OpenAI has announced the launch of OpenAI learning accelerator, an India-first initiative that aims to bring advanced AI to India’s educators and millions of learners nationwide through AI research, training, and deployment. This is happening in partnerships with leading institutions including IIT Madras, AICTE, and others, who will work collaboratively with the AI frontrunner.
The research collaboration with IIT Madras has been backed by $500,000 in funding from OpenAI to conduct long-term studies on how AI can “improve learning outcomes, foster innovative teaching methods, aligned to insights from cognitive neuroscience.”
OpenAI also plans to distribute approximately half a million ChatGPT licenses and training to educators and students across India through partnerships with the Ministry of Education, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), and ARISE.
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“ChatGPT’s Study Mode is actually built to give really high-quality answers on the Indian curriculum. Over time, you will see us advance the way in which our models speak to Indian students in local languages and on local teaching,” Leah Belsky, vice president of education at OpenAI, told The Indian Express. “The reason why we are doing that is because education is central to our mission. So we truly believe AI has potential to transform education for students. It can be a personal, lifelong tutor. For educators, AI can free up time to focus more on the core art of teaching. For institutions, we see that AI will become critical infrastructure for enabling institutions to be managed and how teaching and research is done,” she added.
Belsky also said that she saw the Indian educational system as one of the most diverse. “ChatGPT now is one of the largest learning platforms on the planet. Over 50% of our users in India are under age 24, so students are a major audience,” she said, adding that OpenAI’s team visited India, and spent weeks on the ground with parents and students and teachers to understand how they were using ChatGPT.
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Dr. Kamakoti Veezhinathan, director at IIT Madras, said: “At IIT Madras, our goal is to explore how AI can reshape pedagogy and expand research in education. Partnering with OpenAI allows us to push the boundaries of innovation and prepare the next generation of educators and technologists.”
OpenAI also appointed Raghav Gupta as Head of Education for India and Asia Pacific. Gupta will be working to make the company’s tools more accessible to educators, students and education researchers in India. “The idea is that we provide this technology to teachers so they can start leveraging it in what they are doing with students, lesson planning, student engagement, assignments and so on,” he said, adding that there was intent to engage with both the state and central governments for this purpose.
Previously, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had praised India for AI adoption. He claimed what’s happening in India with AI adoption was “amazing to watch,” and that India is “outpacing the world.”