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The last remnants of Tropical Storm Rachel finally petered out here on the Wasatch Front this week, and we have crisp fall days and blue skies. As soon as I finish this post I’m headed to see some fall color, but what did I read this week?

Three things caught my attention: Silicon Valley's latest reinvention of the university, AI doing surprisingly sophisticated instructional design (with a catch), and organizations expecting AI to transform their industries while judging it mostly by how many hours it saves.

There is perhaps a theme here. In all three cases, looking closely at what something actually does turns out to be rather more revealing than what people call it.

It seems like every week we get an announcement of a new alternative form of higher education or higher education-focused learning program. One of the most recent is the announcement of the Horowitz Andreessen Academy (HAA) by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

HAA will be a two-year residential program in San Francisco for 50 students between the ages of 16 and 22, with the first cohort starting in fall 2027. The inaugural cohort will pay no tuition, although students will have to cover their living expenses in San Francisco. After that, the plan is to charge tuition comparable to an elite private university.

The ambition is considerably larger than creating another small educational program. HAA's founders position it as a future-focused alternative to a traditional higher education system they have been deeply critical of, and as a model that others might follow (per founder Ben Horowitz).

That's a bold claim. But before declaring HAA either the future of higher education or a threat to it, there is a more basic question worth asking: how much of what it proposes is actually new?