How OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, plans to make 'AI-native universities'

By Natasha Singer

 

OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has a plan to overhaul college education — by embedding its artificial intelligence (AI) tools in every facet of campus life. 

If its strategy succeeds, universities would give students AI assistants to guide and tutor them from orientation day through graduation. Professors would provide customised AI study bots for each class. Career services would offer recruiter chatbots for students to practice for job interviews. And undergrads could turn on a chatbot’s voice mode to be quizzed aloud ahead of a test. 

OpenAI dubs its sales pitch “AI-native universities.” “Our vision is that, over time, AI would become part of the core infrastructure of higher education,” Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s vice president of education, said. In the same way that colleges give students school email accounts, she said, soon “every student  would have access to their personalised AI account.” 

 

Last year, OpenAI hired Belsky, an ed tech start up veteran, to oversee its education efforts. She has a two-pronged strategy: marketing OpenAI’s premium paid services to universities while advertising free ChatGPT to students. 

To spread chatbots on campuses, OpenAI is selling premium AI services to universities for faculty and student use. It is also running marketing campaigns aimed at getting students who have never used chatbots to try ChatGPT. 

Some universities are already working to make AI tools part of students’ everyday experiences. In early June, Duke University began offering unlimited ChatGPT access to students, faculty and staff. The school also introduced a university platform, called DukeGPT, with AI tools developed by Duke. 

OpenAI’s campaign is part of an escalating AI arms race among tech giants to win over universities and students with their chatbots. It is following in the footsteps of rivals like Google and Microsoft that have for years pushed to get their computers and software into schools, and court students as future customers. 

The competition is so heated that Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, and Elon Musk, who founded the rival xAI, posted duelling announcements on social media this spring offering free premium AI services for college students during exam period. Then Google upped the ante, announcing free student access to its premium chatbot service “through finals 2026.” 

OpenAI ignited the recent AI education trend. In 2022, its rollout of ChatGPT, which can produce human-sounding essays and term papers, helped set off a wave of chatbot-fuelled cheating. Generative AI tools, which are trained on large databases of texts, also make stuff up, which can mislead students. 

Today, millions of college students regularly use AI chatbots as study aides. Now OpenAI is capitalising on ChatGPT’s popularity to promote its other AI services to universities as the new infrastructure for college education. 

OpenAI’s service for universities, ChatGPT Edu, offers more features, including certain privacy protections. It also enables faculty and staff to create custom chatbots for universities. OpenAI’s push to AI-ify college education amounts to a national experiment on millions of students. The use of chatbots in schools is so new that their potential long-term educational benefits and possible side effects are not yet established. 

A few early studies have found that outsourcing tasks like research and writing to chatbots can diminish skills like critical thinking. And some critics argue that colleges going all-in on chatbots are glossing over issues like societal risks, AI labour exploitation and environmental costs. 

OpenAI’s campus marketing effort comes as unemployment has increased among college graduates — particularly in fields like software engineering, where AI is now automating tasks earlier done by humans.

 

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