The AI one started on November 22, 2022, when Open AI launched ChatGPT, a free AI app that responds like a human. For the tech world, it is mind-blowing to see that ChatGPT has grown faster than any app in history, reaching 100 million active users in just two months, surpassing Facebook, X, and all the others.
Fernando Díaz del Castillo, CEO and co-founder of Mentu, spoke at the Leaders for Education Summit (CLE) in 2018, through his talk ‘Navigating the future: challenges and opportunities for connected education’, about how AI “rapidly evolved”.
He said this was thanks to “investment from different entities,” such as Khan Academy, which launched Khanmigo, an artificial intelligence tutor for children; Google, which launched Gemini, a new multimodal design more capable than Bard; OpenAI, which recently launched Sora, to create videos from descriptions; and Google LearnML, an artificial intelligence model with educational content.
Regardless of these pros and cons, Díaz assured that the global impact that this technological advance has generated, he sums it up in one sentence: “Generative AI is capable of creating”.
How important is the advancement of artificial intelligence?
Geoffrey Hinton, a professor at the University of Toronto and the creator of the neural network model that enabled current advances in artificial intelligence, said that “This technology is as important as the Industrial Revolution, electricity or even the wheel.”.
For Microsoft genius Bill Gates, “generative AI is as impressive as the development of graphical interfaces for computers.”
Challenges for the future
Mentu’s co-founder described the challenges of incorporating AI into humanity’s daily, academic, professional and scientific life:
- Specialized knowledge: The new tool involves learning about AI and developing its use at a professional level.
- Access to multiple tools: One of the most worrying drawbacks is the limited access, due to the associated costs, which in many places around the world – due to their economic conditions – become difficult to achieve. This implies a dilemma with the equity of the use of technology.
- Biases and hallucinations: AI is susceptible to the erosion of truth. In other words, this technology feeds on what it finds on the Internet, that is its input. But there it can find both true and false information, and with this it formulates its responses. “It is not that it intends to lie, because it is not designed for that,” says the co-founder.
- Abuse, and : One of the most feared risks is the ability of AI to be used to create false information about, for example, characters, simulating that they are texts or publications generated by recognized figures, and that this technology can imitate very well, generating confusion.
- Job Losses: This is perhaps one of the most widespread fears. Recently, Amazon published that its developers were 60% more productive when they used Artificial Intelligence. This implies a threat to white-collar jobs, those of the intellect, the thinkers within companies, because this model does it very well.
Specific challenges for education
- What and why to learn? This motivates us to rethink what is worth teaching and learning in a world where AI exists. Díaz del Castillo mentions: “Of those things that we teach in the curricula, which ones are worth continuing to teach and which ones are not, because we are going to delegate them to AI, but we still don’t have an answer to this.”
- How to learn? A second point to reconsider is when and how it makes pedagogical sense to use AI. “We must see AI as a tool with the potential to increase our capacity, producing improvements in efficiency, effectiveness and new tasks,” says Díaz. He adds that AI should mean augmented intelligence, because it allows us to maximize our capabilities.
Fernando Diaz del Castillo concludes that “Rigorous evidence agrees that, to improve educational quality, it is essential to change classroom practices, hand in hand with teachers.”. It also suggests options that should be considered in the future in the educational field, such as the possibility of a personal assistant for each teacher, to help them think about and plan their classes.
And he concludes by saying: “Our vision is to build the leading AI-powered educational ecosystem in Latin America,” with a projection to 2030.
