AI's changing role in education: Monthly highlights of 2023

2023 proved that generative AI has great potential to disrupt the field of education. This year also showed us that AI technology can and is moving at breakneck speed. The big question is always be: “what’s next?”. After reflecting on the past 12 months, we are excited to share our predictions for the next 12 months.

How AI models will improve

• Concerns about hallucinations will basically disappear. Sam Altman has said OpenAI plans to iron out hallucinations within the next 1-2 years. There’s doubt that they will ever fully disappear, but as models improve and people learn how to manage and look for hallucinations, concern about them will soon subside.

• “Prompt engineering” will be reserved for edge cases (e.g. advanced custom workflows). Consumer AI models will be so good that they’ll produce great results with 0 prompt engineering. You can already tell the difference here between GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 where GPT-4 can create stellar results from plain language prompts.

• AI will be accurate enough to generate images that can be used academically for STEM use cases like biology and physics diagrams. This will unlock even more personalized learning potential and a smoother experience for both teachers and students.

• AI will be able to remember more info accurately. Context windows have gone from 8k to 100k within this year for most models and this is likely to improve even further. This means AI tools will be able to better personalize to each student. Imagine an AI model being able to remember how a student struggled with a writing topic previously, or where in math they’ve needed extra help over the course of the semester—an AI tutor could augment learning over the course of units, classes, and school years.

• Speech will become cemented as a major way that we interact with AI. Verbal conversations with AI will feel almost as natural as speaking to a human. Even though, right now, most people are still using text-based interactions—we at Flint have seen a rise in interest in and use of verbal assignments. Speech-to-text transcription is getting insanely good—with some models like OpenAI’s Whisper performing better than humans. The improvement in quality combined with an increase in speed sets up speech-to-text latency to be less and less of an issue. Plus in many cases, speech assignments are less easily plagiarized.

How AI will be used by students, educators, and parents

As more people use AI for learning and teaching, it’ll become a total no-brainer for educational institutions to create precise AI adoption protocols. There will be a few steps/elements to this change:

• Tutoring centers outside and within schools will need to use AI to make them even more valuable to each student and more flexible to deliver value to more students. If these centers fail to embrace AI and prove their unique value, many parents and students will simply opt for self-learning using AI tools.

• 1-1 tutoring will be able to scale to any kid who needs it. This will really take off when AI is truly as good as a human tutor, which we believe will happen in many subjects in the next 12 months.

• AI will change how teachers teach, on a massive scale. We’ve seen at Flint how AI doesn’t save teachers time, but enables them to spend more 1-1 time with students, and rotate as a facilitator while their students get personalized practice and assessment from AI. Assessment will change to focus on deeper learning skills like critical thinking and creativity and teachers will act more as guides for learning while AI handles concept and fact recitation.