Education companies race to the AI market

Education companies, which have faced criticism about how slow they can be to adapt, are wasting no time with their embrace of artificial intelligence (AI).

Late last year, OpenAI’s ChatGPT took the industry by storm, growing at speeds that outpaced the initial growth of even popular social media platforms such as Instagram.

Since then, education companies have clamored to get AI-powered tools on their sites and products.

Brainly, a social learning platform, released a beta version of an AI helper named “Ginny” to its site on April 6. The chatbot is intended to “simplify” or “expand” the answers it gives students.

“Brainly puts the student in control of how they want their questions answered,” Bill Salak, chief technology officer at Brainly, said in the Ginny launch announcement. “Our Learners are able to go deeper into the subject to understand further the topic they are struggling with or request a simplified response. We’re using the latest AI technology to create a more personalized learning experience for students worldwide, unlike searching for information on a search engine, where what you get is what you get.”

In March, the popular language-teaching app Duolingo introduced Duolingo Max, which also uses GPT-4 technology developed by OpenAI. The “new subscription tier above Super Duolingo” includes roleplay exercises, the company says.

And Grammarly, which has been using AI for longer than most, plans to release later this month a new AI feature called GrammarlyGo, designed to help boost communications.

“Grammarly is committed to using the most effective technologies available to solve real individual and organizational problems in everyday communications — from overcoming writer’s block to tackling an email backlog in minutes, and more,” the company said in a blog post.

While it seems as though these features were added in a rush after ChatGPT’s explosion, some firms had already been working on the additions behind the scenes for months.

“We were working with the team over at OpenAI on these technologies before they were released publicly. We were using them and we were giving feedback on them, in some cases, contributing data to help make them better,” Brainly’s Salak told The Hill.

Memrise, a language-learning company, was one of the quickest on the scene with AI after ChatGPT’s launch, announcing its 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,” Memrise’s announcement said.

“Our first bot was out with GPT-3 and we had that out before ChatGPT hit the market. But when ChatGPT hit the market, it exploded like a two megaton bomb into everybody’s consciousness,” Memrise CEO Steve Toy said. “We happen to be sitting right there with an example of what you can do with this in production and where people can touch it, so it was huge for us for sure.”

And teachers are already starting to feel the benefits.

Turnitin, the popular plagiarism detection software used by thousands of educators, announced at the beginning of the month that its AI-based detection has a 98 percent accuracy rate.

“For us, it’s kind of been 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 realized this day was probably coming,” said Turnitin Vice President for Artificial Intelligence Eric Wang, adding that “when ChatGPT really struck the public consciousness, we were ready to go.”

ChatGPT has more than 100 million users in its first five months in the market, fueling excitement and uncertainty about where the technology can evolve and how fast it will develop.

Wang said Turnitin has received a lot of positive feedback on its release of AI detection from users, but also constructive criticism about how interpretable the feedback is on their AI detection.

“We also recognize that what happened on April 4 was the starting line, not the finish line,” he said.

Other companies such as Memrise say they are very optimistic about the future of AI-use in their industry, even if they don’t know exactly what it will look like.

“I can guarantee you that our offering at this time next year will include things that I don’t have in my head right now. I am 100 percent certain that that will be the case. So it’s going to move fast,” Toy said.

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