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“ChatGPT’s Study Mode is actually built to give really high-quality answers on Indian curriculum. Over time, you will see us advance the way in which our models speak to Indian students in local languages and on local teaching,” Leah Belsky, VP of Education, OpenAI, told indianexpress.com on the sidelines of the launch of the OpenAI Learning Accelerator in New Delhi on Monday, August 25.
As part of the OpenAI Learning Accelerator, an India-first initiative, the AI platform announced a new research collaboration with IIT Madras, backed by $500,000 in funding from OpenAI to conduct long-term studies on how AI can “improve learning outcomes, foster innovative teaching methods, aligned to insights from cognitive neuroscience”.
Over the next six months, OpenAI also plans to distribute approximately half a million ChatGPT licenses and training to educators and students across India through partnerships with the Ministry of Education, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), and ARISE.
“The reason why we are doing that is because education is central to our mission. So we truly believe AI has potential to transform education for students. It can be a personal, lifelong tutor. For educators, AI can free up time to focus more on the core art of teaching. For institutions, we see that AI will become critical infrastructure for enabling institutions to be managed and how teaching and research is done,” she added.
With over 300 million students in India, Belsky said, OpenAI sees the Indian educational ecosystem as one of the most diverse, from world class institutions like the IITs to rural schools that have lower skilled teachers and don’t have the same educational access. “ChatGPT now is one of the largest learning platforms on the planet. Over 50% of our users in India are under age 24, so students are a major audience,” she said.
“Our team came to India and spent weeks on the ground with parents and students and teachers to understand how they were using ChatGPT. One of the biggest questions and requests that came out of it was that parents wanted students to be able to use ChatGPT more like a tutor and less like an answer machine,” she explained, adding that they also wanted it to be trained on local Indian curriculum, “everything from IIT exams to the CBSE curriculum”.
Meanwhile, OpenAI has appointed Raghav Gupta as Head of Education for India and Asia Pacific. Gupta will work to make OpenAI’s tools more accessible to educators, students, and education researchers across India.
“The idea is that we provide this technology to teachers so they can start leveraging it in what they are doing with students, lesson planning, student engagement, assignments and so on,” he said on how OpenAI will be engaging with educators. Gupta said the intent is also to engage with both the central and the state governments. “We are just about getting started. So it’s completely in the plan,” he added.
