3. Burrata

After discussing Sam Altman, OpenAI , and the AI driven future they want to create for weeks and weeks, culminating in the POAS research paper,  I wanted to share some of my thoughts. One of the things I noticed was how Sam Altman and other technological leaders all believe that AI will take over most people's jobs soon. However, I cannot help but question how much it comes from business motives. If they spread the belief that AI is revolutionary, it is easier to sell the product to as many people as possible. The people who agree with this vision are called “ AI evangelists ” and try to convince others that AI will change the world.  There is more extreme concern throughout the industry from AI safety professionals that when AI becomes Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), it will be too smart, and not be aligned with human values, and we will all die. Is this possible? Perhaps, but I think it is very, very unlikely because current models lack agency and do not have self di...

  Jaycee Snelson Week 12: Dinner Thoughts Last week I attended a dinner/yearly meeting for the 100 club with my dad. Because my dad works for the city he tends to go to these types of events a lot. I enjoy going to these events with him as much as I can because it's an excuse to dress up more formally than the great walls of American High School allow and I find it really interesting to listen to other active members of the community.  Most of the time, at these events, I tend to be a fly on the wall, just trying to keep up with the “adult” conversations going on around me, while my dad is making small talk and introducing me to everyone. However, this time we were at an event where me and my dad were on slightly more even playing fields. Instead of my dad knowing half the room, as he often seems to do, he only knew a handful of people and seemed to be trying to navigate through this dinner just like me.  As the night goes on, we end up finding an empty spot at this table...

When I first signed up for Sculpture & Ceramics during course requests last year, I thought that I would suck at it. Yes, I’ve taken art classes before (as we all might have at one point in our life), but that was years and years ago. Even now, the highest level of art of mine is tracing pictures off of my laptop screen.  I chose this class because although I had taken IED in freshman year, the art credit ended up being invalid, so I needed some type of art class to get that F credit. Art 1? No way. I can barely draw a tree. Digital Photography? Nope. All I can think of are all the times when my sister would get frustrated at me for taking bad pictures of her. And so I landed on Sculpture & Ceramics. I’ve always wanted to try to work with clay. There’s so much freedom involved with it, since you can mold and shape it any which way you like. We’ve all seen those videos of potters using the wheel and making it look so easy, simply urging the clay to move in the way that they...

Met a senior recently? The ones I’ve seen keep crying about the stock market simulation that many of them were assigned in AP Econ (apparently it’s worth 500 points??). The goal is to perform better than the S&P 500, which basically tracks the performance of the top 500 companies on stock exchanges in the US, and a bunch of the people I’ve talked to (or at least the ones who’ve complained about it to me—is there a correlation there?:) are finding it hard to even make a profit, let alone beat the S&P 500.  Even still, the stock market and other forms of investing (bonds, etc.) remain one of the best ways to earn financial freedom at one point or another during one’s life, especially when one is employed. It isn’t easy to retire off of savings alone, because even if you save your money in a high-yield savings account, the rate of inflation usually beats whatever rate the bank you use offers, leaving you with less valuable money overall, kind of like a dollar being much less v...

Living in the era of technology, we’ve all heard about the pros and cons of social media. Even though it does promote self expression and communication on an accessible platform, new aspects such as anonymity and fear mongering seem to also become a rising issue in the media… and so on and so on. It seems redundant at this point, but perhaps what the adults are telling us does not accurately evaluate the extent of social media in influencing the youth. Social media’s influence is so prevalent, and sometimes we don’t realize how truly powerful it can be, whether good or bad.  A lot of the stories of how people become viral are the same. One night, you were debating whether to hit the big red button written “post” on a random video you made for fun. Well, it didn’t really matter anyways, you told yourself. You post it anyways, ignorant of how people would react because it’s just one small post, right? The next night, your phone is flooded with messages and likes. That sounds like a c...

A few days ago, I sat down in front of my laptop to see what the hype around Alysa Liu has been all about. I’d heard her name come up a few times in my day-to-day life, and as someone who has little interest in figure skating, I was interested in finding out how she had become a household name. As I watched her iconic free skate , set to Donna Summer’s 1978 hit “MacArthur Park,” I was entranced by the way Liu moved, like water rippling through air. I could feel the exhilaration in every move she made, the way that each step and choreographic sequence flowed through time as if it were naturally ordained. The joy on her face from doing what she loved was palpable and infectious, and a wide, breathless grin inevitably spread on my face as I watched her move. This performance was revolutionary to me—for the longest time, I possessed this view of figure skating as a restrictive, controlling discipline, especially following the women’s singles scandals during the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic...