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Mikel Amigot, IBL News | New York
OpenAI is selling premium AI services to universities trying to “become part of the core infrastructure of higher education,” said Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s vice president of education and former manager at Coursera, in an interview with The New York Times [in the picture above].
At the same time, it’s running a marketing campaign targeting students and courting them as future customers — essentially as rivals like Google and Microsoft have been doing for years, pushing their computers and software into schools.
The startup envisions students graduating with their AI assistants and utilizing them throughout their careers in the workplace, like they do with their school-issued Gmail accounts.
On their side, Elon Musk’s xAI and Google have been offering free AI services for college students during the exam period.
Overall, OpenAI aims to embed its AI technology within universities by providing students with AI assistants to help tutor and guide them from orientation through graduation, featuring tools such as chatbots, practice job interview tools, voice model tools, and tools to quiz aloud ahead of a test.
Meanwhile, faculty members can build custom chatbots for their students by uploading course materials, such as lecture notes, slides, videos, and quizzes, into ChatGPT.
OpenAI’s sales pitch has been named “AI-native universities.”
Three of its clients are the University of Maryland, California State University (with 460,000 students across its 23 campuses), and Duke University (through a platform called DukeGPT).
Millions of college students regularly use AI chatbots for writing essays and term papers, researching, composing code, and generating ideas.
The San Francisco–based startup service for universities, ChatGPT Edu, offers additional features, including specific privacy protections, compared to the company’s free chatbot. ChatGPT Edu also enables faculty and staff to create custom chatbots for use within the university.
OpenAI states that it does not utilize the information entered by students, faculty, and administrators into ChatGPT Edu for training its AI.
