&w=3840&q=100)
How OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, plans to make 'AI-native universities'
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.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Hans India
22 minutes ago
- Hans India
TGBIE hosts training session on integrating AI in education
Hyderabad: The Telangana Board of Intermediate Education (TGBIE) conducted a one-day training program for AI Champions and District Academic Monitoring Officers (DAMOs) at its headquarters in Vidya Bhavan on Thursday. The session focused on the implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and Facial Recognition Systems (FRS) in Government Junior Colleges across the state. The initiative was led by Dr Yogita Rana, Secretary to the Government, Education Department, who emphasized the transformative potential of AI in academic progress. She highlighted tools like Gemini, ChatGPT, Meta, and Google's LLM as powerful resources for enhancing student learning outcomes. During the workshop, TGBIE officials instructed participants to actively adopt AI-based solutions tailored to student needs. A key highlight was the planned rollout of Facial Recognition Systems to monitor student attendance more effectively. The FRS will be integrated with the Centre for Good Governance (CGG) portal for real-time tracking and accountability. The Director of Intermediate Education stressed the importance of field-level implementation and urged officers to organize Mega Parent-Teacher Meetings in every Government Junior College. These meetings aim to foster greater parental involvement and awareness of technological advancements in education. The training also underscored the broader vision of the Telangana government to incorporate AI-driven learning environments. AI Champions and DAMOs were briefed on the strategic role of AI in curriculum delivery, student assessment, and personalized learning pathways. This move aligns with national efforts to digitize education and equip institutions with cutting-edge tools. By integrating AI and FRS, the Board aims to improve transparency, attendance tracking, and academic performance monitoring. Officers were urged to ensure swift and effective implementation of these technologies, making Telangana a model for AI-enabled education in India.
Indian Express
an hour ago
- Indian Express
AI-created film ‘Chiranjeevi Hanuman' raises questions about creative labour and ownership. It must initiate a conversation
A month after controversy broke out over the news that the Tamil-dubbed version of the 2013 Hindi film Raanjhanaa, titled Ambikapathy, was being re-released with a new AI-generated ending, the announcement of a new film, Chiranjeevi Hanuman — The Eternal, made using AI, has sharpened fears over what the technology could mean for one of India's biggest creative industries. While the use of the new technology in the two films may vary in terms of scale — from a single scene in Ambikapathy to the entire project in Chiranjeevi Hanuman — it raises equally uncomfortable questions about creative ownership, money and power. 'And so it begins…who…needs writers and directors when it's 'Made in AI'', posted filmmaker Vikramaditya Motwane on social media, with director Anurag Kashyap, too, questioning the wisdom of supporting projects made with technology that could ultimately make the people involved in filmmaking redundant. Their unease underscores the crux of the matter: In a time when prompts fed into a machine are all one needs to make a movie, what happens to those whose livelihood depends on the collaborative, time-consuming process that is cinema? Yet, as Kashyap himself pointed out, there is no wishing away the technology itself. Nearly three years after the debut of OpenAI's ChatGPT, with reactions that swung between a sense of awe over its capabilities and paranoia about a Terminator-like takeover by machines, attitudes have settled in favour of general acceptance. For many, including artists, writers and other creative professionals, it has become one more thread in the fabric of routine, both at home and in the workplace. But apprehensions persist, including over ethical use: In the case of Ambikapathy, for example, the producers were accused of using AI to undermine the creative vision behind the original. The central question, then, is this: At what point does AI go from being a tool — such as in the 2024 film The Brutalist, where it was used to enhance the Hungarian accent of certain characters — to a competitor, as appears to be the case with Chiranjeevi Hanuman and other AI-created films like Maharaja in Denims and Naisha? This is an issue that film industries elsewhere, too, have been grappling with; the use of AI was, notably, a flashpoint in the nearly year-long strike by writers and actors in Hollywood in 2023. In that case, negotiations between industry stakeholders led to the creation of guardrails in how the technology could be used without pitting artists against machines. As Indian cinema swings between excitement and apprehension over a future with AI, this is the conversation that must now take place.
Hindustan Times
2 hours ago
- Hindustan Times
AI-powered robots can take your phone apart
THE WORLD'S rubbish heaps are filling up with valuable electronics. According to the UN, some 62m tonnes of e-waste were produced in 2022, enough to fill a line of lorries parked bumper-to-bumper around the equator. Only 22% is recycled. Most of the rest ends up in landfills or incinerators, where in 2024 recoverable raw materials worth $63bn went to waste. That figure is expected to grow to more than $80bn by 2030. Getting those materials out of the rubbish is a challenge. Many are contaminated when e-waste is crushed during recycling, which can limit the effectiveness of specialist extraction techniques. The process is made more straightforward if products are disassembled and their components sorted by composition before crushing. Copper can then be recovered from wiring. Gold, silver and other precious metals can be leached from circuit boards, along with cobalt, lithium, manganese and nickel from batteries. Rare-earth magnets can be pulled from electric motors. The trouble is that disassembly is labour-intensive and costly. Automation is also tricky: robots are good at putting together a specific item but struggle to recognise and take apart the thousands of different devices that end up in the rubbish. A new generation of robots powered by artificial-intelligence (AI) models, however, looks to be up to the job. Some of these AI-assisted robots are being developed for in-house recycling schemes run by manufacturers, who have an intimate knowledge of how their products are put together. Apple, for example, uses a system called Daisy. A decade ago, an early version could dismantle only one type of iPhone; now, with the help of AI, Daisy can handle more than 20. Microsoft is developing a robot to disassemble computer hard drives. These are usually crushed whole to destroy any sensitive data, but if the drives are dismantled, only the platters containing data need be crushed. ABB, a Swedish-Swiss electrical-engineering group, is working with Molg, an American recycler, on a network of robotic 'minifactories' to dismantle and recover material from the electronics used in vast data centres. José Saenz and his team at the Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation and Automation in Magdeburg, Germany have a still more ambitious goal. They are developing a robotic system that can be used in a general recycling centre, where it would need to be flexible enough to dismantle a wide variety of e-waste, ranging from phones to electric-vehicle batteries, LED screens and solar panels. Their starting point is an AI-assisted robot that can disassemble old desktop PCs, many of which are more than a decade old. The first thing the team's robot does is identify any product it is offered. A camera photographs the item and compares the snap with pictures of different PCs. The robot also scans any labels and product codes to check whether service manuals or other disassembly tips are available online. It can search for other clues, in much the same way ChatGPT might, when asked a similar question, turn up videos posted online by people who have done the job before. All this information is analysed and stored in the robot's memory, where it can be updated and used for reference the next time such a product comes into the recycling centre. Once the identification is complete, the AI system then determines which components are worth removing, either in the form of raw materials or as complete parts to be refurbished and used again. It also checks the integrity of rivets, screws and other fasteners, because years of wear, tear and repair mean some parts may need to be cut out. Analysis done, the AI generates a disassembly sequence to operate the robot's arms. These are equipped with a selection of tools, such as drills, grippers and screwdrivers, to remove and sort items. So far, the team has got each stage in the disassembly process working in separate machines. They are now linking these together into a single robotic device able to complete the whole process. Once dismantling PCs has been mastered the team will train robots to tackle other products. The learning process will take time. Dr Saenz thinks it could be five years until they develop a commercial disassembly robot that could usefully work at a recycling centre taking apart anything from PCs to white goods and televisions. Firms that want to recycle their own, limited range of products could probably put together something more quickly. A multi-purpose robot would probably be popular, since companies are under increasingly fierce legislative pressure to take responsibility for the end-of-life management of their products, either directly or by employing specialists to recycle for them. The rise of smarter spanner-wielding robots, therefore, should encourage more firms to ensure their products are useful in death, as they were in life.
