AI Alliance NCR: No big fear of job losses due to AI among teachers, says PhysicsWallah’s Prateek Maheshwari

Panel Discussion on Will AI Empower Of Impede Learning?

There is no overarching fear of job losses among teachers due to the introduction of newer and more advanced artificial intelligence models, according to Prateek Maheshwari, co-founder of edtech unicorn PhysicsWallah.

“No big fear among our teachers right now because currently GPT is not able to solve IIT advance problems. It's failing in that! So there is not much effort we have to place to assure them but they also see that this is an opportunity,” said Maheshwari, at the Moneycontrol and CNBC-TV18 AI Alliance NCR Chapter in Gurugram on May 17.

This comes even as OpenAI has announced the launch of GPT-4.o (“o” for “omni”) which poses a threat on edtech companies with its powerful abilities in reasoning, and coding intelligence.

Maheshwari also added that AI as a tool will instead impact teacher and student productivity positively while in conversation with Mayank Kumar, co-founder and managing director of upskilling edtech upGrad and Pratham Mittal, founder of edtech company Masters' Union.

For instance, Master’s Union’s Mittal shared how his company is making use of AI to simplify the cumbersome and expensive processes of assessment in hiring.

“We have seen AI really make a difference in assessment. When we have to interview let's say 5000 applicants who apply for the program, we have to select the 500 that you want to offer. It's very hard to interview those 5000 applicants right and that's a huge cost. But if you have an AI powered assessment with human beings at the end of it going through the ranking and figure out who are the best students. I think that's one very good use,” he said.

Kumar agreed and added that while AI will bring better ways of disseminating information, the role of teacher and mentor will continue to exist.

“The social contract is still very, very important when it comes to education. Education is not a very lonely experience. We have many textbooks available in libraries, it did not disrupt universities. We got multiple videos coming on YouTube but it did not disrupt universities and institutions,” he said.

To be sure, edtech experts believe the real challenge lies in training teachers to use the models to make the most out of newer models like GPT-4o which achieves GPT-4 Turbo-level performance on text, reasoning, and coding intelligence, while setting new high watermarks on multilingual, audio, and vision capabilities.

“The real challenge is how to train them in prompting correctly, and making the right usage of AI,” said Maheshwari.

Kumar added that companies that have figured the power of AI are now making upskilling into the tech a priority.

“Those companies who have figured it out are focusing on a wholesome skilling approach, where you're taking frontline staff, letting them know how to use the tool. You're taking the mid level staff, telling them how to sort of implement those tools. And then you're working with the top leadership to figure out how to build the mindset such that it makes executing these tasks easier for both frontline and mid-level staff much better,” he said.