OpenAI will provide 500,000 free ChatGPT licences for six months to students and teachers across government schools from Classes 1 to 12, engineering and technical institutes, as well as K-12 educators.
Sam Altman-led OpenAI on Monday said it would provide 500,000 free ChatGPT licences for six months to students and teachers across government schools from classes 1 to 12, engineering and technical institutes, as well as K-12 educators.
"We believe artificial intelligence has the potential to transform education. AI can be a personal lifelong tutor and learning agent. For educators, AI can free up time for them to focus more on the core part of teaching," Leah Belsky, vice-president of Education at OpenAI, said at a select media briefing.
The programme for students and teachers will be run under the OpenAI Learning Accelerator, an India-first initiative.
Belsky said the company is not looking to monetise through these free licences as of now, adding that the focus for now was "access and training".
"So, the broader hope is that we can enable 500,000 users, with a focus on educators, to learn how they are using ChatGPT, and then replicate those learnings," Belsky added, responding to a question from Business Standard.
As part of the programme, ChatGPT would distribute these licences in India, in collaboration with the ministry of education (MoE), the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), and schools that are members of the Association for Reinventing School Education (ARISE).
The MoE will help OpenAI identify government schools where access to ChatGPT can enhance teachers' lesson planning, student engagement, and outcomes.
Similarly, AICTE and ARISE will help drive access to tools like ChatGPT's study mode at scale, apart from strengthening digital skills, employability, and practical AI use, the company said.
On Monday, OpenAI also signed a memorandum of understanding with the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, for joint research on how AI can improve learning outcomes and foster innovative teaching methods aligned with insights from cognitive neuroscience.
OpenAI will grant $500,000 to the institute for the research project.
"The intent is to study over a period of time, the impact AI can have on learning and how teaching can be made better.
"When the study results are published, we will also make them public.
"We hope that some of the research will help make our learning tools better," Raghav Gupta, the head of Education at OpenAI in India and Asia Pacific, said.
Gupta's appointment, also announced on Monday, is in line with OpenAI's announcement last week to expand its team in the country, along with the opening of an office in New Delhi.
The company is also likely to hire a few more people in the communications and marketing roles in the days to come, according to industry executives.
Earlier in July, OpenAI introduced the study mode in ChatGPT to help students work through problems instead of simply getting the answer to a question.
In study mode, ChatGPT prompts students to interact with questions tailored to their objective and skill level, helping them build a deeper understanding of the subject.
The new mode has been built on system instructions developed by OpenAI in collaboration with teachers, scientists, and pedagogy experts, the company had then said.
Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/Rediff
