Universities would prefer no AI: the degree monopoly and the frontier gap

Universities would prefer no AI

Hollis Robbins argues that higher ed is using its degree monopoly to slow the AI transition rather than embrace it. Over 90% of notable 2025 models came from industry; ten New York universities spent two years and $340M to reach ~400 GPUs, while xAI stood up 100,000 GPUs in 122 days. Chinese universities produce more papers and talent, but frontier models there also come from DeepSeek, Alibaba, and ByteDance. A few voices inside Penn and other schools are pushing change, but most of the sector remains fixated on old battles over athletics, speech, and DEI.

Why it matters: Opinion piece backed by concrete data and a historical analogy, not empty rhetoric. Hits all three HKR axes, but as commentary rather than hard news, it lands at the featured threshold of 72.