SAN JOSE, Calif. (KGO) — The California State University system says it’s taking on Artificial Intelligence in an unprecedented way, joining forces with several of the world’s major tech companies to create an AI-powered higher education system.
San Jose State University was the site of the major announcement that impacts all 23 CSU universities.
“No other university system in the U.S. or internationally is doing anything like this, not at this scale,” said Dr. Mildred Garcia, CSU Chancellor.
The CSU is teaming up with companies like Adobe, Alphabet/Google, AWS, IBM, Instructure, Intel, LinkedIn, Microsoft, NVIDIA and OpenAI. Governor Gavin Newsom’s Office is also involved.
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Students and guests at San Jose State University got to see the future of AI first-hand on campus Friday.
The goal is to help all students keep up with the AI revolution in their studies and their launch into the workforce.
“We need to start building that kind of usage of the tools and understanding those tools into everything we teach. And so our students need to learn these things so that when they graduate, they’ll be prepared for the workforce or grad school or whatever they want to do next,” said Ed Clark, CSU Chief Information Officer.
One of the main goals in developing the AI-powered education system was to have one AI platform to be used across every CSU university.
“What we noticed across the country, not just in the CSU, is that universities are developing their own AI strategies, and depending on their funding, they’re purchasing their own tools,” Clark said, “We were seeing that happening in the CSU, and we realized we can’t let some universities go ahead while others fall behind, so we needed to provide a common tool.”
That common tool will be a customized version of ChatGPT created specifically for educational institutions.
“It has specific features for faculty and administrators to create what we call custom GPTs to interact with students,” said Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s VP and GM of education.
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A free classroom-ready resource aims to provide basic AI awareness for high school students in the Bay Area and throughout the country.
That version of ChatGPT will be launched to more than 500,000 CSU students and faculty, but CSU officials say the public-private partnership aims to do more.
That includes apprenticeship programs within AI enabled organizations.
“They’ll be using these tools to do critical thinking, to be creative, to be in the classroom, using these tools with the content specialists, helping them go along, understanding how to use it when they go out into the workforce,” Dr. Garcia said.
Training materials provided by the tech partners are going to be rolled out to the CSU universities by the end of the week.
ChatGPT EDU will be rolled out to the entire CSU community over the next month.
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