Latest news with #DukeGPT
The Star
13-06-2025
- Business
- The Star
Welcome to campus. Here's your ChatGPT.
OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has a plan to overhaul college education – by embedding its artificial intelligence tools in every facet of campus life. If the company's strategy succeeds, universities would give students AI assistants to help guide and tutor them from orientation day through graduation. Professors would provide customized AI study bots for each class. Career services would offer recruiter chatbots for students to practice job interviews. And undergrads could turn on a chatbot's voice mode to be quizzed aloud before a test. OpenAI dubs its sales pitch 'AI-native universities'. 'Our vision is that, over time, AI would become part of the core infrastructure of higher education,' Leah Belsky, OpenAI's vice president of education, said in an interview. In the same way that colleges give students school email accounts, she said, soon 'every student who comes to campus would have access to their personalized AI account.' To spread chatbots on campuses, OpenAI is selling premium AI services to universities for faculty and student use. It is also running marketing campaigns aimed at getting students who have never used chatbots to try ChatGPT. Some universities, including the University of Maryland and California State University, are already working to make AI tools part of students' everyday experiences. In early June, Duke University began offering unlimited ChatGPT access to students, faculty and staff. The school also introduced a university platform, called DukeGPT, with AI tools developed by Duke. OpenAI's campaign is part of an escalating AI arms race among tech giants to win over universities and students with their chatbots. The company is following in the footsteps of rivals like Google and Microsoft that have for years pushed to get their computers and software into schools, and court students as future customers. The competition is so heated that Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, and Elon Musk, who founded the rival xAI, posted dueling announcements on social media this spring offering free premium AI services for college students during exam period. Then Google upped the ante, announcing free student access to its premium chatbot service 'through finals 2026'. OpenAI ignited the recent AI education trend. In late 2022, the company's rollout of ChatGPT, which can produce human-sounding essays and term papers, helped set off a wave of chatbot-fueled cheating. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, which are trained on large databases of texts, also make stuff up, which can mislead students. Less than three years later, millions of college students regularly use AI chatbots as research, writing, computer programming and idea-generating aides. Now OpenAI is capitalizing on ChatGPT's popularity to promote the company's AI services to universities as the new infrastructure for college education. OpenAI's service for universities, ChatGPT Edu, offers more features, including certain privacy protections, than the company's free chatbot. ChatGPT Edu also enables faculty and staff to create custom chatbots for university use. (OpenAI offers consumers premium versions of its chatbot for a monthly fee.) OpenAI's push to AI-ify college education amounts to a national experiment on millions of students. The use of these chatbots in schools is so new that their potential long-term educational benefits, and possible side effects, are not yet established. A few early studies have found that outsourcing tasks like research and writing to chatbots can diminish skills like critical thinking. And some critics argue that colleges going all-in on chatbots are glossing over issues like societal risks, AI labor exploitation and environmental costs. OpenAI's campus marketing effort comes as unemployment has increased among recent college graduates – particularly in fields like software engineering, where AI is now automating some tasks previously done by humans. In hopes of boosting students' career prospects, some universities are racing to provide AI tools and training. California State University announced this year that it was making ChatGPT available to more than 460,000 students across its 23 campuses to help prepare them for 'California's future AI-driven economy'. Cal State said the effort would help make the school 'the nation's first and largest AI-empowered university system.' Some universities say they are embracing the new AI tools in part because they want their schools to help guide, and develop guardrails for, the technologies. 'You're worried about the ecological concerns. You're worried about misinformation and bias,' Edmund Clark, the chief information officer of California State University, said at a recent education conference in San Diego. 'Well, join in. Help us shape the future.' Last spring, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Edu, its first product for universities, which offers access to the company's latest AI. Paying clients like universities also get more privacy: OpenAI says it does not use the information that students, faculty and administrators enter into ChatGPT Edu to train its AI. ( The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, over copyright infringement. Both companies have denied wrongdoing.) Last fall, OpenAI hired Belsky to oversee its education efforts. An ed tech startup veteran, she previously worked at Coursera, which offers college and professional training courses. She is pursuing a two-pronged strategy: marketing OpenAI's premium services to universities for a fee while advertising free ChatGPT directly to students. OpenAI also convened a panel of college students recently to help get their peers to start using the tech. Among those students are power users like Delphine Tai-Beauchamp, a computer science major at the University of California, Irvine. She has used the chatbot to explain complicated course concepts, as well as help explain coding errors and make charts diagraming the connections between ideas. 'I wouldn't recommend students use AI to avoid the hard parts of learning,' Tai-Beauchamp said. She did recommend students try AI as a study aid. 'Ask it to explain something five different ways.' Belsky said these kinds of suggestions helped the company create its first billboard campaign aimed at college students. 'Can you quiz me on the muscles of the leg?' asked one ChatGPT billboard, posted this spring in Chicago. 'Give me a guide for mastering this Calc 101 syllabus,' another said. Belsky said OpenAI had also begun funding research into the educational effects of its chatbots. 'The challenge is, how do you actually identify what are the use cases for AI in the university that are most impactful?' Belsky said during a December AI event at Cornell Tech in New York City. 'And then how do you replicate those best practices across the ecosystem?' Some faculty members have already built custom chatbots for their students by uploading course materials like their lecture notes, slides, videos and quizzes into ChatGPT. Jared DeForest, the chair of environmental and plant biology at Ohio University, created his own tutoring bot, called SoilSage, which can answer students' questions based on his published research papers and science knowledge. Limiting the chatbot to trusted information sources has improved its accuracy, he said. 'The curated chatbot allows me to control the information in there to get the product that I want at the college level,' DeForest said. But even when trained on specific course materials, AI can make mistakes. In a new study – 'Can AI Hold Office Hours?' – law school professors uploaded a patent law casebook into AI models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. Then they asked dozens of patent law questions based on the casebook and found that all three AI chatbots made 'significant' legal errors that could be 'harmful for learning.' 'This is a good way to lead students astray,' said Jonathan S. Masur, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and a co-author of the study. 'So I think that everyone needs to take a little bit of a deep breath and slow down.' OpenAI said the 250,000-word casebook used for the study was more than twice the length of text that its GPT-4o model can process at once. Anthropic said the study had limited usefulness because it did not compare the AI with human performance. Google said its model accuracy had improved since the study was conducted. Belsky said a new 'memory' feature, which retains and can refer to previous interactions with a user, would help ChatGPT tailor its responses to students over time and make the AI 'more valuable as you grow and learn.' Privacy experts warn that this kind of tracking feature raises concerns about long-term tech company surveillance. In the same way that many students today convert their school-issued Gmail accounts into personal accounts when they graduate, Belsky envisions graduating students bringing their AI chatbots into their workplaces and using them for life. 'It would be their gateway to learning – and career life thereafter,' Belsky said. – ©2025 The New York Times Company This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Yahoo
College Says Every Student Is Now Required to Use AI
Forget the debate about whether AI has a place in education: Ohio State University went ahead and announced that, starting this fall, every single one of its students will be forced to use AI in class. We hope your eyeballs are nice and lubricated, because prepare for them to do some major rolling, courtesy of this zinger by the institution's executive vice president and provost, Ravi Bellamkonda. "Through AI Fluency, Ohio State students will be 'bilingual' — fluent in both their major field of study and the application of AI in that area," Bellamkonda said in a statement. "Grounded with a strong sense of responsibility and possibility, we will prepare Ohio State's students to harness the power of AI and to lead in shaping its future of their area of study." You heard that right. Ohio State isn't capitulating to the tech industry — it's benevolently teaching "AI Fluency" to prepare its bright-eyed pupils for a world in which typing "can you do my homework please?" into ChatGPT is somehow an indication of resourcefulness. The writing has been on the wall for a while now. Large language models have become incredibly popular with lazy students — much to the chagrin of their professors, if they aren't using chatbots themselves — and many universities have already partnered with tech firms to integrate the latest AI tools. Duke University, for example, just began offering unlimited ChatGPT access to students, along with its own "DukeGPT" tool. Students are supposedly pretty enthused that they've been given the green light to use AI in class. We wonder why. "A student walked up to me after turning in the first batch of AI-assisted papers and thanked me for such a fun assignment," said Steven Brown, an associate professor in OSU's department of philosophy who's already using AI in his classes, as quoted by NBC4. "And then when I graded them and found a lot of really creative ideas. My favorite one is still a paper on karma and the practice of returning shopping carts." By his own admission, Brown encourages students "to write papers using AI however they'd like," including an exercise using AI to create Platonic dialogs between two people taking opposing viewpoints on a controversial topic, which helps "them understand how intelligent and thoughtful parties might disagree about that issue." Brown added that banning AI in class is "shortsighted." "It would be a disaster for our students to have no idea how to effectively use one of the most powerful tools that humanity has ever created," Brown said, per NBC4. "AI is such a powerful tool for self-education, that we must rapidly adapt our pedagogy or be left in the dust." This is an incredible claim to make, because "AI" — a catch-all marketing buzzword, let's not forget — is still plagued by factual hallucinations. As in, the tool that Brown is having his students learn stuff with gets the facts wrong all the time, lacking the expertise in a particular field that someone like Brown has. The tech's rapid adoption also means there's little long-term evidence of its benefits in education — whereas there's plenty of worrying signs to the contrary, with multiple studies linking ChatGPT use with plummeting grades, memory loss, and diminished critical thinking skills. But Ohio State, along with many other institutions, are rushing to adopt AI anyway. Starting in the Fall 2025 semester, OSU students will now have to take a mandatory AI skills seminar, tailored to each field of study. As an example OSU provided to NBC4, education majors could be asked to use AI to create a lesson plan, which they'd then evaluate and revise. Then they'd write a reflection — every student's favorite — on their AI usage. Maybe some students could benefit from learning about the downsides of AI from these courses. But on the whole, university policies like these could foster a climate where AI usage is not just openly acceptable but desirable, having students believe they're being empowered by some all-knowing sci-fi tech, when in reality it's still very experimental with a future that is anything but certain. More on AI: Are Children Losing the Ability to Read?
&w=3840&q=100)
Business Standard
08-06-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
How OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, plans to make 'AI-native universities'
OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has a plan to overhaul college education — by embedding its artificial intelligence (AI) tools in every facet of campus life. If its strategy succeeds, universities would give students AI assistants to guide and tutor them from orientation day through graduation. Professors would provide customised AI study bots for each class. Career services would offer recruiter chatbots for students to practice for job interviews. And undergrads could turn on a chatbot's voice mode to be quizzed aloud ahead of a test. OpenAI dubs its sales pitch 'AI-native universities.' 'Our vision is that, over time, AI would become part of the core infrastructure of higher education,' Leah Belsky, OpenAI's vice president of education, said. In the same way that colleges give students school email accounts, she said, soon 'every student would have access to their personalised AI account.' Last year, OpenAI hired Belsky, an ed tech start up veteran, to oversee its education efforts. She has a two-pronged strategy: marketing OpenAI's premium paid services to universities while advertising free ChatGPT to students. To spread chatbots on campuses, OpenAI is selling premium AI services to universities for faculty and student use. It is also running marketing campaigns aimed at getting students who have never used chatbots to try ChatGPT. Some universities are already working to make AI tools part of students' everyday experiences. In early June, Duke University began offering unlimited ChatGPT access to students, faculty and staff. The school also introduced a university platform, called DukeGPT, with AI tools developed by Duke. OpenAI's campaign is part of an escalating AI arms race among tech giants to win over universities and students with their chatbots. It is following in the footsteps of rivals like Google and Microsoft that have for years pushed to get their computers and software into schools, and court students as future customers. The competition is so heated that Sam Altman, OpenAI's chief executive, and Elon Musk, who founded the rival xAI, posted duelling announcements on social media this spring offering free premium AI services for college students during exam period. Then Google upped the ante, announcing free student access to its premium chatbot service 'through finals 2026.' OpenAI ignited the recent AI education trend. In 2022, its rollout of ChatGPT, which can produce human-sounding essays and term papers, helped set off a wave of chatbot-fuelled cheating. Generative AI tools, which are trained on large databases of texts, also make stuff up, which can mislead students. Today, millions of college students regularly use AI chatbots as study aides. Now OpenAI is capitalising on ChatGPT's popularity to promote its other AI services to universities as the new infrastructure for college education. OpenAI's service for universities, ChatGPT Edu, offers more features, including certain privacy protections. It also enables faculty and staff to create custom chatbots for universities. OpenAI's push to AI-ify college education amounts to a national experiment on millions of students. The use of chatbots in schools is so new that their potential long-term educational benefits and possible side effects are not yet established. A few early studies have found that outsourcing tasks like research and writing to chatbots can diminish skills like critical thinking. And some critics argue that colleges going all-in on chatbots are glossing over issues like societal risks, AI labour exploitation and environmental costs. OpenAI's campus marketing effort comes as unemployment has increased among college graduates — particularly in fields like software engineering, where AI is now automating tasks earlier done by humans.
Indian Express
08-06-2025
- Business
- Indian Express
Inside OpenAI's plan to embed ChatGPT into college students' lives
OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has a plan to overhaul college education — by embedding its artificial intelligence tools in every facet of campus life. If the company's strategy succeeds, universities would give students AI assistants to help guide and tutor them from orientation day through graduation. Professors would provide customized AI study bots for each class. Career services would offer recruiter chatbots for students to practice job interviews. And undergrads could turn on a chatbot's voice mode to be quizzed aloud before a test. OpenAI dubs its sales pitch 'AI-native universities.' 'Our vision is that, over time, AI would become part of the core infrastructure of higher education,' Leah Belsky, OpenAI's vice president of education, said in an interview. In the same way that colleges give students school email accounts, she said, soon 'every student who comes to campus would have access to their personalized AI account.' To spread chatbots on campuses, OpenAI is selling premium AI services to universities for faculty and student use. It is also running marketing campaigns aimed at getting students who have never used chatbots to try ChatGPT. Some universities, including the University of Maryland and California State University, are already working to make AI tools part of students' everyday experiences. In early June, Duke University began offering unlimited ChatGPT access to students, faculty and staff. The school also introduced a university platform, called DukeGPT, with AI tools developed by Duke. OpenAI's campaign is part of an escalating AI arms race among tech giants to win over universities and students with their chatbots. The company is following in the footsteps of rivals like Google and Microsoft that have for years pushed to get their computers and software into schools, and court students as future customers. The competition is so heated that Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, and Elon Musk, who founded the rival xAI, posted dueling announcements on social media this spring offering free premium AI services for college students during exam period. Then Google upped the ante, announcing free student access to its premium chatbot service 'through finals 2026.' OpenAI ignited the recent AI education trend. In late 2022, the company's rollout of ChatGPT, which can produce human-sounding essays and term papers, helped set off a wave of chatbot-fueled cheating. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, which are trained on large databases of texts, also make stuff up, which can mislead students. Less than three years later, millions of college students regularly use AI chatbots as research, writing, computer programming and idea-generating aides. Now OpenAI is capitalizing on ChatGPT's popularity to promote the company's AI services to universities as the new infrastructure for college education. OpenAI's service for universities, ChatGPT Edu, offers more features, including certain privacy protections, than the company's free chatbot. ChatGPT Edu also enables faculty and staff to create custom chatbots for university use. (OpenAI offers consumers premium versions of its chatbot for a monthly fee.) OpenAI's push to AI-ify college education amounts to a national experiment on millions of students. The use of these chatbots in schools is so new that their potential long-term educational benefits, and possible side effects, are not yet established. A few early studies have found that outsourcing tasks like research and writing to chatbots can diminish skills like critical thinking. And some critics argue that colleges going all-in on chatbots are glossing over issues like societal risks, AI labor exploitation and environmental costs. OpenAI's campus marketing effort comes as unemployment has increased among recent college graduates — particularly in fields like software engineering, where AI is now automating some tasks previously done by humans. In hopes of boosting students' career prospects, some universities are racing to provide AI tools and training. California State University announced this year that it was making ChatGPT available to more than 460,000 students across its 23 campuses to help prepare them for 'California's future AI-driven economy.' Cal State said the effort would help make the school 'the nation's first and largest AI-empowered university system.' Some universities say they are embracing the new AI tools in part because they want their schools to help guide, and develop guardrails for, the technologies. 'You're worried about the ecological concerns. You're worried about misinformation and bias,' Edmund Clark, the chief information officer of California State University, said at a recent education conference in San Diego. 'Well, join in. Help us shape the future.' Last spring, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Edu, its first product for universities, which offers access to the company's latest AI. Paying clients like universities also get more privacy: OpenAI says it does not use the information that students, faculty and administrators enter into ChatGPT Edu to train its AI. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, over copyright infringement. Both companies have denied wrongdoing.) Last fall, OpenAI hired Belsky to oversee its education efforts. An ed tech startup veteran, she previously worked at Coursera, which offers college and professional training courses. She is pursuing a two-pronged strategy: marketing OpenAI's premium services to universities for a fee while advertising free ChatGPT directly to students. OpenAI also convened a panel of college students recently to help get their peers to start using the tech. Among those students are power users like Delphine Tai-Beauchamp, a computer science major at the University of California, Irvine. She has used the chatbot to explain complicated course concepts, as well as help explain coding errors and make charts diagraming the connections between ideas. 'I wouldn't recommend students use AI to avoid the hard parts of learning,' Tai-Beauchamp said. She did recommend students try AI as a study aid. 'Ask it to explain something five different ways.' Belsky said these kinds of suggestions helped the company create its first billboard campaign aimed at college students. 'Can you quiz me on the muscles of the leg?' asked one ChatGPT billboard, posted this spring in Chicago. 'Give me a guide for mastering this Calc 101 syllabus,' another said. Belsky said OpenAI had also begun funding research into the educational effects of its chatbots. 'The challenge is, how do you actually identify what are the use cases for AI in the university that are most impactful?' Belsky said during a December AI event at Cornell Tech in New York City. 'And then how do you replicate those best practices across the ecosystem?' Some faculty members have already built custom chatbots for their students by uploading course materials like their lecture notes, slides, videos and quizzes into ChatGPT. Jared DeForest, the chair of environmental and plant biology at Ohio University, created his own tutoring bot, called SoilSage, which can answer students' questions based on his published research papers and science knowledge. Limiting the chatbot to trusted information sources has improved its accuracy, he said. 'The curated chatbot allows me to control the information in there to get the product that I want at the college level,' DeForest said. But even when trained on specific course materials, AI can make mistakes. In a new study — 'Can AI Hold Office Hours?' — law school professors uploaded a patent law casebook into AI models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. Then they asked dozens of patent law questions based on the casebook and found that all three AI chatbots made 'significant' legal errors that could be 'harmful for learning.' 'This is a good way to lead students astray,' said Jonathan S. Masur, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and a co-author of the study. 'So I think that everyone needs to take a little bit of a deep breath and slow down.' OpenAI said the 250,000-word casebook used for the study was more than twice the length of text that its GPT-4o model can process at once. Anthropic said the study had limited usefulness because it did not compare the AI with human performance. Google said its model accuracy had improved since the study was conducted. Belsky said a new 'memory' feature, which retains and can refer to previous interactions with a user, would help ChatGPT tailor its responses to students over time and make the AI 'more valuable as you grow and learn.' Privacy experts warn that this kind of tracking feature raises concerns about long-term tech company surveillance. In the same way that many students today convert their school-issued Gmail accounts into personal accounts when they graduate, Belsky envisions graduating students bringing their AI chatbots into their workplaces and using them for life. 'It would be their gateway to learning — and career life thereafter,' Belsky said.
Time of India
08-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Welcome to campus, here's your ChatGPT
OpenAI , the maker of ChatGPT , has a plan to overhaul college education -- by embedding its artificial intelligence tools in every facet of campus life. If the company's strategy succeeds, universities would give students AI assistants to help guide and tutor them from orientation day through graduation. Professors would provide customized AI study bots for each class. Career services would offer recruiter chatbots for students to practice job interviews. And undergrads could turn on a chatbot's voice mode to be quizzed aloud before a test. OpenAI dubs its sales pitch "AI-native universities." Play Video Pause Skip Backward Skip Forward Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration 0:00 Loaded : 0% 0:00 Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 1x Playback Rate Chapters Chapters Descriptions descriptions off , selected Captions captions settings , opens captions settings dialog captions off , selected Audio Track default , selected Picture-in-Picture Fullscreen This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Opaque Semi-Transparent Text Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Caption Area Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Drop shadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like How Much Money Should You Have Before Hiring a Financial Advisor? SmartAsset Learn More Undo "Our vision is that, over time, AI would become part of the core infrastructure of higher education," Leah Belsky, OpenAI's vice president of education, said in an interview. In the same way that colleges give students school email accounts, she said, soon "every student who comes to campus would have access to their personalized AI account." To spread chatbots on campuses, OpenAI is selling premium AI services to universities for faculty and student use. It is also running marketing campaigns aimed at getting students who have never used chatbots to try ChatGPT. Live Events Some universities, including the University of Maryland and California State University, are already working to make AI tools part of students' everyday experiences. In early June, Duke University began offering unlimited ChatGPT access to students, faculty and staff. The school also introduced a university platform, called DukeGPT, with AI tools developed by Duke. Discover the stories of your interest Blockchain 5 Stories Cyber-safety 7 Stories Fintech 9 Stories E-comm 9 Stories ML 8 Stories Edtech 6 Stories OpenAI's campaign is part of an escalating AI arms race among tech giants to win over universities and students with their chatbots. The company is following in the footsteps of rivals like Google and Microsoft that have for years pushed to get their computers and software into schools, and court students as future customers. The competition is so heated that Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, and Elon Musk, who founded the rival xAI, posted dueling announcements on social media this spring offering free premium AI services for college students during exam period. Then Google upped the ante, announcing free student access to its premium chatbot service "through finals 2026." OpenAI ignited the recent AI education trend. In late 2022, the company's rollout of ChatGPT, which can produce human-sounding essays and term papers, helped set off a wave of chatbot-fueled cheating. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, which are trained on large databases of texts, also make stuff up, which can mislead students. Less than three years later, millions of college students regularly use AI chatbots as research, writing, computer programming and idea-generating aides. Now OpenAI is capitalizing on ChatGPT's popularity to promote the company's AI services to universities as the new infrastructure for college education. OpenAI's service for universities, ChatGPT Edu, offers more features, including certain privacy protections, than the company's free chatbot. ChatGPT Edu also enables faculty and staff to create custom chatbots for university use. (OpenAI offers consumers premium versions of its chatbot for a monthly fee.) OpenAI's push to AI-ify college education amounts to a national experiment on millions of students. The use of these chatbots in schools is so new that their potential long-term educational benefits, and possible side effects, are not yet established. A few early studies have found that outsourcing tasks like research and writing to chatbots can diminish skills like critical thinking. And some critics argue that colleges going all-in on chatbots are glossing over issues like societal risks, AI labor exploitation and environmental costs. OpenAI's campus marketing effort comes as unemployment has increased among recent college graduates -- particularly in fields like software engineering, where AI is now automating some tasks previously done by humans. In hopes of boosting students' career prospects, some universities are racing to provide AI tools and training. California State University announced this year that it was making ChatGPT available to more than 460,000 students across its 23 campuses to help prepare them for "California's future AI-driven economy." Cal State said the effort would help make the school "the nation's first and largest AI-empowered university system." Some universities say they are embracing the new AI tools in part because they want their schools to help guide, and develop guardrails for, the technologies. " You're worried about the ecological concerns. You're worried about misinformation and bias," Edmund Clark, the chief information officer of California State University, said at a recent education conference in San Diego. "Well, join in. Help us shape the future." Last spring, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Edu, its first product for universities, which offers access to the company's latest AI. Paying clients like universities also get more privacy: OpenAI says it does not use the information that students, faculty and administrators enter into ChatGPT Edu to train its AI. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, over copyright infringement. Both companies have denied wrongdoing.) Last fall, OpenAI hired Belsky to oversee its education efforts. An ed tech startup veteran, she previously worked at Coursera, which offers college and professional training courses. She is pursuing a two-pronged strategy: marketing OpenAI's premium services to universities for a fee while advertising free ChatGPT directly to students. OpenAI also convened a panel of college students recently to help get their peers to start using the tech. Among those students are power users like Delphine Tai-Beauchamp, a computer science major at the University of California, Irvine. She has used the chatbot to explain complicated course concepts, as well as help explain coding errors and make charts diagraming the connections between ideas. "I wouldn't recommend students use AI to avoid the hard parts of learning," Tai-Beauchamp said. She did recommend students try AI as a study aid. "Ask it to explain something five different ways." Belsky said these kinds of suggestions helped the company create its first billboard campaign aimed at college students. "Can you quiz me on the muscles of the leg?" asked one ChatGPT billboard, posted this spring in Chicago. "Give me a guide for mastering this Calc 101 syllabus," another said. Belsky said OpenAI had also begun funding research into the educational effects of its chatbots. "The challenge is, how do you actually identify what are the use cases for AI in the university that are most impactful?" Belsky said during a December AI event at Cornell Tech in New York City. "And then how do you replicate those best practices across the ecosystem?" Some faculty members have already built custom chatbots for their students by uploading course materials like their lecture notes, slides, videos and quizzes into ChatGPT. Jared DeForest, the chair of environmental and plant biology at Ohio University, created his own tutoring bot, called SoilSage, which can answer students' questions based on his published research papers and science knowledge. Limiting the chatbot to trusted information sources has improved its accuracy, he said. "The curated chatbot allows me to control the information in there to get the product that I want at the college level," DeForest said. But even when trained on specific course materials, AI can make mistakes. In a new study -- "Can AI Hold Office Hours?" -- law school professors uploaded a patent law casebook into AI models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. Then they asked dozens of patent law questions based on the casebook and found that all three AI chatbots made "significant" legal errors that could be "harmful for learning." "This is a good way to lead students astray," said Jonathan S. Masur, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and a co-author of the study. "So I think that everyone needs to take a little bit of a deep breath and slow down." OpenAI said the 250,000-word casebook used for the study was more than twice the length of text that its GPT-4o model can process at once. Anthropic said the study had limited usefulness because it did not compare the AI with human performance. Google said its model accuracy had improved since the study was conducted. Belsky said a new "memory" feature, which retains and can refer to previous interactions with a user, would help ChatGPT tailor its responses to students over time and make the AI "more valuable as you grow and learn." Privacy experts warn that this kind of tracking feature raises concerns about long-term tech company surveillance. In the same way that many students today convert their school-issued Gmail accounts into personal accounts when they graduate, Belsky envisions graduating students bringing their AI chatbots into their workplaces and using them for life. "It would be their gateway to learning -- and career life thereafter," Belsky said.
