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Ivy League students at one of America’s most expensive colleges will be learning AI next year.
The teachers at Harvard University’s popular entry-level coding course, which typically hosts about 1,000 students each semester, are “experimenting” with a ChatGPT-supported teaching assistant.
Professor David Malan, who leads the course, justifies plans to introduce the ‘CS50 bot’ by noting that the course has often implemented new software in its syllabus.
A ChatGPT AI teacher, he said, was simply an “evolution of that tradition,” he said in a statement.
“Our own hope is that through AI we can eventually approach a 1:1 teacher:student ratio for every student in CS50…by providing them with software-based tools that, 24/7, monitor their learning in a pace and in a style that works best for them personally.’
The teachers of CS50, Harvard University’s popular introductory programming course, are “experimenting” with a ChatGPT-powered teaching assistant. Above, Radcliffe Quad student residence at Harvard University in the fall of 2013, before the arrival of AI teachers
In his statement to the crimsonthe Harvard newspaper, Professor Malan specified that he and the course staff were “currently experimenting with both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models.”
Outside of the Ivy League, however, developers and software engineers are struggling to incorporate creator OpenAI’s new ChatGPT-4 into their workflow, calling into question their new algorithmic collaborator’s ability to code.
“Is it just me or has the quality of GPT-4 deteriorated significantly lately?” asked a user of the Silicon Valley startup incubator Hacker News forum from Y-combinator.
Outside of the Ivy League, developers and software engineers are struggling to incorporate OpenAI’s new ChatGPT-4 into their workflow, calling into question their new AI collaborator’s ability to code
“It generates more buggy code,” the user wrote, “and overall it feels much worse than before.”
Others in the community described the AI’s software skills as “significantly worse‘ than earlier versions of ChatGPT, prone to ‘superficial reactions‘and almost’lobotomyin his answers to coding prompts.
With the full cost of a four-year Harvard degree somewhere around $334,000, based on rates for the 2022-23 school year, paying students will likely want and expect that the CS50 staff’s “experimentation” with ChatGPT will fully work out the kinks. have worked out by September.
CS50 is one of Harvard’s most popular offerings on the online learning platform edX, according to the Crimson. collaboration with MIT in 2012.
The two universities sold edX to educational technology company 2U for $800 million in 2021 – with the proviso that the platform be operated as a public benefit institution that also offers its courses as ‘free to check’.
While Prof. Malan acknowledged that “early incarnations” of AI programs like ChatGPT are likely to “underperform or even make mistakes at times,” he nevertheless expressed his belief that having his own AI teaching assistant will cut back on busy work.
‘[A]assessing, more qualitatively, students’ code design has remained labor intensive,” Malan said.
“Through AI, we hope to shorten that time so that we can redistribute [teaching fellows’] time to more meaningful, interpersonal time with their students, similar to a student model.”
College, as the saying goes, is not about teaching students what to think, but how to think – and Malan’s parting remarks about the new CS50 bot reflected this learning philosophy.
“We will make it clear to students that they should always think critically when taking in information as input,” Malan said, “whether it be from humans or software.”