Anthropic Launches an AI Chatbot Plan For Colleges and Universities (techcrunch.com) 9
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Anthropic announced on Wednesday that it's launching a new Claude for Education tier, an answer to OpenAI's ChatGPT Edu plan. The new tier is aimed at higher education, and gives students, faculty, and other staff access to Anthropic's AI chatbot, Claude, with a few additional capabilities. One piece of Claude for Education is "Learning Mode," a new feature within Claude Projects to help students develop their own critical thinking skills, rather than simply obtain answers to questions. With Learning Mode enabled, Claude will ask questions to test understanding, highlight fundamental principles behind specific problems, and provide potentially useful templates for research papers, outlines, and study guides.
Anthropic says Claude for Education comes with its standard chat interface, as well as "enterprise-grade" security and privacy controls. In a press release shared with TechCrunch ahead of launch, Anthropic said university administrators can use Claude to analyze enrollment trends and automate repetitive email responses to common inquiries. Meanwhile, students can use Claude for Education in their studies, the company suggested, such as working through calculus problems with step-by-step guidance from the AI chatbot. To help universities integrate Claude into their systems, Anthropic says it's partnering with the company Instructure, which offers the popular education software platform Canvas. The AI startup is also teaming up with Internet2, a nonprofit organization that delivers cloud solutions for colleges.
Anthropic says that it has already struck "full campus agreements" with Northeastern University, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Champlain College to make Claude for Education available to all students. Northeastern is a design partner -- Anthropic says it's working with the institution's students, faculty, and staff to build best practices for AI integration, AI-powered education tools, and frameworks. Anthropic hopes to strike more of these contracts, in part through new student ambassador and AI "builder" programs, to capitalize on the growing number of students using AI in their studies.
Anthropic says Claude for Education comes with its standard chat interface, as well as "enterprise-grade" security and privacy controls. In a press release shared with TechCrunch ahead of launch, Anthropic said university administrators can use Claude to analyze enrollment trends and automate repetitive email responses to common inquiries. Meanwhile, students can use Claude for Education in their studies, the company suggested, such as working through calculus problems with step-by-step guidance from the AI chatbot. To help universities integrate Claude into their systems, Anthropic says it's partnering with the company Instructure, which offers the popular education software platform Canvas. The AI startup is also teaming up with Internet2, a nonprofit organization that delivers cloud solutions for colleges.
Anthropic says that it has already struck "full campus agreements" with Northeastern University, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Champlain College to make Claude for Education available to all students. Northeastern is a design partner -- Anthropic says it's working with the institution's students, faculty, and staff to build best practices for AI integration, AI-powered education tools, and frameworks. Anthropic hopes to strike more of these contracts, in part through new student ambassador and AI "builder" programs, to capitalize on the growing number of students using AI in their studies.
Like Catholicism (Score:4, Insightful)
Ha! Fools. (Score:2)
Every school is grappling with the epidemic of students using AI to do the work for them. Only a school run by fools would employ AI to do work for them while telling students to not use AI to do the work for them. I suppose we'll be finding out which schools truly are run by fools.
Well, that's funny (Score:4, Insightful)
a new feature [...] to help students develop their own critical thinking skills,
It's been quite firmly established that the "AI" does exactly the opposite, by making cheating easy again, it produces "students" that are lazier, dumber and more prone dispense with thinking at all.
Shit's gone to opposite world.
Re: (Score:2)
I've seen some pretty wild shit. Kids standing in my office talking to me while real-time furiously typing things into ChatGPT for context in the middle of the conversation. They're straight up hooked into this shit.
Looking long-term, ya, probably not a great thing... but for now, these are the new hires I ha
Re: (Score:2)
Kids standing in my office talking to me while real-time furiously typing things into ChatGPT for context in the middle of the conversation.
That's wild shit indeed, but imagine what will happen when people begin to neurolink themselves with all kinds of buggy hardware...
Shifting gears (Score:3)
Of course when the customers are not the end users, the product always trends towards shit. In this context, that just means free money - people who want LLMs will pay for a tool they like, and everyone gets to pay for the shitty robot nobody uses.
Re: (Score:2)
Anthropic has a like 13% CMGR. OpenAI is like 15-30% IIRC since 4o.
We're nowhere near the peak. I do imagine they're looking to get more long-term package arrangements vs monthly individuals, though, because that's basically the end goal of every subscription service.
ChatGPT just passed 400 million weekly active users.
"We were selling...their fat assess back to them" (Score:2)
--Fight Club
Get 'em young and train 'em. (Score:2)
This goes back to basic sales / basic prophet behavior. Hook the young, and train them to be true believers, and you will have a userbase for their lives, and the lives of their children because they will *INSIST on teaching it to their offspring.
The irony of AI teaching critical thinking skills? I'm not even sure how to comment on that.