A Technologist Spent Years Building an AI Chatbot Tutor. He Decided It Cant Be Done. – EdSurge
When Satya Nitta worked at IBM, he and a team of colleagues took on a bold assignment: Use the latest in artificial intelligence to build a new kind of personal digital tutor.
This was before ChatGPT existed, and fewer people were talking about the wonders of AI. But Nitta was working with what was perhaps the highest-profile AI system at the time, IBMs Watson. That AI tool had pulled off some big wins, including beating humans on the Jeopardy quiz show in 2011.
Nitta says he was optimistic that Watson could power a generalized tutor, but he knew the task would be extremely difficult. I remember telling IBM top brass that this is going to be a 25-year journey, he recently told EdSurge.
He says his team spent about five years trying, and along the way they helped build some small-scale attempts into learning products, such as a pilot chatbot assistant that was part of a Pearson online psychology courseware system in 2018.
But in the end, Nitta decided that even though the generative AI technology driving excitement these days brings new capabilities that will change education and other fields, the tech just isnt up to delivering on becoming a generalized personal tutor, and wont be for decades at least, if ever.
Well have flying cars before we will have AI tutors, he says. It is a deeply human process that AI is hopelessly incapable of meeting in a meaningful way. Its like being a therapist or like being a nurse.
Instead, he co-founded a new AI company, called Merlyn Mind, that is building other types of AI-powered tools for educators.
Meanwhile, plenty of companies and education leaders these days are hard at work chasing that dream of building AI tutors. Even a recent White House executive order seeks to help the cause.
Earlier this month, Sal Khan, leader of the nonprofit Khan Academy, told the New York Times: Were at the cusp of using A.I. for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen. And the way were going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.
Khan Academy has been one of the first organizations to use ChatGPT to try to develop such a tutor, which it calls Khanmigo, that is currently in a pilot phase in a series of schools.
Khans system does come with an off-putting warning, though, noting that it makes mistakes sometimes. The warning is necessary because all of the latest AI chatbots suffer from what are known as hallucinations the word used to describe situations when the chatbot simply fabricates details when it doesnt know the answer to a question asked by a user.
AI experts are busy trying to offset the hallucination problem, and one of the most promising approaches so far is to bring in a separate AI chatbot to check the results of a system like ChatGPT to see if it has likely made up details. Thats what researchers at Georgia Tech have been trying, for instance, hoping that their muti-chatbot system can get to the point where any false information is scrubbed from an answer before it is shown to a student. But its not yet clear that approach can get to a level of accuracy that educators will accept.
At this critical point in the development of new AI tools, though, its useful to ask whether a chatbot tutor is the right goal for developers to head toward. Or is there a better metaphor than tutor for what generative AI can do to help students and teachers?
Michael Feldstein spends a lot of time experimenting with chatbots these days. Hes a longtime edtech consultant and blogger, and in the past he wasnt shy about calling out what he saw as excessive hype by companies selling edtech tools.
In 2015, he famously criticized promises about what was then the latest in AI for education a tool from a company called Knewton. The CEO of Knewton, Jose Ferreira, said his product would be like a robot tutor in the sky that can semi-read your mind and figure out what your strengths and weaknesses are, down to the percentile. Which led Feldstein to respond that the CEO was selling snake oil because, Feldstein argued, the tool was nowhere near to living up to that promise. (The assets of Knewton were quietly sold off a few years later.)
So what does Feldstein think of the latest promises by AI experts that effective tutors could be on the near horizon?
ChatGPT is definitely not snake oil far from it, he tells EdSurge. It is also not a robot tutor in the sky that can semi-read your mind. It has new capabilities, and we need to think about what kinds of tutoring functions todays tech can deliver that would be useful to students.
He does think tutoring is a useful way to view what ChatGPT and other new chatbots can do, though. And he says that comes from personal experience.
Feldstein has a relative who is battling a brain hemorrhage, and so Feldstein has been turning to ChatGPT to give him personal lessons in understanding the medical condition and his loved-ones prognosis. As Feldstein gets updates from friends and family on Facebook, he says, he asks questions in an ongoing thread in ChatGPT to try to better understand whats happening.
When I ask it in the right way, it can give me the right amount of detail about, What do we know today about her chances of being OK again? Feldstein says. Its not the same as talking to a doctor, but it has tutored me in meaningful ways about a serious subject and helped me become more educated on my relatives condition.
While Feldstein says he would call that a tutor, he argues that its still important that companies not oversell their AI tools. Weve done a disservice to say theyre these all-knowing boxes, or they will be in a few months, he says. Theyre tools. Theyre strange tools. They misbehave in strange ways as do people.
He points out that even human tutors can make mistakes, but most students have a sense of what theyre getting into when they make an appointment with a human tutor.
When you go into a tutoring center in your college, they dont know everything. You dont know how trained they are. Theres a chance they may tell you something thats wrong. But you go in and get the help that you can.
Whatever you call these new AI tools, he says, it will be useful to have an always-on helper that you can ask questions to, even if their results are just a starting point for more learning.
What are new ways that generative AI tools can be used in education, if tutoring ends up not being the right fit?
To Nitta, the stronger role is to serve as an assistant to experts rather than a replacement for an expert tutor. In other words, instead of replacing, say, a therapist, he imagines that chatbots can help a human therapist summarize and organize notes from a session with a patient.
Thats a very helpful tool rather than an AI pretending to be a therapist, he says. Even though that may be seen as boring, by some, he argues that the technologys superpower is to automate things that humans dont like to do.
In the educational context, his company is building AI tools designed to help teachers, or to help human tutors, do their jobs better. To that end, Merlyn Mind has taken the unusual step of building its own so-called large language model from scratch designed for education.
Even then, he argues that the best results come when the model is tuned to support specific education domains, by being trained with vetted datasets rather than relying on ChatGPT and other mainstream tools that draw from vast amounts of information from the internet.
What does a human tutor do well? They know the student, and they provide human motivation, he adds. Were all about the AI augmenting the tutor.
Go here to see the original:
A Technologist Spent Years Building an AI Chatbot Tutor. He Decided It Cant Be Done. - EdSurge
- Here Are My Top Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks to Buy Right Now - The Motley Fool - April 26th, 2024 [April 26th, 2024]
- Types of Artificial Intelligence That You Should Know in 2024 - Simplilearn - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- This Red-Hot Artificial Intelligence (AI) Company Just Joined Nvidia and AMD in the S&P 500: Is It Time to Buy? - Yahoo Finance - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Nasdaq All-Time High: 3 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks That Led the Index to Its Highest Level Ever (and Can Help ... - The Motley Fool - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- This Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock Has Jumped 158% in a Year, and It Could Soar Another 60% - MSN - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Justice Department beefs up focus on artificial intelligence enforcement, warns of harsher sentences - ABC News - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Ready to Invest in Artificial Intelligence (AI)? 2 Nvidia Alternatives - The Motley Fool - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- The Scariest Part About Artificial Intelligence - The New Republic - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Artificial intelligence vs machine learning: what's the difference? - ReadWrite - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- AI singularity may come in 2027 with artificial 'super intelligence' sooner than we think, says top scientist - Livescience.com - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- 2 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks You May Regret Not Buying Right Now Before They Soar 31% to 88% - The Motley Fool - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- This Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock Could Double, and It Is Way Cheaper Than Nvidia - Yahoo Finance - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Billionaire David Tepper Slashed His Position in Nvidia. Here Are the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks He Bought Instead. - Yahoo Finance - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Artificial Intelligence, Real Consequences: The use of Artificial Intelligence platforms in higher-education - The Justice - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Meet T-Stitch: A Simple Yet Efficient Artificial Intelligence Technique to Improve the Sampling Efficiency with Little or No Generation Degradation -... - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- A.I. Is Learning What It Means to Be Alive - The New York Times - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- The Adams administration quietly hired its first AI czar. Who is he? - City & State New York - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Think Palantir Technologies Stock Is Expensive? Here's a Cheaper Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock to Buy Before It ... - Yahoo Finance - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- 1 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock That Has Created Millionaires and Will Continue to Make More - The Motley Fool - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Report: Artificial Intelligence A Threat to Climate Change, Energy Usage and Disinformation - Friends of the Earth - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Artificial-intelligence tool shows high accuracy for diagnosing ear infections - University of Minnesota Twin Cities - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Artificial Intelligence Takes the Spotlight at TiEcon Delhi 2024 - CXOToday.com - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- This Week in AI: Ethics, Chips and Small Business Investments - PYMNTS.com - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock Nvidia May Be the Bubble of the Century, and History Suggests It Won't End Well - The Motley Fool - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- The Terrifying A.I. Scam That Uses Your Loved One's Voice - The New Yorker - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Driving Innovation: Exploring the Automotive Artificial Intelligence Market In The Latest Research - WhaTech - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Chinas lawmakers walk fine line between AI development and tighter regulation - South China Morning Post - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- The benefits and risks of Artificial Intelligence - IT Brief Australia - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- The Bull Market Is Official: 1 Superb Artificial Intelligence (AI) Growth Stock to Buy Before the Nasdaq Soars Higher in ... - The Motley Fool - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Learn the ways of machine learning with Python through one of these 5 courses and specializations - Fortune - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Forget Nvidia: These 2 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks Are Considerably Cheaper and Not in a Bubble - The Motley Fool - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- MotoGP, China close to Ducati: Lenovo uses artificial intelligence in the 'Remote Garage' - GPOne.com - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- Here's the Only Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock That Warren Buffett and Cathie Wood Both Own As 2024 Begins - Yahoo Finance - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- 3 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks to Buy Today, Still Below Their 2021 Highs - The Motley Fool - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- Demystifying AI: The Probability Theory Behind LLMs Like OpenAI's ChatGPT - PYMNTS.com - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- The Urgent but Difficult Task of Regulating Artificial Intelligence - Amnesty International - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- 1 Spectacular Artificial Intelligence (AI) Growth Stock Down 35% to Buy Hand Over Fist in 2024 - Yahoo Finance - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- The Diabetic Cyborg Life 01/22: Artificial Intelligence Makes for Lies in New Hampshire - Medium - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- Comparing Student Reactions To Lectures In Artificial Intelligence And Physics - Science 2.0 - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- Critics Say Sweeping Artificial Intelligence Regulations Could Target Parody, Satire Such as South Park, Family Guy - R Street - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- Could Snowflake Be the Best Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock to Own in 2024? - The Motley Fool - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- Forget Nvidia: 2 Artificial Intelligence Stocks That Could Help Make You Rich in 2024 - The Motley Fool - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- Stanford Researchers Introduce PEPSI: A New Artificial Intelligence Method to Identify Tumor-Immune Cell Interactions from Tissue Imaging -... - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- Does Microsoft's Latest Artificial Intelligence (AI) Product Make It a Screaming Buy? - The Motley Fool - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- Artificial Intelligence: inevitable integration enterprises | Top Stories | theweeklyjournal.com - The Weekly Journal - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- Seven technologies to watch in 2024 - Nature.com - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- Artificial intelligence helped scientists create a new type of battery - Science News Magazine - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- Beware The Coming Artificial Intelligence Tax - Forbes - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- AI News: Artificial Intelligence Trends And Top AI Stocks To Watch - Investor's Business Daily - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- WHO releases AI ethics and governance guidance for large multi-modal models - World Health Organization - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- When Might AI Outsmart Us? It Depends Who You Ask - TIME - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- 1 Spectacular Artificial Intelligence (AI) Growth Stock Down 35% to Buy Hand Over Fist in 2024 - The Motley Fool - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- Youngkin signs a new executive order on artificial intelligence - WRIC ABC 8News - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- UAE establishes Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Technology Council - Al Arabiya English - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- Artificial intelligence cant replace the majority of jobs right now in cost-effective ways: study - National Post - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- 2 Stock-Split Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks to Buy Before They Soar 50% and 80%, According to Certain Wall Street ... - Yahoo Finance - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- 3 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks That Could Make You a Millionaire - Yahoo Finance - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear Stability - War On The Rocks - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- Test Yourself: Which Faces Were Made by A.I.? - The New York Times - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- History Suggests the Nasdaq Will Surge in 2024: My Top 7 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Growth Stocks to Buy Before It Does - The Motley Fool - January 22nd, 2024 [January 22nd, 2024]
- Cathie Wood's Ark Invest Is Selling Nvidia Stock and Buying These 2 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Growth Stocks Ahead of ... - The Motley Fool - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- 2 Unstoppable Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks Up 159% and 217% in 2023 to Buy in 2024 - Yahoo Finance - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- Nvidia Stock Has This Under-the-Radar Artificial Intelligence (AI) Growth Strategy for 2024 - The Motley Fool - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- This Is Warren Buffett's Favorite Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock. Here's Why. - The Motley Fool - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- If I Could Buy Only 1 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock, This Would Be It - The Motley Fool - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- Quantitative gait analysis and prediction using artificial intelligence for patients with gait disorders | Scientific Reports - Nature.com - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- AI Revolution: Unleashing the Power of Artificial Intelligence in Our Lives - Medium - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- Arguing the Pros and Cons of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare - HealthITAnalytics.com - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- This "Magnificent Seven" Stock Could Win Big From Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 2024, and Beyond - The Motley Fool - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- Is artificial intelligence about to free us from the curse of Babel? - New Scientist - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- 1 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock Down 58% to Buy Hand Over Fist in 2024 - The Motley Fool - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- This Artificial Intelligence Stock Could Be Like Buying Amazon in 1997 - The Motley Fool - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- 3 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks With 48% to 123% Upside in 2024, According to Select Wall Street Analysts - The Motley Fool - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- Michael Cohen Used Artificial Intelligence to Feed Lawyer Bogus Cases - Yahoo! Voices - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- AI Assimilation: 7 Stocks Leading in Artificial Intelligence Adoption - InvestorPlace - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- 1 Dow Jones Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock to Buy Hand Over Fist in 2024. Hint: It's Not in the "Magnificent Seven." - The Motley Fool - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- Worried About Nvidia's Valuation? 1 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock to Buy Right Now Before It Soars Higher - The Motley Fool - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- Why Are the "Magnificent Seven" So Magnificent? Hint: Artificial Intelligence - The Motley Fool - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- History Says the Nasdaq Will Soar in 2024: 1 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Growth Stock to Buy Before It Does - The Motley Fool - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- The top 10 people in artificial-intelligence hardware - Business Insider - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
Tags: