Harvard announces it will use artificial intelligence teachers to teach students next semester
Students at one of America's most expensive universities, the Ivy League Harvard, will be taught by artificial intelligence teachers next year.
Faculty at Harvard University's popular introductory-level programming course, which typically has about 1,000 students per semester, are experimenting with ChatGPT-based teaching assistants.
In a statement, the course's director, Professor David Malan, explained the plan to introduce "CS50 Robotics", noting that the course often uses the new software in its syllabus. ChatGPT AI teachers are just an "evolution" of this tradition, he said.
"Our hope is that with artificial intelligence, we can eventually achieve close to a 1:1 teacher-student ratio for every student at CS50 ... providing them with software-based tools that support their individualized learning 24/7," he said. progress and manner."
In a statement to Harvard's campus newspaper, The Crimson, Professor Malan made it clear that he and the course's faculty are "currently experimenting with the GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models."
Outside the Ivy League, however, developers and software engineers have had trouble incorporating OpenAI's new ChatGPT-4 into their workflows, raising questions about the new algorithmic collaborator's coding prowess .
“Is it just me or has the quality of GPT-4 dropped significantly lately?” asked a user on the Hacker News forum of Silicon Valley start-up incubator Y Combinator.
Questions have arisen about the encoding capabilities of the GPT-4 model, with some developers and engineers saying they have had difficulty incorporating it into their workflows and seeing a significant drop in the quality of GPT-4. This perception has sparked discussion in some tech communities.
"The code it generates has more bugs and the overall feel is much worse than before," the user wrote.
Others in the community have described the AI's software capabilities as "significantly worse", prone to "superficial responses" than past versions of ChatGPT, and almost "brainless" when it comes to answering coded prompts.
Based on rates for the 2022-2023 academic year, the full cost of a four-year degree at Harvard is approximately $334,000. Fee-paying students may hope and expect that the CS50 faculty will have fully settled on ChatGPT by September.
According to Crimson, CS50 is one of the most popular courses on edX, Harvard University's online learning platform. The school partnered with MIT to launch edX in 2012.
The two universities sold edX to education technology company 2U for $800 million in 2021, with the proviso that the platform operates as a public benefit entity and offers its courses as "free audits."
Professor Malan acknowledged that "early AI programs like ChatGPT often performed poorly or even made mistakes occasionally", but he still expressed confidence that his AI teaching assistant will reduce tedious work.
"Assessing the design of student code from a more qualitative perspective still requires human input," Malan said. He hopes that with the help of artificial intelligence, the time spent in this area can be reduced so that the time of teaching assistants can be reallocated to more detailed discussions with students. Meaningful interpersonal communication, similar to the apprenticeship model.
As the saying goes, college doesn't teach students how to think, it teaches them how to think. Malan's parting comments about the new CS50 robot also echo this teaching philosophy.
“We make it clear to students that they should think critically when they receive information, whether the source is a human or a software,” Malan said.