Interview with Vitaliy Goncharuk — Founder of AI.Business. May 23, 2024. Originally published vy AeroDivan
Vitaly Goncharuk is an American entrepreneur(Washington DC) of Ukrainian origin (Odesa). In 2013, he founded the leading company in the field of autonomous navigation, Augmented Pixels. In 2022, the company was bought by the international company Qualcomm in a record-breaking exit for Eastern Europe!
Vitaly Goncharuk also initiated and chaired the Committee for the Development of Artificial Intelligence in 2020–2022, which organizes the largest professional AI conference in Eastern Europe (EECVC).
Today, we invited Vitaly to our office at Aerodіvan to discuss the possibility of integrating new ChatGPT 4 omni technologies into the education system.
Petro Chernyshov: So, Vitaly, let’s get right to the heart of the matter. What role does the new version of ChatGPT 4o play in the modern educational process, and how does it differ from traditional teaching methods?
Vitaly Goncharuk: For me, there are two approaches to looking at the use of ChatGPT in the field of education:
First, as a tool that simply helps students with homework and answers their questions about learning, it shows a certain secure approach when people get more access to information for learning and actively use it, improving their knowledge.
On the other hand, there is a more revolutionary approach. It involves combining, for example, ChatGPT with a 3D human model generation tool. This approach could potentially replace 75%-85% of teachers and transform the learning process into an interaction between a student and an AI-powered teacher. This could significantly improve the quality of educational processes, as it would allow for the replacement of ‘suboptimal’ teachers and eliminate variability in teaching styles.
Of course, there are many great teachers in the education field, but there is a significant staffing problem. Therefore, this technology could reduce the workload on truly great teachers while replacing or transitioning those who teach formulaically and ineffectively to specific ‘facilitators’.
Petro Chernyshov:What technologies and methods are used in the new version of AI that are not typical for ordinary teachers to provide more effective learning for each student?
So, when a person wants to get an answer to a simple learning question, they can interact with this model, and a human (teacher) transitions to the position of a facilitator’s assistant, because most teachers quote and repeat information that is already written in their curricula. There’s a conditional percentage that they simply teach from the book, and a certain percentage that they facilitate students in a practical way.
That’s why I believe that ‘book learning’ can be replaced by such communication between students and a 3D model with artificial intelligence.
Vitaly Goncharuk: As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, many educational processes transitioned to online distance learning, separating students from their teachers in a physical space. In this scenario, replacing the teacher with a 3D model equipped with an even vaster knowledge base on the subject matter, similar to ChatGPT, wouldn’t significantly alter the student’s perception. They would still be interacting with a visual representation, but potentially one that could make learning more engaging and productive in certain situations.
Petro Chernyshov: Vitaly, after the release of the new ChatGPT 4.0 version, you wrote to me: “You can already replace all your teachers.” Why do you think so, and does this thesis extend to the general education system?
For instance, I studied in a class of 32 students. Back then, I didn’t have the opportunity to ask many questions that interested me because of the large number of students. The teacher simply couldn’t physically handle all the questions. Additionally, some questions might have been embarrassing to ask publicly, as other students might have perceived me as not being intelligent if I asked too many questions. They might think I didn’t understand the teacher.
In the scenario where a child is currently interacting with a ChatGPT/3D model, this issue doesn’t arise. Students can ask as many questions as they like and receive fairly qualified answers.
Overall, access to knowledge in AI-powered learning is not constrained by a country’s education curriculum or the teacher’s intellectual level. Students gain access to a global knowledge base.
Petro Chernyshov: What do you think about the potential impact of replacing teachers with AI on the social and emotional development of students? Could it lead to the formation of an ‘introverted’ generation?
Vitaly Goncharuk: There is a certain percentage of teachers who teach excellently: they motivate, are passionate about their subject, and so on. It is possible to train AI models on such teachers and even reproduce them in 3D. However, teachers who demotivate, lack up-to-date knowledge, and do not produce tangible results (there were many such teachers when I was a student) should be replaced by technology.
I fully support this approach. The education system should prioritize the needs of its customers-students, ensuring they gain the knowledge they seek. This means focusing on effective learning rather than simply rewarding those who work in education solely for a paycheck. In my opinion, there is a need for retraining into facilitators, that is, people who will help students fill in any gaps. Thanks to this, the quality of the education system can be significantly improved. Of course, when I wrote “Replace all teachers,” it was a little provocation, but the fact that many teachers can be replaced is already a common practice.
I am currently in my third year of an Executive MBA at Harvard. I can say that some of our professors are already using “digital twins”-a 3D replica of the professor that is provided to us so that we can communicate with them on questions that interest us. This is done so that we do not distract professors with tasks like: “What do you think about this issue?”. This is a win-win system that provides most of the answers to students’ questions and does not overload professors.
Petro Chernyshov: What are the prospects and challenges of implementing artificial intelligence in the education system in the next 5–10 years, and what steps need to be taken to successfully integrate AI without compromising academic integrity in the education system?
The best teachers and professors understand that this is a tool for them that significantly increases the positive impact and learning productivity of students.
Vitaly Goncharuk: I graduated from Odessa Lyceum, which was the best math school in Odessa in 2001. At that time, I didn’t have access to courses from Harvard, Stanford, etc. Now, it seems to me that thanks to digital education, there are no informational borders for those who are truly interested in learning, so this is a big plus.
For people who are simply ‘maturing’ in universities, meaning they enter them because they are not yet socially and emotionally formed, this is a problem, as they simply have nowhere to socialize and develop in this regard. However, existing technologies like ChatGPT 4, and the creation of digital copies of people who have already begun to understand, hear, and see human emotions, and even express them, will, in my opinion, contribute to the improvement of people’s social skills.
For example, there are already studies that show that when a person communicates with a new version of ChatGPT, they feel more empathy than when communicating with most doctors, because a doctor is usually an emotionally closed person during a patient appointment, because they physically cannot pay attention to each patient.
Therefore, I do not believe that we can form an introverted generation. People will interact with each other a little differently, as can be seen from the example of generations, that this process is always happening, meaning that the specifics of interactions between people are always changing.
Vitaly Goncharuk: I will highlight four key points that need to be understood:
1. There will be a lot of resistance in the existing system from the teaching staff, because it is a social issue-”who gets paid?”, “who gets fired?”, “who is effective, who is not effective?”. From a technological point of view, it works, so it is only necessary to deal with socio-political issues.
2. It should be noted that Ukraine is not in a vacuum. The state competes with other countries, including for the quality of human capital. If AI can improve human capital and it will be more effective than using old-school methodologies, this means that resistance to this system leads to even lower competitiveness of Ukraine’s human capital.
3. It is necessary to understand the existing business processes in the world and accordingly integrate technologies into hem so that it makes sense.
4. The integration of ChatGPT technology and AI in general into the educational process raises questions about how to prevent students from simply using ChatGPT to generate homework without actually improving their skills for future use of the knowledge gained. Unfortunately, many people today use AI for copy-pasting and obtaining task completion without even thinking. This is degradation, so it is important to understand how to integrate this processually.
There are already many service technologies available that can provide synthetically generated content, including ChatGPT. In my opinion, creating content and communicating with students is effective with the help of AI, but students need to be motivated to use their brains and improve their knowledge, not just mindlessly complete tasks with ChatGPT. This turns them into copy-pasters and violates academic integrity. Such projects need to be implemented, but only with a clear understanding of “how to do this?”
Originally published at https://ai.business.