Teaching Discernment in the Age of AI and Higher Education with UW Vice Provost for AI Noah Smith

In this episode of Shift AI, Noah Smith, Vice Provost for AI at the University of Washington and Senior Director of NLP Research at the Allen Institute for AI, joins host Boaz Ashkenazy for a wide ranging conversation on how universities are preparing for a workplace increasingly run by AI agents.Noah's path wound from a PhD at Johns Hopkins to a tenured professorship at Carnegie Mellon, until a call from UW pulled him west in 2015 to help build out its natural language processing faculty. A few years later he took on a second role leading a research team at the Allen Institute for AI, and this past November added a newly created role as UW's first Vice Provost for AI. The conversation covers how faculty across UW are experimenting with AI in the classroom, from an interactive logic textbook in the philosophy department to new AI literacy courses, and digs into OLMo, the fully open language model project Noah leads at Ai2, unpacking why releasing the weights, code, and training data together, not just an API, matters for regulated industries, universities, and anyone who wants to retrain a model rather than just prompt it.Noah lays out a scenario where 80 percent of entry level work gets done by autonomous agents and argues the skill universities need to double down on is not AI literacy so much as discernment, the ability to unwrap a problem and figure out what questions to ask.This one is for university administrators, provosts, and faculty grappling with AI policy, as well as founders and engineers building on open source models, and anyone curious how a major research university is trying to get ahead of the agentic era instead of just reacting to it.Chapters[00:05] Welcome to Shift AI, live from UW's Foster School of Business[03:44] Noah's path from Carnegie Mellon to UW's Vice Provost for AI[06:08] Bagging groceries: Noah's first paid job[08:11] Six months in: what surprised Noah most about the role[09:22] How AI is reshaping teaching and pedagogy at UW[11:33] Preparing students for a world where agents do 80 percent of the work[14:08] Inside the Allen Institute for AI and the origins of OLMo[15:52] What "fully open" really means for language models[17:49] Specialized models versus general-purpose models for regulated industries[19:47] AI governance, security, and UW's new governance committee[24:35] The future of work in two words: human agencyConnect with Noah SmithLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-smith-0322511a4/Connect with Boaz AshkenazyLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boazashkenazy/Email: [email protected]