校园里的大人工智能：ChatGPT 将在秋季学期回归
【中美创新时报2024 年 9 月 6 日编译讯】（记者温友平编译）在长周末，成千上万的返校学生堵塞了波士顿地区的街道，他们本周将返回课堂。今年的学习体验很大一部分将涉及人工智能应用程序，特别是有助于头脑风暴、撰写论文和编码的生成式应用程序。对此，《波士顿环球报》记者亚伦·普雷斯曼（Aaron Pressman）作了下述报道。
许多学生已经在使用微软支持的 ChatGPT 和亚马逊支持的 Claude 等工具。今年，他们还会发现越来越多的专门为特定课程或主题领域设计的应用程序。早期限制大学校园使用人工智能的方法已被抛弃。
“三年前，人们的做法是‘你不能使用它，因为它在智力上是不诚实的’，”在波士顿学院卡罗尔管理学院教授战略的杰里·波茨 (Jerry Potts) 说。但他表示，现在这种做法已经得到了更广泛的接受。
“我们都意识到它的存在——尤其是在商学院，”波茨补充道，他在投资管理公司 MFS 工作了 36 年，然后于 2020 年成为全职教授。“你怎么能忽视这场海啸？”
波茨使用人工智能聊天机器人来审查他的课程材料，既是为了改善为学生提供的课程，也是为了了解学生如何在作业中使用人工智能系统。他说，聊天机器人编造信息或产生幻觉仍然存在问题，但人工智能正在不断改进。
“我不得不重写我所有的作业，以便更加专注于连接不存在的点，”他说。他解释说，学生必须将个人经历与课程内容联系起来，“将其综合成一些有创意但又与众不同的东西”。
一些学校甚至走得更远，为学生设计专门的生成式人工智能程序，供他们在特定课程中使用。
风险投资公司飞桥资本合伙公司（Flybridge Capital Partners）的普通合伙人、哈佛商学院高级讲师杰夫·巴斯冈（Jeff Bussgang ）将一个他称之为“ChatLTV”的专业聊天机器人带回了他的创业课。
去年，班上所有 250 名学生都可以使用这个机器人，用它做各种事情，从定义晦涩难懂的会计术语到弄清楚巴斯冈的办公时间。今年夏天，在一位前学生的帮助下，巴斯冈将应用程序更新为 ChatGPT 的最新“4o”版本，并添加了更多课程内容。
“它的速度非常快，”巴斯冈在一封电子邮件中说。
在麻省理工学院的马丁·特拉斯特创业中心，比尔·奥莱特教授推出了一款名为“JetPack”的聊天机器人，它可以指导学生完成他严格的 24 步流程，以开发一家初创企业和“最小可行产品”。奥莱特上周在 LinkedIn 上写道，这款应用在过去六个月内开发完成，是“我们学生的 AI 助手的 MVP”。
在学生输入商业创意后，AI 机器人会收集并组织有关潜在客户、营销方法、财务模型等的研究。
“就像喷气背包一样，它不能自动工作，但它确实加速了这个过程，并允许在相同的时间内进行更多次迭代，”奥莱特写道。
不过，随着生成式 AI 的炒作，奥莱特和其他人正在努力确保这项技术比喷气背包更有用、更普及。
题图：今年，大学生会发现越来越多的专门为特定课程或主题领域设计的人工智能应用程序。Andrew Burke-Stevenson for The Boston Globe
附原英文报道：
Big AI on campus: ChatGPT is back for the fall semester
By Aaron Pressman Globe Staff,Updated September 3, 2024
After tens of thousands of returning students clogged Boston-area streets over the long weekend, they’re heading back to classes this week.
And a big part of this year’s learning experience will involve artificial intelligence apps, particularly the generative variety that helps with brainstorming, writing papers, and coding.
Many students have already been using tools like Microsoft-backed ChatGPT and Amazon-backed Claude. This year, they’ll also find a growing cadre of more specialized apps designed for specific courses or topic areas. The early-days approach of restricting AI on college and university campuses has fallen by the wayside.
“Three years ago, the approach was, ‘You can’t use it, it’s intellectually dishonest,’” said Jerry Potts, who teaches strategy at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. But that’s evolved to much wider acceptance now, he said.
“We’re all realizing it’s here — especially in a business school,” Potts, who spent 36 years at investment manager MFS before becoming a full-time professor in 2020, added. “How can you ignore this tsunami?”
Potts has used an AI chatbot to review his course materials, both to improve the offerings for students and to get a sense of how students might use the AI systems on assignments. There’s still an issue with chatbots making up information, or hallucinating, but the AI is improving, he said.
“I’ve had to rewrite all my assignments to be much more focused on connecting dots that aren’t out there,” he said. Students will have to connect their personal experiences to course content “to synthesize that into something creative but different,” he explained.
Some schools are going even further and crafting specialized generative AI programs for students to use in specific courses.
Jeff Bussgang, general partner at venture capital firm Flybridge Capital Partners and a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, is bringing back a specialty chatbot he dubbed “ChatLTV” to his class on entrepreneurship.
All 250 students in the class had access to the bot last year, using it for everything from defining arcane accounting terms to figuring out when Bussgang had office hours. This summer, with a former student’s help, Bussgang updated the app to ChatGPT’s latest “4o” version and added more course content.
“It is blazing fast,” Bussgang said in an email.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship, professor Bill Aulet has debuted a chatbot called “JetPack” that can take students through his rigorous 24-step process for developing a startup business and a “minimum viable product.” Built over the past six months, the app is “an MVP of an AI assistant for our students,” Aulet wrote on LinkedIn last week.
After a student inputs a business idea, the AI bot collects and organizes research about possible customers, marketing approaches, financial models, and more.
“Like a jetpack, it does not work autonomously but it sure accelerates the process and will allow for many more iterations in the same amount of time,” Aulet wrote.
Then again, with all the hype around generative AI, Aulet and others are working to make sure this technology becomes considerably more useful and widespread than the jetpack.
