AI来了，大学还能“大而不倒”吗？

TL;DR - Hong Kong University professor Zhang Zheng argues that AI can replace much of universities’ routine knowledge instruction, but not their role as communities for peer learning, experimentation, and personal development. Universities should use AI to reallocate teaching resources while prioritizing durable skills over rapidly changing tool proficiency.

• Modern education excludes many learners and produces narrow specialists, problems that AI-assisted instruction could help address but will not automatically solve.
• Skills tied to prompts, coding copilots, and autonomous agents become outdated quickly; durable abilities include asking good questions, detecting errors, constructively challenging answers, and learning from imperfect responses.
• The author’s LLM4LLM course suggested that an AI tutor can teach structured knowledge effectively, although Socratic prompting may feel exhausting and does not necessarily teach students to initiate questions.
• Universities’ defensible value lies in shared human experiences—discussion, collaboration, research, competition, and risk-taking—rather than knowledge delivery or credentials alone.