Historian and economist Niall Ferguson told students at the University of Austin (UATX) that giving anyone under 25 unlimited access to ChatGPT "will just be dumber" than others, warning AI tools are a “disaster” for “neural development” while the brain is still forming.
What Happened: Speaking at an Austin Union lecture in June, the UATX co‑founder argued brain plasticity lasts until about age 25 and said students who spend four undergraduate years "in the cloister" without large language models will "crush the competition" after graduation.
