After artificial intelligence is successful, educational hardware may be the first to be subverted

With the release of GPT4 by OpenAI, it has been discovered that artificial intelligence is developing faster than expected.

In November 2022, ChatGPT, also known as GPT 3.5, was released. Just 5 months later, GPT4 was released, bringing more powerful models and computing power, and adding image recognition capabilities. People's understanding of AI is constantly being refreshed.

Currently in the mock bar exam, GPT-4 scores are about the top 10% – beating 90% of humans, while the GPT-3.5 behind ChatGPT scores around the bottom 10%. On March 17, Microsoft announced the launch of a new AI-driven product, Copilot, for its Microsoft 365 apps and services, which uses AI to help people generate documents, emails, PPTs and other work like an assistant.

At present, the industry believes that the next industry that may be disrupted by artificial intelligence is most likely education, especially the education industry based on intelligent hardware.

Compared with traditional search engines such as Google and Baidu, the new generation of AI represented by ChatGPT can not only collect and organize, but also train itself and form its own judgment in continuous learning and feedback. Therefore, in terms of correcting wrong questions, checking information, answering questions, etc., artificial intelligence can fully behave like a real teacher.

According to Morgan Stanley data, the domestic smart learning device market is expected to reach 48 billion yuan in 2023, an increase of 20% over 2022. Some insiders believe that artificial intelligence may bring significant efficiency improvements to the education industry, thereby narrowing the gap between consumer education levels in different regions.

Intelligent education hardware expects breakthroughs

Educational tablets are commonly equipped with reversible cameras

At present, in addition to general-purpose mobile phones, computers, and smart watches, the current intelligent hardware of the education industry is mainly concentrated in three sub-categories: educational tablets, intelligent learning lights, and dictionary pens. According to the statistics of various data agencies, educational tablets account for the highest proportion of sales among non-general educational products (such as smart tablets), accounting for about half of the total.

The educational tablet is more versatile, more interactive, and has the greatest room for functional improvement.

Relatively speaking, dictionary pens and learning lights seem to be more tool-oriented products, generally used to translate foreign sentences and query problem solutions. The form is more focused on querying feedback, and it is also single because there is no screen interaction mode. Although the two categories account for about 30% of sales in the field of intelligent learning hardware, it seems that it is difficult to eat the dividends of artificial intelligence.

In the field of educational tablets, representative products are the Xiaodu optical eye protection learning tablet Z20 Pro Zhixue Edition launched by Baidu Xiaodu Technology, the iFLYTEK AI Learning Machine T20 Pro, the BBK Tutor S6 and the Youdao Learning Machine X10 launched by NetEase Youdao.

Compared with common iPad and Android general-purpose tablets, educational tablet products are generally equipped with special front-facing cameras for collecting homework and test questions that users are completing The screen uses different technologies to achieve the effect of protecting the eyes. The content is equipped with teaching materials and question banks covering all disciplines and sections to meet students' learning needs inside and outside the classroom.

Specifically, in terms of judgment ability on objective topics, the current education tablet performs well. For example, simple fill-in-the-blank selection, and even mathematical calculations and chemical formula writing, educational tablets can complete the functions of identification, judgment and correction.

For subjective topics such as essays, the educational tablet is still helpless, unable to achieve grading or correction. In addition, on social platforms, parents generally complain that such educational tablet products are not intelligent enough, and if they encounter slightly difficult problems, they still have to consult teachers or tutors. This reflects the problem of low intelligence in such products.

In addition, some industry insiders pointed out that today's educational intelligent hardware generally introduces Al artificial intelligence-related technologies, but the main application at present is the judgment of objective questions and accounting scores, and at most it is to find out the relatively weak knowledge points in the user knowledge system.

And the education tablet wants to achieve real intelligent learning, like a real teacher, to analyze and answer every question of students, classify wrong questions and analyze data, it is still too early.

Hop on the AI Express

In summary, the core process of educational tablets is collection, identification and computing. In the stage of collection and recognition, China has a good basic environment, whether it is hardware equipment cameras, or text image recognition algorithms, each family has relevant accumulation over the years.

The real bottleneck lies in the final calculation: how to summarize the law of the wrong problem and how to analyze the data is the problem that the current educational hardware needs to solve, and it is also the next breakthrough in the high-growth artificial intelligence.

At present, the latest AI technology represented by ChatGPT can become an almost omniscient teacher through massive data and training.

Facts have proved that in basic disciplines such as mathematics, Chinese, physics, biology, chemistry, and even cutting-edge fields such as quantum mechanics, aerospace technology, and biomedicine, ChatGPT can give satisfactory answers to most questions. With the increase of user data and feedback, and the continuous iteration of training, the performance of artificial intelligence will become better and better. In the new GPT-4, the function of image understanding has been added, and if a picture is given, the AI can also understand the meaning.

In the foreseeable future, artificial intelligence will be able to fully realize the understanding, judgment, scoring and other functions of language and images, so as to provide more suggestions for user learning.

Although previous smart products can also provide answers and guidance to questions, they often only give the correctness of the answer, without logical guidance and teaching. This point has a lot of room for improvement from the perspective of ChatGPT, such as users can continuously ask a question, and then learn about a topic or even all the relevant knowledge, which is also the change that ChatGPT can bring.

Artificial intelligence is also a double-edged sword

At present, the problems encountered by students in learning in the classroom often exist outside the parents' knowledge system. Once AI is introduced to help, parents are given a 24-hour helper, thus avoiding difficulties in learning due to their own cognitive limitations.

The best form of productization of artificial intelligence is currently the educational tablet. The design of its own large screen and multiple speakers can meet the long-term interaction needs of users, and the basic components such as its own network and computing power can also communicate with ordinary tablet computers in large quantities, it should be said that the hardware will not become an obstacle to learning the comprehensive AI of the tablet.

In addition to the needs of children themselves and the difficulty of hardware landing, parents also need the greatest motivation for educational tablets to expand the market. Under the double reduction policy, children's spare time is concentrated at home, and the pressure of parents themselves to tutor their children's learning is bound to increase, and the demand for alternative products will naturally increase.

In addition to the 2C end, that is, the education tablet for children and parents, solving the needs of teachers is also a practical problem. At present, marking homework and marking papers still occupies a lot of teachers' working time. If artificial intelligence can be relied on in the future to automate the processing of these tasks and data analysis, teachers' productivity will also be liberated.

But what can be encountered, the introduction of artificial intelligence into the field of education, will also lead to some negative situations. For example, many universities have found that students are using ChatGPT to write papers, and even use this to "wash the manuscript" to prevent being discovered by the plagiarism check system.

This point can still have a "window period" for the general-purpose ChatGPT, leaving people to think about how to solve it. However, for the education tablet of the student group, some experts pointed out that educational products equipped with artificial intelligence need to have relevant regulations and restrictions before they are listed, otherwise once abused, it will lead to more problems.

At present, with the introduction of new technologies, the entire education industry will usher in a new reshuffle. The need for teaching and summarizing traditional knowledge will be further reduced. Under the double reduction policy, family education is still in its infancy, and intelligent hardware such as educational tablets have the opportunity to realize the needs of companionship, auxiliary learning and student assistance.

In addition, from the perspective of the general development law of technology, all products that can help human beings "save time" will be greatly developed. Trains, cars, the Internet, ChatGPT, and educational tablets also have the opportunity to catch the express train of artificial intelligence.

(This article was first published in Titanium Media App, author/Wu Honglei, editor/Zhong Yi)