SAIL: Universal Knowledge Engine
Welcome to Sensemaking, AI, and Learning (SAIL) a regular look at how AI impacts education.
We don't have many search engines. Most people use Google. Some use Bing. A few use tools like DuckDuckGo. Search is fairly utilitarian, but I think there is value for thinking about education in the age of AI. I don't think we're going to see hundreds of AI agents in education. I think we're going to only see a few. These will likely be built on data now sitting in Coursera, Chegg, Canvas, or perhaps in some of the large open universities (with students in the 100s of thousands range). Why is this data more valuable than, say, ChatGPT? ChatGPT might overtime become a universal knowledge engine, but the unique aspects of learning through interaction with content and engagement with peers will provide nuance in developing (tuning) models. Content has an almost zero valuation in education due to ChatGPT. Textbook publishers and educational content providers have a short life ahead unless they dramatically change their value points. Tools that capture process and engagement will provide critical value. The future of AI technologies in education will be at an intersection of learning content (where even education personal AI tutors will increasingly be in competition with ChatGPT) and learning processes - where engagement and community will be key.
AI and Education
To Advance AI Use in Education, Focus on Understanding Educators "It is only with the acceptance and trust of educators that these innovative solutions can elevate learning outcomes, academic achievements, and educational equity."
Is AI the better programming partner? Human-Human Pair Programming vs. Human-AI pAIr Programming "We found that both human-human and human-AI pair programming have benefits and challenges, but current research did not give us a clear answer on the efficacy of human-AI pair programming."
ChatGPT Needs to Go to College. Will OpenAI Pay? "Virtually no one outside of the big tech firms like OpenAI and Google are actually building the underlying language models from scratch, but many companies are buying access to those models, like GPT-4, and then tweaking them with specialist data for their own purposes." This relates to my opening comments. Will we end up with a universal knowledge engine? Or will we end up with a range of tuned/trained models based on educational curricula?
ChatGPT: The Double-Edged Sword of AI in Education (from March). It's all about data sets. "At Schmidt Futures, we’re supporting efforts like high-quality dataset generation to help make breakthrough progress on key challenges such as significantly improving the rate of middle school math learning."
AI powered training for skilled trades. AI startups are going to be more prominent in education - the deluge is on the horizon. Tools such as this target a specific sector and a specific need.
Coursera launches Coach. I missed this when it was announced, but Coursera has launched some generative AI tools including a virtual coach and a course authoring tool.
General AI
Model collapse "What happens as AI-generated content proliferates around the internet, and AI models begin to train on it, instead of on primarily human-generated content?" Basically, models degrade quickly, which raises the need for quality data sets. And perhaps a growing role for synthetic data.
Salesforce is betting big on AI "It’s really about bringing generative AI in a trusted fashion to the enterprise". The tools being built now are increasingly moving technical complexity one layer down, advancing the opportunity for broader participation in AI adoption. They're also investing big in AI companies.
What will GPT-2030 look like? A long read. But important and worth the time.
Big AI companies allow gov't access "Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic have agreed to open up their AI models to the U.K. government for research and safety purposes"
Social Impacts
Loneliness, insomnia linked to work with AI systems Not that after-work drinking is also associated with AI work. There is a broad human/social/connectedness aspect to AI.
AI at Work: What are people saying? 13,000 person survey, most people are optimistic. Varied perspectives between leaders and front-line. Most are tuned into the responsible AI conversation.
AI-Church. It may be a tad uncomfortable, but AI is deity-like in the sense that it can "see" and interact with information at a much larger scale than humans can. It is a cognitive higher power.