Mohd Qaiser Malik

Building the global standard for measuring and Credentialing AI capability @answerr_ai MBA'25 @babson

[Mohd Qaiser Malik @askqaiser]

Don’t give up. Be dead instead.

[Mohd Qaiser Malik @askqaiser]

Companies are hiring more AI brain rot into their teams than ever, because hiring interviews can’t pick up on it.

A majority of people at work never even verify what AI gives them.

Now think about how that coworker got the job.

A resume screen, then a few rounds of interviews. Both show what the candidate produced, and in 2026 a model can help produce all of it. Neither shows whether they can catch a model that's confidently wrong OR publish its answer with certainty of accuracy

So companies find out after the hire, and lose millions because of it.

(that’s why we built @AnswerrAI. we help employers verify AI capability before they hire)

[JFPuget 🇫🇷🇺🇦🇨🇦🇬🇱 @JFPuget]

To me the biggest risk of AI is brain rot.

I have more and more situations like this. Some coworker shares a report on something they did. I read, and find something fishy. I ask about and get no answer. I ask again and I'm told: the agent said that. And no follow up. It's clear form the interaction that they did not read the report they shared. Their brain is not used as it should be.

I am not against AI at all (fortunate for something working at NVIDIA). I use AI a lot.

But I use it as a tool. I own the result and whenever I see something fishy I ask about its output I force a change if I am not convinced.

I wish there was a way to force people to read the AI output they share with others.

[Mohd Qaiser Malik @askqaiser]

By the time today's students apply for jobs, they'll have years of AI practice.

An employer never sees any of it.

Their transcript lists courses and grades and the resume lists tools like ChatGPT and Claude.

But how they actually use those tools? You can’t find that anywhere.

An AI capability credential must be portable.

And since you build the capability across years of work, the proof should follow you into the workforce.

With Answerr, a student gets a first measure as a benchmark.

A new one follows at the end of each semester.

And they keep that record when they graduate and move onto the workforce.

Learn more about what we’re building here: https://t.co/9G1SCJLBId

[Mohd Qaiser Malik @askqaiser]

By 2028, everyone who works on a laptop will be mandated use AI.

People already use it in:

• marketing
• sales
• tech
• healthcare
• policymaking

Candidates who can question AI, check its outputs, and apply judgment will have an edge over those who simply use it.

[Mohd Qaiser Malik @askqaiser]

A GPA alone won't get a student employed anymore. The way I read it, it's a Y Combinator for very early students. They admit young builders on what they've built and nurture them from there.

Universities are already well aware of the underlying issues of the GPA. If they can't give a student something beyond a GPA, that student won't get employed. And if their students don't get employed, why would anyone enroll?

What I'd add to proof of work is portability.

A student builds AI capability across years, from university into the workforce.

The proof of it should move along with them.

We built the AI Capability credential to work that way. It measures how a person works with AI and it belongs to them.

A university can hand that to every graduate, along with the GPA.

[Molly O’Shea @MollySOShea]

BREAKING: a16z Launches The Horowitz Andreessen Academy with $42M in Funding

Yes, a school.

The Academy is an unaccredited, residential alternative to a 4-year degree in San Francisco, led by Founder & CEO Gagan Biyani (@gaganbiyani) (Udemy, Maven).

Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) & Erik Torenberg (@eriktorenberg) are on the board. Investors include Adam D'Angelo, Tobi Lütke, Tony Xu, Fidji Simo & Shyam Sankar.

Applications open today for a Founding Class of roughly 50 students, starting Fall 2027. 1 year, no tuition, admitted on proof of work.

Anthropic, Anduril, Coinbase, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit & Stripe are Founding Partners, with 30+ hiring partners behind them.

We cover:
› The $42M raise and the runway behind it
› Portfolios, interviews and IQ testing in admissions
› 75% to 80% project time and weekly pod check-ins
› Tuition, partnerships and equity as the 3 revenue lines
› Why the Academy is telling fundable 17-year-olds to wait

"The big difference between going to the academy and going to college is we are not gonna prioritize your grades. We're gonna prioritize proof of work."

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Gagan Biyani, Founder & CEO of Horowitz Andreessen Academy
(01:01) Why this Academy is different from college
(04:44) Started his first company at age 13
(08:30) Building a school for Silicon Valley
(11:55) Raising $40M for a School
(14:06) "You Did What?" - Proof of work over grades
(19:08) Should young builders really start companies?
(22:37) Why this is different from YC and fellowships
(27:35) The Academy is for young builders
(31:33) Why schools need to embrace AI
(37:18) How AI is changing education
(44:17) What an AI-native curriculum looks like
(48:51) Why high-agency students struggle in college
(53:12) Why the best builders zigzag
(1:02:19) Why you should apply even if you don't get in
(1:04:36) Building a supportive environment for young builders
(1:08:54) What the Academy program looks like
(1:10:44) Why the Academy is in San Francisco
(1:11:19) The people who shaped Gagan
(1:14:41) Favorite book!

[Mohd Qaiser Malik @askqaiser]

The ability to code loses more and more value by the day.

In 2012, I spent a year teaching myself PHP and HTML to build my first website.

That led me to build and sell my first company.

In 2026, that wouldn’t of been possible.

Anyone with basic programming can build that site with Claude.

So where this is going?

Companies will ONLY hire developers who still use their own brain.

Right now most of that thinking is being handed straight to the AI.

[John Burn-Murdoch @jburnmurdoch]

I hereby declare the "learn to code" era officially dead:

Big declines in the number of people studying computer science in the last year or two 📉

Chart from this week’s edition of our newsletter on AI and the labour market https://t.co/y4yKn6GTl1

[Mohd Qaiser Malik @askqaiser]

Universities banning AI think they're protecting their students. They're setting them back for the exact world they're about to enter.

Everyone in the working world already runs on this stuff - marketing, sales, healthcare, even the people writing policy. It's Salesforce ten years ago. If a job required Salesforce, you learned Salesforce, because that's the direction work was heading. AI is now that big, across every field.

So take a student, block them from it for four years, then hand them a degree. They walk into a first job that assumes they're fluent, and they're starting from zero.

Do the opposite. Give the university the right stack and let students actually use AI. Teach them to question it and check its work.

If we keep our graduates off of AI right now, they won’t be able to do the job in the future.

[Mohd Qaiser Malik @askqaiser]

I sat down with vice presidents at two Fortune 500 companies.

They were struggling with the same AI problem you see with college students:

Their employees aren't AI capable yet.

And nothing is verified, so nobody inside either company knows who is.

A student pasting ChatGPT into an assignment and an employee pasting it into a report have the same problem.

This is becoming a real conversation amongst the largest corporations in the world.

[Mohd Qaiser Malik @askqaiser]

Universities banning AI think they're protecting their students. They're setting them back for the exact world they're about to enter.

Everyone in the working world already runs on this stuff - marketing, sales, healthcare, even the people writing policy. It's Salesforce ten years ago. If a job required Salesforce, you learned Salesforce, because that's the direction work was heading. AI is now that big, across every field.

So take a student, block them from it for four years, then hand them a degree. They walk into a first job that assumes they're fluent, and they're starting from zero.

Do the opposite. Give the university the right stack and let students actually use AI. Teach them to question it and check its work.

If we keep our graduates off of AI right now, they won’t be able to do the job in the future.

[Mohd Qaiser Malik @askqaiser]

I sat down with vice presidents at two Fortune 500 companies.

They were struggling with the same AI problem you see with college students:

Their employees aren't AI capable yet.

And nothing is verified, so nobody inside either company knows who is.

A student pasting ChatGPT into an assignment and an employee pasting it into a report have the same problem.

This is becoming a real conversation amongst the largest corporations in the world.

[Mohd Qaiser Malik @askqaiser]

One bad hire costs a company roughly $100,000-$500,000.

So why don’t most hiring processes check how a candidate works with AI?

Today the process is:

• an ATS filters the resumes
• the team spends its time and budget on interviews

After both, they still struggle to see the tangible skills a candidate brings.

And every one of those candidates will work with AI once they start.

So a company only finds out whether its new hire can work with AI AFTER the offer is signed.

Doesn’t make sense.

[Mohd Qaiser Malik @askqaiser]

One bad hire costs a company roughly $100,000-$500,000.

So why don’t most hiring processes check how a candidate works with AI?

Today the process is:

• an ATS filters the resumes
• the team spends its time and budget on interviews

After both, they still struggle to see the tangible skills a candidate brings.

And every one of those candidates will work with AI once they start.

So a company only finds out whether its new hire can work with AI AFTER the offer is signed.

Doesn’t make sense.

[Mohd Qaiser Malik @askqaiser]

If ChatGPT can pass an assignment, the assignment is the problem.

Banning AI does nothing to solve the problem.

Right now most students copy the question, paste it into a model and check the answer at a very basic level before they hand it in. The assignment gets done and the student learns very little from it.

A harder problem is a step in the right direction.

If a model can't solve it on the first try, the student has to spot what the model got wrong and keep pushing until the answer is right.

It changes the professor's job as well. When every student in the room has the same model, a professor can only tell them apart by HOW each one worked with it (and of course the actual output as well).

At Answerr we measure each student's AI capability at the start of a semester and again at the end.

The second number shows which students got better with AI.

[a16z @a16z]

Ben Horowitz says instead of banning AI, educators should set problems students can't solve without it:

"I was talking to Dan Boneh, who is a great professor of computer science and cryptography at Stanford. His take on AI was: You have two choices. You can ban it, and by the way, that won't work. Or you can make the problems so hard that you can't solve them without AI."

"What he's seeing is, 'I've got students solving things that no student in history could have ever solved.' That's what's possible. You want to have that orientation: What can you solve with the tools? What can you do that's a breakthrough? Now everybody has an opportunity to create a breakthrough."

"Then you're a main character, not an NPC. That's what the academy is about. Do you want to be a main character? If you want to be a main character, we help you do that. If you want to be a cog in a machine, this is not going to be the best place for you."

@bhorowitz

[Mohd Qaiser Malik @askqaiser]

Soon, employers will never hire without measuring AI capability.

If a company ran on Salesforce, you had to know Salesforce to get hired there.

Every job runs on AI that way now.

The problem is knowing what to measure.

Before the offer, an employer needs to know where a candidate stands on:

• judgment quality
• question originality
• critical thinking
• complex reasoning
•learning velocity

We developed @AnswerrAI to be able to measure all five in a 60-minute assessment.

Find out more here: https://t.co/9G1SCJLBId

[Mohd Qaiser Malik @askqaiser]

A university got on a call with me and only wanted to discuss one thing.

AI capability.

Their students are graduating into jobs that will require them to use AI.

Right now, nothing tells the university which of those students can actually work with it.

[Mohd Qaiser Malik @askqaiser]

A university got on a call with me and only wanted to discuss one thing.

AI capability.

Their students are graduating into jobs that will require them to use AI.

Right now, nothing tells the university which of those students can actually work with it.

[Mohd Qaiser Malik @askqaiser]

There's no such thing as an AI skill.

Knowing Claude or Codex only puts you where everyone else already is.

Anyone can open Codex and use it the exact same way as the next person.

That's the problem with calling it a skill.

The advantage comes from using your brain on top of it.

Complex reasoning and critical thinking are human behaviors.

They're what an employer needs evidence of.

[Mohd Qaiser Malik @askqaiser]

There's no such thing as an AI skill.

Knowing Claude or Codex only puts you where everyone else already is.

Anyone can open Codex and use it the exact same way as the next person.

That's the problem with calling it a skill.

The advantage comes from using your brain on top of it.

Complex reasoning and critical thinking are human behaviors.

They're what an employer needs evidence of.

[Mohd Qaiser Malik @askqaiser]

Anyone with basic programming skills can be a developer now with Claude or Cursor. That's why the tools on your resume are the wrong thing to judge you on.

Put two people on one project with Claude.

1. The first one takes whatever Claude generates and hands it in.
2. The second one questions it and verifies it first

Both can say they built it with AI, but only one of them used their brain while doing it.

And ultimately, what makes a person valuable is their cognitive ability. Right now, more of it gets offloaded onto AI every day for the average person.

The same problem shows up far beyond engineering, in hiring and in universities. Everyone being judged has the same tools.

Someone who knows how to use AI properly can technically use any AI tool. But a tool list won't tell you which of those two are actually worth hiring.

[Mohd Qaiser Malik @askqaiser]

Since moving to the Bay 2 weeks ago, I've met 20+ other tech CEOs in San Francisco.

The same problem kept coming up.

Most of them are hiring and they can't tell which candidates are AI capable. Right now, how a candidate or an employee actually works with AI is never verified.

In SF you meet a lot of people, and you see how big the problem is.

Those conversations are a big reason we're pivoting Answerr toward hiring.

[Mohd Qaiser Malik @askqaiser]

Anyone with basic programming skills can be a developer now with Claude or Cursor. That's why the tools on your resume are the wrong thing to judge you on.

Put two people on one project with Claude.

1. The first one takes whatever Claude generates and hands it in.
2. The second one questions it and verifies it first

Both can say they built it with AI, but only one of them used their brain while doing it.

And ultimately, what makes a person valuable is their cognitive ability. Right now, more of it gets offloaded onto AI every day for the average person.

The same problem shows up far beyond engineering, in hiring and in universities. Everyone being judged has the same tools.

Someone who knows how to use AI properly can technically use any AI tool. But a tool list won't tell you which of those two are actually worth hiring.