this after being cheated out of tens of thousands of training fees.
say more
Whenever a new technology becomes hot, a large number of training institutions will flock to re-invent some course products and sell them to students by "selling shovels" and "selling water". There is no problem with this business model. The popularization and promotion of new technologies and the cultivation of new talents are inseparable from these professional training institutions. The problem is those "shoddy shovels" and "water mixed with impurities", as well as the greedy hands that use information barriers to reach out to the pockets of students.
In this case, how to avoid being pitted?
Looking at the lecturer of the course, there is a risk of over-packaging and falsified resume; looking at the course content, it is difficult to distinguish the quality through the teaching catalog or one or two lessons; the teacher service, income return, and the metaphysics that can easily play word games, really encounter problems You may not get any services, and the so-called skills, certificates, and employment can also be verbal...
Combined with our understanding of the technology industry and enterprises, I will give you some reference ideas. To sum it up in one sentence, it is: If it is not necessary, nothing will be taken out. If you are not 100% sure of the investment-benefit ratio of training, don't rush to spend any money.
First of all, AI is a very open and resource-rich technical field, looking for the strength of the open source community.
The development of AI is inseparable from the power of open source. Papers are open source, development frameworks are open source, and the open source community also has a large number of models and tools open. Some open source projects are also very suitable for developers to use to get started with AI. In the open source community, many AI practitioners and AI community technical experts are very welcome to exchange and discuss. They can fully use their subjective initiative to fully understand and learn basic knowledge by themselves, join the AI community, and establish relationships with other AI learners and practitioners. Contact us to discuss AI technology together, and you can also get professional guidance and technical support.
Secondly, professional R&D teams and companies that focus on new technologies generally have official support for talent training.
When a technology company launches a new technology or product, it is very necessary for someone to promote and apply it. Take the operating system as an example. Domestic operating systems are still blank in a large number of industries. If no one understands this thing, no matter how strong the technology is, the speed of advancement will not be satisfactory. The same is true for AI. It is impossible for AI companies and cloud service providers to serve thousands of industries by themselves. Software service providers, solution providers, developers, etc. are needed to jointly create AI technologies and products that better meet the needs of the industry based on their AI technologies and products. vertical product.
Therefore, companies capable of developing these new technologies often attach great importance to talent training and have corresponding talent incubation plans, including but not limited to competitions, free courses, free resources, entrepreneurial support, internship programs, and school-enterprise joint training , professional mentor guidance, teacher training, etc. These professional and authentic resources are closer to the real talent needs of the industry and can be used first.
Of course, if you have done all these things, or think that paid education is more efficient and faster, you can also take some time to chat with professionals you trust before paying.
Some free industry salons, community summits, developer salons, etc. will have a large number of practitioners participating, and their opinions can help you realize whether a paid course is worth the money.
In general, liars are always eager to lure you and force you to participate immediately, creating a sense of urgency such as "the opportunity is not lost, and the loss will never come again", "don't learn to lose at the starting line", and "a lesson is hard to find". Therefore, the simple and rude anti-fraud idea is, if you want to pay quickly, think about it first.
New technologies are in the ascendant, so don't worry about missing them if you slow down. Liars are in a hurry, but technology is not in a hurry, and we are not in a hurry.
