2024 AIGC + Education Industry Report: Human-computer Co-nurturing The last newsletter offered an...
2024 AIGC + Education Industry Report: Human-computer Co-nurturing
In the early hours of March 19, Beijing time, the NVIDIA GTC 2024 conference kicked off, drawing significant attention in the global artificial intelligence wave. The speech by Jensen Huang, not only captivated the tech community but also became a hotly anticipated event by the global capital market.
Image from UNESCO
The advancements showcased by NVIDIA at the GTC 2024 conference, particularly in AI technologies, underscore the depth at which AI has permeated various aspects of our lives and underscores its evolving integration into our daily lifestyles. This integration highlights the urgency for educators to embrace AI, as its applications in AI+Education promise to reshape teaching methodologies, learning environments, and student engagement strategies. Now more than ever, it is imperative for educational professionals to leverage AI tools and platforms to enhance the educational experience, making learning more accessible, customized, and efficient for students worldwide. This urgency is not just about keeping pace with technological advancements but also about redefining the educational landscape to prepare students for a future where AI is an integral part of life and work.
This newsletter offers an overview and insights into the intersection of AI and education, showcasing general trends and data.
Image from LinkedInABSTRACT:
From a macro perspective, if artificial intelligence is viewed as a form of life, the essence of AIGC + education is actually about the interaction and nurturing between carbon-based life and silicon-based life. At the meso level, the dominant capabilities of AIGC technology in terms of knowledge volume, information acquisition, and processing compel the education sector to further reflect on the existing educational framework, including teaching entities, educational content, educational mediums, and learning entities. Microscopically, every educational scenario benefits from the application of AIGC technology, such as teachers' lesson planning. However, it is crucial to be vigilant that AIGC technology has significant resource intensity and dependency characteristics, and since education is a social welfare activity, educational welfare should ensure fairness and balance as much as possible. The educational community needs to work together to prevent the attraction of strong resources to each other and the exacerbation of the Matthew effect.
Image from Sina
CHANGE AND INNOVATION:
From a macro perspective, AIGC technology has extended and expanded human intelligence and reduced the barriers to its use, with its application influence becoming infinitely generalized. Specifically in the education sector, some fundamental tasks have been replaced, and the structure of the workforce and demand for talent have been reshaped. AIGC technology aligns ingeniously with modern education in aspects such as curriculum content, faculty allocation, and interaction methods, highlighting the necessity of technology implementation.
AI technology has evolved from teaching aids to adaptive learning, promoting the gradual implementation of personalized education on a large scale. These developments collectively have heightened the era's focus on AIGC + education, reflected in capital investment and financing, regulatory policies of various countries, and academic research, among other areas.
Macro Perspective: The Productivity Revolution Brought by AIGC
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AIGC extends and expands human intelligence, lowers barriers to use, and has an infinitely generalized impact.
Marshall McLuhan proposed that media are extensions of man. As an artificial tool (medium), AIGC technology is an extension of the inherent capabilities of human brain computation, thinking, discernment, and learning. Bolstered by massive amounts of data, AIGC has a clear advantage in discovering, understanding, and applying principles. It represents a scalable aggregation, operation, and response of human intelligence in machine form, breaking through the boundaries of human capabilities. Features of AIGC, such as question-and-answer interaction and the elimination of the need for downloads and configurations, significantly lower the barriers to AI technology use, leading to a democratization of AI technology. Meanwhile, the support of real-time, massive data available online, combined with the openness of model sourcing and plugin ecosystems, along with users' limitless creativity, enables AIGC's influence to penetrate every corner of various industries, generalizing and expanding its impact.
Meso Perspective: The Development of AI Technology and Its Educational Drive
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From Educational Support to Adaptive Learning: The Evolutionary Impact of AIGC Technology on Personalized Education.
The journey of AI in education has traversed three distinct stages— inception, exploration, and industrialization. Initially, the fusion of AI with educational practices was primarily investigational, centering around supplemental teaching functionalities such as question answering, practice sessions, and mock examinations, effectively substituting for the repetitive tasks traditionally undertaken by educators. With the advent of machine learning, the AI-education nexus progressed into an exploratory phase, focusing on intelligent tutoring and adaptive learning methodologies.The advent of deep learning propelled AI technologies into a commercial phase, marking the transition of AI in education into its industrial era. Recent advancements in big data, cloud computing, and computational power, coupled with the rapid development of large-scale language models, have significantly altered the educational landscape. The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 catalyzed a global competitive surge in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), signaling a pivotal shift towards the realization of General Artificial Intelligence (AGI). This era of innovation has notably enhanced teaching efficiencies and laid the groundwork for the widespread adoption of tailored educational methodologies, heralding a new age of personalized learning at scale.
The Era of Focus on AIGC + Education - Academia and Society
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AIGC + Education has become a focal point of attention across various societal sectors and academic research.
Influenced by the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, there has been widespread global interest in AIGC and its related applications. Since February 2023, there has been significant interest from all walks of society in the application of generative artificial intelligence within the educational field, reaching a peak in June 2023, with the enthusiasm continuing unabated. In the same year, the academic community also began to pay close attention to AIGC technology, which has driven the popularity of research in artificial intelligence and education. "AIGC + Education" has become a focus of attention for both the academic community and society at large.
EDUCATIONAL EVOLUTION:
The formidable capabilities of AIGC technology in knowledge volume, information acquisition, and processing compel the educational sector to further reflect on the existing educational frameworks.In terms of teaching entities, AIGC introduces the expectation of human-computer collaborative teaching and the enhancement of teaching resources, while also prompting considerations about AI challenging the central role of teachers. As for teaching mediums, AIGC promises to empower teachers and achieve personalized education at scale, yet it challenges traditional learning models and assessment tools. Regarding the content of education, the importance of higher-order general knowledge and interdisciplinary composite abilities is reemphasized, supplemented by the requirements for AIGC technological literacy. In the aspect of learning entities, it sparks a nearly sci-fi, yet not distant, philosophical debate: whether to educate humans or train large models, as both may compete for educational resources in a broad sense.
Image from Pxfuel
PROSPECTS AND CHALLENGE:
On the content level, AIGC based on neural network technology shares inherent similarities with literacy development, enabling enterprises to lead industry development through focusing on small models for the consumer market. Technically, the combination of large model analysis, multimodal interaction, agent planning, and embodied intelligent action deeply aligns the complete form of AGI with educational scenarios. Regarding the implementation of welfare, there is a need for collaboration across all sectors of education to overcome the significant gaps in opportunity, skills, and resources. In terms of human-computer collaboration, the relationship between humans and machines is entering a new era; humans and machines will co-educate, participate in a life cycle, and nourish each other, with humans and AI learning and building together endlessly.
Image from Nateliason
For our next newsletter, we will delve deep into the educational aspects with details, covering topics like the Contemporary Educational Framework, Teaching Entities, Educational Mediums, Educational Content, and AIGC Products in Foreign Education.
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References:
1.iResearch. (2024). 2024 AIGC + Education Industry Report. Retrieved from https://www.iresearch.com.cn/Detail/report?id=4312&isfree=0
2."I Am AI | NVIDIA GTC 2024 | Official Keynote Intro", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMW8_YVFgzY
3."The opening of NVIDIA GTC 2024 conference ignites another wave of investment fervor in the Moment of AI Transformation", https://hea.china.com/article/20240319/032024_1494427.html
Author: Yirui (Sandy) Jiang
Chief Editor: Yirui (Sandy) Jiang