ChatGPT’s First University Partner
Last week ASU announced it has become the first HE institution to partner with ChatGPT Enterprise. We are excited to see a major milestone in the adoption of AI in education, which highlights key opportunities and current limitations to wide scale adoption.
Starting in February, ASU will invite faculty and staff to submit ideas for innovative ways to implement ChatGPT+, with a focus on three key areas:
Enhancing student success
Forging new avenues for innovative research
And streamlining organizational processes
Which all are great ways to experiment with ChatGPT+. They also are reportedly getting something of “walled garden” environment from OpenAI to safeguard data and IP.
On the other hand, ASU does not plan to actually provide access yet to ChatGPT-4 to their students or even faculty, and one imagines that is at least in part due to the significant costs.
Some back of the envelope math based on current ChatGPT+ rates:
- For 5,000 faculty members = $1.2M per year
- For their 145,000 students? A whopping $34.8 MILLION a year
- To equip everyone on campus would equal ~9% of their annual budget.
While we very are excited about the potential outcomes of this partnership, it's also clear that until compute costs come down wide scale adoption of the best model on the market is just not tenable for most education institutions.
What do you think about the approach? What are some innovative approaches would you like to see in this experimental phase?
Read more about the partnership from ASU here.
