Campus Technology Insider Podcast April 2024
Listen: Inside Arizona State University's OpenAI Partnership
Rhea Kelly 00:11
Hello and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast. I'm Rhea Kelly, editor in chief of Campus Technology, and your host. In January, Arizona State University announced a major partnership with OpenAI to explore the potential of ChatGPT in education. For this episode of the podcast, we caught up with ASU CIO Lev Gonick to find out more about that collaboration, how the university is approaching the use of generative AI across campus, and what the key takeaways have been so far. Here's our chat.
Hi Lev, welcome to the podcast.
Lev Gonick: 00:53
Thanks, Rhea.
Rhea Kelly 00:55
So let's start with kind of the beginning. How did the partnership with OpenAI come about? Was it initiated by ASU? Or did OpenAI come knocking?
Lev Gonick 01:06
Well, me and a lot of other people in higher education were doing our level best to try to get some attention from folks in Silicon Valley around all things generative AI. And in fact, I was definitely among those trying to navigate the labyrinth of this new disruptive group of folks in it who had a, you know, a very small startup at the time with no signage on their building. But in the end, through a network of long-standing relationships with folks close to the folks at OpenAI, I managed to basically get an opportunity to introduce Arizona State University to Open I. And it turns out that, in fact, many of the folks that we had, we broke bread together, we had lunch together, many folks actually already knew quite a bit about Arizona State University, our commitment to student inclusion and success, as well as our innovation, sort of, if you will, credit that we had in the innovation space. And from there, we had some very, very exciting visioning projects, and then sort of got down to brass tacks, on sorting through sort of what the partnership, what the elements of the partnership might actually look like.
Rhea Kelly 02:37
So was it kind of like you were knocking on their door, saying, Hey, you guys should be paying attention to higher education?
Lev Gonick 02:45
Yes. I think, again, when all of us, you know, in November, now just about 16 months ago, began seeing ChatGPT being offered, and then quickly thereafter, a number of other large language models, with an opportunity to dialogue with the large language models coming out, we all saw great potential. My pitch directly to the team there is that like OpenAI, ASU has an ambition to leverage technologies at scale in support of our mission, which includes, again, this I would say unprecedented commitment to supporting an inclusive orientation to students and learners and their journeys, and using all the technologies in service of that goal. And that resonated, I mean, I knew it was going to resonate with the team at OpenAI, because, again, I know, I know, what the ,what the nonprofit had sought to do. I know what the research team was working on. And it had similar global ambition to be really a force for advancing humankind. We also, like they, you know, have plenty of folks who think that, you know, there are all kinds of reasons why they, why that might not be the only outcome that using the technology, or in our case, you know, using our approach to learning might unfold. But definitely a case where I made the pitch really around alignment of our vision, our mission, and our commitment to using technologies to drive really a positive outcome.
Rhea Kelly 04:35
Could you kind of outline the basic elements of the partnership?
Lev Gonick 04:40
Yeah, I mean, they're really just threefold. One is, you know, we actually have contracted for licensing of a new product, a product that we had a wee bit to do with, which is called Enterprise ChatGPT. A lot of us back, again, 16 months ago, when ChatGPT, the consumer version, was released, got excited, but then got very concerned that things like the intellectual property of the university, or the privacy and confidentiality for our students, health information, and other things that are sort of part of our ecosystem, all those things needed some assurances, some guardrails that would allow us to leverage the power of the large language models, but in a way that protected the assets of the enterprise, the enterprise in this case being Arizona State University. And so, you know, that, you know, we were the first enterprise university to actually contract licenses in that regards. But in addition to that, we have committed to and are regularly interacting with their technical architects around the things that we need to see happen in higher education. Again, it's not just the things that are now in the enterprise product. There are all kinds of very important things that relate to the research program of the university, in terms of technical workspaces, to how to actually leverage this to roll out to hundreds of thousands of students and, at ASU, almost 12,000 courses. Can you imagine leveraging this in a more intelligent way than simply letting everyone run after and try to develop their own approach to using a GPT for, again, 300 physics courses or, again, 12,000 courses across the institution — there has to be a way to build out enterprise tools. And so again, we're helping in the technical requirements, if you will, for that kind of work. And again, we don't think it's just for higher education. We think it's not only for education, we think, again, for all enterprises that have complex organizational models with lots of products being created, this is going to be important. So we're part of a team that is working to support the technical requirements. And then we have a whole sort of set of efforts to really help in thought leadership with OpenAI, inviting them to the events that we're invited to, as well as to our own events, where we get to, again, outline the kind of aspirations, in our case tied to our mission and to our charter, and others, you know, related to other kind of critical, critical insights, as well as us getting invited to their gatherings, whether those are executive briefings all over the world, or whether or not those are, again, more quiet conversations with their team in San Francisco. Those are all things that are part of the partnership effort. And the truth is we, you know, we've also committed just to say if something really interesting comes up, like we don't want to foreclose the opportunity to explore opportunities. And so for example, in that regard, we didn't anticipate early on working in the health education space, but actually, because ASU is now actually embarking upon the design of ASU Health with two schools related to, you know, the needs that we have here in Arizona, you know, we've, we've engaged OpenAI, who were in turn saying, "Great, we don't yet have a thought partner or design partner for that kind of work. We'd love to continue to build on that." And of course, we brought many other stakeholders to the table, and that work is progressing.