2023 AI in Education Wrapped

A timeline of landmark moments and pivotal developments that transformed AI in Education in 2023

2023: the year Generative AI took center stage, “the year many of us learned to communicate, create, cheat, and collaborate with robots”. We saw the remarkable evolution of large language models (surpassing human performance!), near-daily AI releases, AI funding booms, and even a late night board coup that shook the tech world.

Crucially, 2023 offered a glimpse into the transformative impact of AI on education. From personalized AI tutors to teacher copilots to AI companions, the technology has already redefined the norms of teaching and learning across classrooms, universities, and the workplace. The emergence of innovative startups taking on new white spaces, and the dynamic adoption of AI applications by established incumbents has injected fresh vigor into the sector. Amidst this surge of innovation, educators, policymakers and system leaders have continued to played a pivotal role in responsibly integrating AI into learning. We recognize we face more questions than answers in these early innings, but we’re so excited to see what the AI & Education space will bring us in 2024!

In this recap, we explore landmark moments and pivotal developments that transformed AI in Education in 2023 👇

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January

• Microsoft invested $10B in OpenAI, as part of funding that valued the firm at $29B.

• New York City's Department of Education blocked access to ChatGPT on its devices and networks across 1,851 public schools, serving over 1M students. Officials expressed concerns around its impact on student learning, safety, plagiarism and content accuracy.

• Q&A website Stack Overflow banned ChatGPT-generated content due to the model's propensity for outputting incorrect answers to technical questions.

• OpenAI released a tool to detect machine-written text.

• ChatGPT hit 100M MAU, just two months after launch.

February

• Google entered the generative AI chatbot game and officially released Bard, its ChatGPT rival.

• OpenAI launched ChatGPT Plus, starting at $20 per month and delivering a number of benefits over the base-level ChatGPT.

• Quizlet launched Q-Chat, an adaptive, AI-powered tutor experience built on OpenAI's ChatGPT API. Q-Chat leverages Quizlet's massive educational content library to provide a virtual tutor experience to students.

March

• OpenAI released GPT-4 and launched its ChatGPT API, allowing any business to build ChatGPT tech into their apps, websites, products and services. OpenAI’s GPT-4 remains the most powerful AI model to power a chatbot accessible to the public. ChatGPT also launched Plugins at the end of March, making it possible to use a single chat box to access any service/software in the world from ChatGPT.

• Google integrated generative AI features into Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Slides, Chat, etc)

• Khan Academy introduced Khanmigo, an experimental AI guide designed to enhance education, offering 1:1 personalized tutoring experiences for learners and assisting teachers with administrative tasks.

• Duolingo launched Duolingo Max, a new AI-Powered subscription tier with features like Explain My Answer and Roleplay.

• Grammarly introduced GrammarlyGO, a generative-AI powered writing assistant.

• GitHub launched Copilot X, an AI pair programmer for the entire development lifecycle.

• Humane raised a $100M Series C to deliver the next era of personal mobile computing driven by AI.

• Bloomberg released BloombergGPT, its 50-billion parameter large language model, purpose-built from scratch for finance.

April

• Dozens of scientists, experts and tech leaders signed an open letter advocating for a 6-month moratorium to give AI companies and regulators time to formulate safeguards to protect society from potential risks of the technology.

• Chegg announced CheggMate, a new AI companion built upon Chegg’s billions of pieces of learning content and over 150,000 subject matter experts.

• Replit and Google Cloud partnered to advance generative AI for software development. Replit also announced their series B extension, raising $97.4M at a $1.16B valuation.

• Hugging Face released HuggingChat, an open-source alternative to ChatGPT.

• Snapchat saw spike in 1-star reviews as users panned the ‘My AI’ feature, calling for its removal.

• Stack Overflow’s traffic dropped by 14% in March, with developers increasingly getting advice from AI chatbots and GitHub CoPilot rather than Stack Overflow message boards.

May

• New York City’s Department of Education rescinded its ban on ChatGPT. “While initial caution was justified, it has now evolved into an exploration and careful examination of this new technology’s power and risks”.

• Nvidia stock hit $1T market cap on rising AI demand. Chegg saw its stock get cut in half after warning that ChatGPT might have contributed to sluggish user growth.

• Anthropic closed $450M in funding.

• ChatGPT released an official iOS app.

  

• Inflection launched its generative AI chatbot Pi, short for Personal Intelligence. Pi is built around the idea of an emotionally intelligent conversational partner that can successfully mimic an empathetic and caring human being.

• Sam Altman testified before congress on AI risks.

• A Texas A&M professor failed more than half of his class after ChatGPT falsely claimed it wrote their papers.

• Scientists used GPT AI to passively read people's thoughts in breakthrough. An AI model similar to ChatGPT was combined with fMRI readings to non-invasively decode continuous language from subjects, a new study reports.

June

• Synthesia, a startup using custom AI avatars to create synthetic videos for advertising and other L&D use cases, raised a $90M Series C.

• PowerSchool announced its collaboration with Microsoft Azure OpenAI to provide personalized learning at scale in K-12 education.

• Mistral AI (a four week old startup at the time) raised a $113M Seed round to take on OpenAI.

• Accenture aimed to invest $3B in AI and have 80,000 staff working on AI.

• Synthesis launched Synthesis Tutor, your child’s own superhuman math tutor.

• Harvard’s CS50 announced its integration of AI into Course Instruction.

• Nvidia announced Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) for Games, a new solution that utilizes generative AI to enhance non-player characters (NPCs) in video games.

July

• Merlyn Mind launched a suite of education-specific LLMs, developed with an emphasis on education workflows and safety requirements.

• Typeface, an AI startup focused on content creation services for businesses, raised $100M at a $1B valuation.

• Loora, a generative AI app that uses an audio interface to help users learn English, raised $9.25M.

• YouTube began testing AI-generated quizzes on educational videos.

• Google introduced NotebookLM, an AI-first notebook, grounded in your own documents, designed to help you gain insights faster.

• In response to high demand from parents and educators, Common Sense Media released a new AI ratings and reviews system to help families and policymakers make informed decisions about artificial intelligence tools and programs.

• OpenAI shut down its tool meant to detect AI-written text due to low accuracy. OpenAI admitted the classifier was never very good at catching AI-generated text and warned that it could spit out false positives, aka human-written text tagged as AI-generated.

• Meta introduced Llama 2, an open-source family of AI language models that is freely available for almost anyone to use for research and commercial purposes. 

• Seven leading A.I. companies (Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI) formally made their commitment to new standards for safety, security and trust at a meeting with President Biden at the White House.

August

• Time magazine announced the TIME100 Most Influential People in AI.

• Instructure and Khan Academy announced a major partnership on AI tutoring and teaching. The collaboration aims to combine Khan Academy's educational content with Instructure's extensive reach and data insights.

• GoStudent raised another $95M to go after VR and AI-enhanced tutoring.

• One Model raised $41M to bring AI & data science-powered insights to HR.

• Sizzle AI raised $7.5M in Seed funding. Sizzle is an AI chatbot tutoring startup that helps students with STEM homework.

• Learn.xyz raised $3M Seed funding.

• Delphi announced $2.7M in funding and its new AI digital cloning service.

• Uplimit released an AI teaching assistant, dubbed Cobot, that answers students’ questions, analyzes their programming code, and even provides moral support.

September

• Outschool launched its AI Teaching Assistant, a tool for tutors to generate progress reports for their students.

• Writer raised a $100M Series B for its enterprise-focused generative AI platform.

• AI reading coach startup Ello raised $15M in Series A funding to bolster child literacy.

• Elicit, an AI research assistant, raised a $9M Seed.

• Gizmo raised $3.5M in Seed funding. Gizmo leverages generative AI to generate quizzes from a user’s class notes and create gamified quizzes.

• Edsoma, an AI-powered reading, education and communication platform for children, raised $2.5M in Seed funding.

• MagicSchool raised $2.4M in Seed funding to fight teacher burnout using AI.

• OpenAI released GPT-4V (multimodal), DALL-E 3 and launches a red teaming network.

• Spotify began piloting AI Voice Translation for podcasts.

• GoGuardian incorporated AI Features into its Edulastic Platform, with new features around question generation, rubric design and grade recommendation.

• Harvard Business School study finds consulting giant BCG's staff using ChatGPT outperform on every measure – and underachievers got the biggest boost.

• Mistral released Mistral 7B, their first 7B-parameter model.

October

• American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the second-largest teacher's union in the U.S., partnered with GPTZero, an AI identification platform that makes tools that can identify ChatGPT and other AI-generated content.

• AI is disrupting education, but only 13 states offered guidance for schools. Just two states—California and Oregon— offered official guidance to school districts on using AI in schools in the fall. Another 11 states were in the process of developing guidance.

• Class Companion raised $4M in Seed funding to use AI to empower teachers to give instant, personalized feedback to students,

• PhysicsWallah introduced its Generative AI Platform, Alakh AI, a student’s dedicated companion for both academic and non-academic support.

• Canva introduced Classroom Magic, a suite of AI tools for the classroom and Canva’s biggest education product launch ever.

• LinkedIn released new AI tools for learning, recruitment, marketing and sales, powered by OpenAI.

• Workday unveiled new HR-focused generative AI features.

• TeachAI, an initiative led by Code.org, ETS, ISTE, Khan Academy, and WEF, launched an AI Guidance for Schools toolkit to help education systems globally address gaps in AI guidance and policy.

• OpenAI’s revenue crossed $1.3B annualized rate.

• Jasper, an early generative AI winner, cut its internal valuation by 20% as growth slowed.

• A multidisciplinary team from Stanford, MIT, and Princeton designed a scoring system, The Foundation Model Transparency Index, evaluating models on 100 different aspects of transparency.

  

November

• President Joe Biden enacted a sweeping 100+ page executive order (EO) aimed at the oversight of artificial intelligence (our overview here). The order lays the groundwork for how the government will regulate the AI field.

• Sam Altman was ousted and reinstated as OpenAI’s CEO in the span of 5 days (a timeline of the saga here).

• OpenAI announced customizable ChatGPTs and more powerful, cheaper version of GPT-4.

• Learnosity launched Author Aide, a new AI-powered tool that makes exam question creation 10 times faster.

• EarnBetter raised $4.5M in Seed funding. EarnBetter’s platform utilizes generative AI to reformat and rewrite resumes, draft cover letters, and scan through millions of jobs to provide personalized matches to job seekers.

• Google opened up Bard access to teenagers, offering features like homework help, step-by-step math problem solving, and data visualization. The launch prioritizes safety and responsibility.'

• LinkedIn surpassed 1B members and launched new AI chatbot to help you get a job. The new AI chatbot can help users gauge whether a job application is worth their time and point to potential gaps in a user’s experience that could hurt them in the job application process.

• Humane officially launched the Ai Pin, its OpenAI-powered wearable.

• xAI announced its first LLM, Grok.

• NVIDIA released a new top-of-the-line GPU, the H200.

• Instagram spotted developing a customizable ‘AI friend’.

• Amazon announced initiative to provide free AI skills training to 2M people by 2025 with its new ‘AI Ready’ commitment.

December

• Google introduced Gemini, the AI model it hopes will take down GPT-4.

• OpenAI in talks to raise new funding at $100B valuation. OpenAI is set to complete a separate tender offer led by Thrive Capital, which would allow employees to sell shares at a valuation of $86B. Anthropic, the OpenAI rival, is in talks to raise $750M in funding as well.

• Kyron Learning raised $14.6M in Series A funding further develop the platform’s generative AI capabilities and build out its K-12 math curriculum.

• Retorio raised a €9M Series A to expand their personalized AI coaching platform.

• Nolej raised a $3M Seed. NolejAI lets teachers automatically create learning resources (like worksheets and quizzes) based on material like YouTube videos or news articles.

• Carnegie Learning announced LiveHint AI, a new live textbook assistant that allows students to obtain real-time hints on textbook assignments.

• AWS announced Amazon Q to reimagine the future of work. Amazon Q is a new generative AI–powered assistant that is specifically designed for work and can be tailored to your business.

• Curriculum Associates acquired SoapBox Labs, a startup that provides more than 50 education companies with AI voice-technology tools.

• Meta AI unveiled its AI suite of multimodal “Seamless” translator models - SeamlessExpressive," which translates speech while maintaining the speaker's expressions like pitch and emotion, and "SeamlessStreaming," which translates speech with minimal delay while the speaker is still talking.

• After a marathon of ‘final’ talks, the E.U. agreed on a landmark A.I. Act.

• The NYTimes sued OpenAI and Microsoft over A.I. use of copyrighted work. , The lawsuit said millions of articles from The New York Times were used to train chatbots that now compete with it.

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A year in AI can truly feel like an entire decade, and we’re so excited to see what 2024 bring us. Join us at our inaugural AIR (AI Revolution) Show event (attendance is complimentary, but spots are limited) and ASU+GSV in San Diego in April to discuss and celebrate all things AI & Education!

Did we miss anything? Let us know (claire@gsv.com) and subscribe for more AI in Education content 👋