ChatGPT was released my senior year of high school, just weeks after I had wrapped up my Early Action applications for college. It's pretty strange to feel "old" at just 21, but my years of compulsory education before the boom of LLMs might as well have been the stone age.
With the speed that AI is moving, things begin to look obsolete rather quickly. My freshman year of college, I was herded into taking the introductory engineering physics course as a black sheep CS major who needed the credit to graduate. In times of trouble, GPT-4 was my not-so-trusty assistant, attacking each problem through nothing else but next-token prediction. Looking back, it's a miracle that it got questions right even a fraction of the time. More surprisingly, I still had to pay for Chegg!
Musing on these days as graduation looms closer, I found a blank practice exam from this course. I opened oh-my-pi, my harness of choice, equipped with Deepseek V4.1 Flash. I pointed it to the exam, and said nothing more but to solve and show me the answers.
After working for a couple minutes, tokens rapidly streamed across my screen far too quick to be read. I opened the accompanying instructor-made solution file, and begin to check Deepseek's work. As I expected, it was all correct, with thorough steps that would receive full marks on the exam.
This cost me 2 cents!!! Right now, you can have personal tutoring for fractions on the dollar from a machine that is infintiely patient with you and has a greater breadth of information than any human.
WIP finishing still