Education companies, which have faced complaints about how slow they are to adapt, are not wasting time in their adoption of AI.
Late last year, OpenAI’s ChatGPT took the industry by storm, growing at speeds that outpaced the initial growth of popular social media platforms like Instagram.
Since then, education companies have been calling for AI-powered tools on their sites and products.
Brainly, a social learning platform, launched a beta version of its AI assistant named “Ginny” to its site on April 6. The chatbot aims to “simplify” or “expand” the answers it provides to students.
“Brainly puts the student in control of how they want their questions answered,” Bill Salak, Brainly’s chief technology officer, said in Ginny’s launch announcement. Our learners are able to dig deeper into a topic to further understand a topic they are struggling with or ask for a streamlined response. We use the latest AI technology to create a more personalized learning experience for students around the world, as opposed to searching for information on a search engine, where what you get is what you get.”
In March, he introduced the popular language teaching application Duolingo Max, which also uses GPT-4 technology developed by OpenAI. The company says its “new subscription tier above Super Duolingo” includes role-playing exercises.
Grammarly, which has been using AI longer than most, plans to release a new AI feature later this month called GrammarlyGo, designed to help boost connections.
“Grammarly is committed to using the most effective technology available to solve real individual and organizational problems in everyday communications — from overcoming writer’s block to tackling email backlogs in minutes, and more,” the company said in a blog post.
While it seems as if these features were added quickly after ChatGPT exploded, some companies have already been working on the additions behind the scenes for months.
“We’ve been working with the team at OpenAI on these technologies before they’re released publicly. We’ve been using them and we’ve been providing feedback on them and, in some cases, contributing data to help improve them,” Brinley Salk told The Hill.
Memrise, a language learning company, has been one of the fastest on the scene with AI after launching ChatGPT, announcing Membot.
“Using cutting-edge GPT-3 technology, we’ve built an AI language partner called MemBot, which embodies the final ‘Communicate’ step of the ‘Learn-Immerse-Communicate’ method that underpins everything we do here at Memrise,” the announcement said.
“Our first bot was with GPT-3 and we had that before ChatGPT hit the market. But when ChatGPT hit the market, it exploded like a 2-megaton bomb in everyone’s consciousness,” said Steve Toy, CEO of Memrise. That we sat there with an example of what you can do with this in production and where people can touch it, so it was definitely huge for us.”
And teachers are already beginning to feel the benefits.
Turnitin, a popular plagiarism-spotting program used by thousands of educators, announced at the beginning of the month that AI-based detection has an accuracy rate of 98 percent.
“For us, it’s been kind of a long burn. We’ve been looking at GPT for two to two and a half years. With the release of GPT-3, we kind of knew that day was probably coming,” said Turnitin’s vice president of AI Eric Wang, “when ChatGPT really shocked the public’s consciousness, we were ready to go.”
ChatGPT has more than 100 million users in its first five months on the market, fueling excitement and uncertainty about where and how quickly the technology can evolve.
Wang said that Turnitin received a lot of positive feedback on its release of AI discovery from users, but also constructive criticism about how interpretable the feedback was on their AI discovery.
“We also realize that what happened on April 4 was the starting line, not the finish line,” he said.
Other companies like Memrise say they are very optimistic about the future of using AI in their industry, even if they don’t know exactly what it will look like.
“I can guarantee you that our show this time next year will include things I just don’t have in mind right now. I’m 100 percent sure that will be the case. So it will move quickly,” Toy said.
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