Anant Agarwal: AI for Education
Anant Agarwal: AI for Education
On new features in EdX for education, ChatGPT's impact on student success, and more!
Appears in this episode
In episode 85 of The Gradient Podcast, Andrey Kurenkov speaks to Anant Agarwal
Anant Agarwal is the chief platform officer of 2U, and founder of edX. Anant taught the first edX course on circuits and electronics from MIT, which drew 155,000 students from 162 countries. He has served as the director of CSAIL, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. He is a successful serial entrepreneur, having co-founded several companies including Tilera Corporation, which created the Tile multicore processor, and Virtual Machine Works.
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Outline:
(00:00) Intro
(01:30) History with research
(05:56) Founding EdX
(13:05) AI at EdX
(18:40) Reaction to AI as a teacher
(25:00) Student interest in AI
(32:20) AI’s impact on academia
(35:00) Future of AI in education
(38:25) AI writing essays
(43:38) Experiences playing with ChatGPT
Anant Agarwal: AI for Education
Another interesting interview. As a teacher of writing, it was interesting listening to Agarwal’s take on the future of essay writing. One flaw in his argument lies in the highly influential nature of the LLM’s text on the user’s pathways of thinking and thus follow-up writing or revising. If we start with our outline, but allow LLMs to fill the gap with copious text, we as writers will miss the chance to fill the space with something fresh and original. A lot of research suggests that once a concrete writing scheme is introduced, the writer’s mind has to work twice as hard to get somewhere else. The gravitational pull of the content, biases, and selectivity of the existing content has real power, particularly for younger users.