I'm actually glad something is forcing the education system to think critically about change.
When I enrolled in a MBA a few years ago, I was a glorified test taker being monitored by some random person overseas to prevent cheating. Even then, many people in my cohort cheated on their tests and it is pretty well known that MBAs cheat more than other degrees.
I dropped out a year into it after learning nothing and seeing all those test answers on websites like Chegg while noticing that majority of the schools that offer an online MBA program all used the same curriculum/tests/answers and that nobody was actually teaching. I had a dream that I might learn from a business professor of the notoriety of Clayton Christensen or similar. I got a huge reality check instead.
So if ChatGPT can interpret the answer from Chegg, then it is fair game to have earned that MBA.
That sounds awful. Also absolutely different from my in-person experience a long time ago. Not sure to what degree a virtual experience can be made worthwhile.
How many of these “machine does something humans do” articles are we going to get? It says a lot about how we’ve discovered core concepts and streamlined learning that a machine can pass a test. Text is a wonderful medium for communication, and computers are finally somewhat up to it and it’s marvelous, but this is like producing solved sudokus — it doesn’t really create anything.
ChatGPT isn’t an MBA any more than someone equipped with the answer key to the test is an MBA.
Oh how quickly the goalposts shift... If the test was done correctly and there was no data leakage, this absolutely does not compare to someone equipped with the answer key.
Your comment isn't original either, it's almost always the same response if anyone questions many technologies.
If you think about it critically, maybe we will find there isn't actually much use for ChatGPT outside of it being a pretty cool party trick. Even if it gets better.
I think it pains people to think about it this way but if we have bullshit jobs, and now have bullshit bots to do bullshit jobs, what's really changed? Likely we'll just end up with more bullshit.
I'm sorry but I think it wouldn't hurt for you to also be objective yourself when evaluating the system your defending.
When you think about it this way, if ChatGPT has the answer to all answerable questions loaded into it's memory, is any of this really that impressive? Initially yes, in the long term maybe so.
I would argue it speeds up finding the answer to many questions which I can find online, but I pretty much had access to any answer I needed already.
My feeling is we think these machines are impressive, because we think we're impressive, and ChatGPT is doing something that looks like what we do in a new and novel way.
I also get the vibe that we almost "have" to be impressed with it because as a species, we've invest a lot into these endeavors and I guess the thought of it being not useful it just as scary as it being useful and replacing everyone's work and crashing the economy of whatever.
The psychology of it all is fascinating.
I guess we all thought steam trains were amazing and unfathomable at one point in time, is this really much different time will tell :)
It does compare to inputting a math question into a calculator though.
Do calculators mean that we shouldn't teach multiplication anymore? That we shouldn't have tests for multiplication? The calculator will always get the right answer.
The bigger question imo is what humans are doing with these new tools. We no longer need the human computers of old now that we have calculators, and almost certainly we can innovate over automated MBAs now
Marshall ChatGPT leads Allied Armies to victory! [all ranks between Army General and Captain, non inclusive, have been declared redundant and eliminated with ChatGPT absorbing those ranks]
Probably a lot more? Part of it is we don’t have a definition of intelligence, so the best we can do is measure machines against our tests since passing tests is a thing intelligent people can do. This kind of performance (even if it’s less glamorous upon closer inspection) puts symbolic AI folks from the 80s to shame.
That’s the whole point of Attention is All You Need, the paper that opened the door to web-scale language models. No, you don’t need a brittle and cumbersome knowledge base, at least not for this. MBA professors are perfectly happy accepting an autocomplete on steroids.
Reading through the questions on the test I'm thinking about getting an MBA in my spare time this exam seems incredibly easy unless I'm missing something.
> Wow! Not only is the answer correct, but it is also superbly explained. The idea of the bottleneck as the rate
limiting step was clearly understood and all calculations were carried out correctly. I don’t see any reasons to take
points off from this answer: A+!
I tend to agree. This is exposing a (perhaps universal) bias towards confidence, correct grammar, and a general encyclopedic tone. The trappings of a correct answer, rather than explanatory power and correctness. It’s a con artist.
Attention is All You Need. Was not just an esoteric comment about dot-product attention and transformers. It was a proclamation. With teeth.
For decades the statistical language folks had to take it from the symbolic AI camp, which made pretty good progress for its time with expert systems. But symbolic systems also stumbled at seemingly trivial tasks, like parsing the following sentence:
Time flies like a banana.
It’s pretty clear to a human what this means, but for a computer it’s pretty hard. There’s nothing in the knowledge base about “time flies”, nor what this particular species eats.
Once computers became powerful enough, statistical language modeling folks just ignored that entire issue and digested the whole internet. Strings that would start a lexical parser on fire, a GPT eats for breakfast. It’s an approach that seems to work pretty well for some things.
But statistical language models aren’t the panacea. They have issues. They hallucinate. They bullshit. They lie with such charming bravado that they can con pretty much anyone not suspecting it. In my personal opinion, we won’t have a complete solution without burying the hatchet and marrying the two camps.
Is it though? The full quote is "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana". The humour, being the nonsense that the first phrase sets you up with a metaphor, the secod is literal.
"Time flies like a banana" means very little, because while "time flies" and "flies like bananas" make sense, as you said "time flies" aren't a thing and banana's can't fly.
As a matter of fact, ChatGPT agrees and said '"Time flies like an arrow" is a common idiomatic expression meaning that time seems to pass quickly. The phrase "time flies like a banana" does not have any meaning or usage in the English language. It may be a play on words or a made-up phrase.'
It doesn't seem like a terribly hard test. But that's as someone who has (quiet now) an MBA who did a 1:1 project for an operations management professor and graduated high in their class albeit a long time ago. So don't read a lot into my assessment.
The Kanban answer I found especially interesting. The equivocation on the one answer is exactly the one I would have equivocated on. (Well, yes, that's the idea but it has to be done correctly.)
I'd also observe that operations management/engineering is a lot closer to other types of engineering than things like organizational behavior are so writing this off as just an MBA thing is pretty complacent.
I've known many MBAs over the years but yet to understand what they actually know vs those that do not have one. I think a person with a 4 year business degree likely has a more complete business education vs an MBA imo.
The best business leaders are charismatic, great speakers and are able to inspire people. I'm not sure that these qualities are teachable but, to the extent they are, it seems that this is what should be taught in something like an MBA/executive school.
First, remember an MBA is a terminal degree. It is usually preceded by other degrees. In my case I have a bachelors in computer engineering and an MS in computer science. Many of my colleagues had PhDs in a variety of subjects both in the social sciences and in the hard sciences, and usually had several years of work experience in their field. For example, I was developer at Amazon before I went to b-school. The MBA does not suddenly erase one's technical competence. Indeed, I've written far more code since I left b-school, than I wrote before it.
Second, it is a misconception that an MBA makes you a leader. I know business schools try to make that association in their marketing materials, but that's not true. They try to prepare you for leadership roles, and some classes at some schools do indeed have specific classes on leadership. But they don't automatically qualify you as a leader.
There are some hard skills that an MBA can give you. But whether you take advantage of the opportunity or not depends on your interest. For me it was a solid grasp of accounting and finance that I continue to use in my own business to this day. The class on negotiation strategies was absolutely invaluable to me. I've used that so many times to structure my negotiations to better effect. I have enjoyed exploring game theory in the context of strategy, although I haven't had an opportunity to apply it any real-world setting. Some of my classmates focused on operations, and others on more advanced finance -- it's a case of whatever interests you.
There is very significant overlap between, what you learn in an MBA vs. an executive-MBA. But the most important difference is the usually the participants in an executive-MBA already have considerable leadership experience, and are looking less for basic leadership advice (e.g. how to negotiate) but more as an opportunity to fill in the gaps in foundational experience. Some may be missing operations or marketing experience, that to some extent an MBA compensate for.
In the end the MBA is designed to help you become familiar with a variety of business functions in a modern corporation. The nature of the corporation itself is evolving, and so are the curricula of MBA courses.
Get an MBA if you want to take time off to immerse yourself in an academic environment to really get the opportunity to think and learn about business. And the network you develop doesn't hurt either. It may not be immediately useful, but when you're in your 50s like me and are trying to bootstrap an idea, it's really useful to be able to ping the CEO of a hotshot startup, who was your classmate at school. (BTW that works even for your classmates from undergrad and high-school)
Finally remember that MBAs are people. There is a very wide diversity amongst them. Like with any other profession. So the sample of people you experience may or may not be representative of the larger population.
I don't think many of the MBAs that I have encountered have had a chance to utilize their accounting knowledge or negotiation skills (or leverage their networks). Perhaps this is the reason.
Readit News
When I enrolled in a MBA a few years ago, I was a glorified test taker being monitored by some random person overseas to prevent cheating. Even then, many people in my cohort cheated on their tests and it is pretty well known that MBAs cheat more than other degrees.
I dropped out a year into it after learning nothing and seeing all those test answers on websites like Chegg while noticing that majority of the schools that offer an online MBA program all used the same curriculum/tests/answers and that nobody was actually teaching. I had a dream that I might learn from a business professor of the notoriety of Clayton Christensen or similar. I got a huge reality check instead.
So if ChatGPT can interpret the answer from Chegg, then it is fair game to have earned that MBA.
One kind ticks a box at big organizations where promotion above a certain level strictly requires it.
The other kind is for high-level networking, study, and development.
If you want the latter, you have a pretty small pool of schools that you're interested in.
ChatGPT isn’t an MBA any more than someone equipped with the answer key to the test is an MBA.
If you think about it critically, maybe we will find there isn't actually much use for ChatGPT outside of it being a pretty cool party trick. Even if it gets better.
I think it pains people to think about it this way but if we have bullshit jobs, and now have bullshit bots to do bullshit jobs, what's really changed? Likely we'll just end up with more bullshit.
I'm sorry but I think it wouldn't hurt for you to also be objective yourself when evaluating the system your defending.
When you think about it this way, if ChatGPT has the answer to all answerable questions loaded into it's memory, is any of this really that impressive? Initially yes, in the long term maybe so.
I would argue it speeds up finding the answer to many questions which I can find online, but I pretty much had access to any answer I needed already.
My feeling is we think these machines are impressive, because we think we're impressive, and ChatGPT is doing something that looks like what we do in a new and novel way.
I also get the vibe that we almost "have" to be impressed with it because as a species, we've invest a lot into these endeavors and I guess the thought of it being not useful it just as scary as it being useful and replacing everyone's work and crashing the economy of whatever.
The psychology of it all is fascinating.
I guess we all thought steam trains were amazing and unfathomable at one point in time, is this really much different time will tell :)
Do calculators mean that we shouldn't teach multiplication anymore? That we shouldn't have tests for multiplication? The calculator will always get the right answer.
The bigger question imo is what humans are doing with these new tools. We no longer need the human computers of old now that we have calculators, and almost certainly we can innovate over automated MBAs now
* ChatGPT wins the Nobel Prize for Literature
* ChatGPT wins a Ford Foundation grant for the arts
That’s the whole point of Attention is All You Need, the paper that opened the door to web-scale language models. No, you don’t need a brittle and cumbersome knowledge base, at least not for this. MBA professors are perfectly happy accepting an autocomplete on steroids.
It’s not that impressive of a feat. It’s no different than just googling answers to an exam.
Of course you’d do great.
If you couldn't answer it with chatgpt, you shouldn't expect an MBA course taker to answer it
https://mackinstitute.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2...
So much willful suspension of disbelief.
I tend to agree. This is exposing a (perhaps universal) bias towards confidence, correct grammar, and a general encyclopedic tone. The trappings of a correct answer, rather than explanatory power and correctness. It’s a con artist.
For decades the statistical language folks had to take it from the symbolic AI camp, which made pretty good progress for its time with expert systems. But symbolic systems also stumbled at seemingly trivial tasks, like parsing the following sentence:
Time flies like a banana.
It’s pretty clear to a human what this means, but for a computer it’s pretty hard. There’s nothing in the knowledge base about “time flies”, nor what this particular species eats.
Once computers became powerful enough, statistical language modeling folks just ignored that entire issue and digested the whole internet. Strings that would start a lexical parser on fire, a GPT eats for breakfast. It’s an approach that seems to work pretty well for some things.
But statistical language models aren’t the panacea. They have issues. They hallucinate. They bullshit. They lie with such charming bravado that they can con pretty much anyone not suspecting it. In my personal opinion, we won’t have a complete solution without burying the hatchet and marrying the two camps.
> It’s pretty clear to a human what this means.
Is it though? The full quote is "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana". The humour, being the nonsense that the first phrase sets you up with a metaphor, the secod is literal.
"Time flies like a banana" means very little, because while "time flies" and "flies like bananas" make sense, as you said "time flies" aren't a thing and banana's can't fly.
As a matter of fact, ChatGPT agrees and said '"Time flies like an arrow" is a common idiomatic expression meaning that time seems to pass quickly. The phrase "time flies like a banana" does not have any meaning or usage in the English language. It may be a play on words or a made-up phrase.'
I really enjoy watching LLMs bullshit, it is like they see a path to a goal and take it.
http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_...
The Kanban answer I found especially interesting. The equivocation on the one answer is exactly the one I would have equivocated on. (Well, yes, that's the idea but it has to be done correctly.)
I'd also observe that operations management/engineering is a lot closer to other types of engineering than things like organizational behavior are so writing this off as just an MBA thing is pretty complacent.
That was my reaction too. Donald J. Trump, a man not known for his intellect, also passed
The best business leaders are charismatic, great speakers and are able to inspire people. I'm not sure that these qualities are teachable but, to the extent they are, it seems that this is what should be taught in something like an MBA/executive school.
First, remember an MBA is a terminal degree. It is usually preceded by other degrees. In my case I have a bachelors in computer engineering and an MS in computer science. Many of my colleagues had PhDs in a variety of subjects both in the social sciences and in the hard sciences, and usually had several years of work experience in their field. For example, I was developer at Amazon before I went to b-school. The MBA does not suddenly erase one's technical competence. Indeed, I've written far more code since I left b-school, than I wrote before it.
Second, it is a misconception that an MBA makes you a leader. I know business schools try to make that association in their marketing materials, but that's not true. They try to prepare you for leadership roles, and some classes at some schools do indeed have specific classes on leadership. But they don't automatically qualify you as a leader.
There are some hard skills that an MBA can give you. But whether you take advantage of the opportunity or not depends on your interest. For me it was a solid grasp of accounting and finance that I continue to use in my own business to this day. The class on negotiation strategies was absolutely invaluable to me. I've used that so many times to structure my negotiations to better effect. I have enjoyed exploring game theory in the context of strategy, although I haven't had an opportunity to apply it any real-world setting. Some of my classmates focused on operations, and others on more advanced finance -- it's a case of whatever interests you.
There is very significant overlap between, what you learn in an MBA vs. an executive-MBA. But the most important difference is the usually the participants in an executive-MBA already have considerable leadership experience, and are looking less for basic leadership advice (e.g. how to negotiate) but more as an opportunity to fill in the gaps in foundational experience. Some may be missing operations or marketing experience, that to some extent an MBA compensate for.
In the end the MBA is designed to help you become familiar with a variety of business functions in a modern corporation. The nature of the corporation itself is evolving, and so are the curricula of MBA courses.
Get an MBA if you want to take time off to immerse yourself in an academic environment to really get the opportunity to think and learn about business. And the network you develop doesn't hurt either. It may not be immediately useful, but when you're in your 50s like me and are trying to bootstrap an idea, it's really useful to be able to ping the CEO of a hotshot startup, who was your classmate at school. (BTW that works even for your classmates from undergrad and high-school)
Finally remember that MBAs are people. There is a very wide diversity amongst them. Like with any other profession. So the sample of people you experience may or may not be representative of the larger population.
Hope that helps.