ChatGPT has reached yet another incredible milestone to cement its credibility as a disruptor and a new source of information that may impact critical thinking.
The OpenAI chatbot GPT-3 has passed the final exam for the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School Master of Business Administration (MBA) program. The exam was set by Professor Christian Terwiesch, in a research to test ChatGPT’s artificial intelligence capabilities.
The question by Terwiesch, who authored the research paper, was: “Would Chat GPT3 Get a Wharton MBA? A Prediction Based on Its Performance in the Operations Management Course.” He said the bot scored between a B- and B on the exam, adding to the already raised concern that the AI-powered invention could spell doom for education.
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He said in the paper, which was published on Jan. 17, that the bot’s explanations were “excellent.”
Terwiesch said the ChatGPT’s score is an indication of its “remarkable ability to automate some of the skills of highly compensated knowledge workers in general and specifically the knowledge workers in the jobs held by MBA graduates including analysts, managers, and consultants.”
The bot did an “amazing job at basic operations management and process analysis questions including those that are based on case studies,” he wrote, concluding that it is also “remarkably good at modifying its answers in response to human hints.”
ChatGPT has become popular among internet users since it was launched late last year, due to its ability to add human-like context to queries. It uses GPT-3.5, a large language model released last year, to generate answers and authentic-looking responses to queries about all topics. With the GPT-3.5-powered ability, ChatGPT helps users to accomplish tasks such as creating poems, composing college essays and writing code.
But the AI chatbot abilities have become cause of concern to educators who fear that it has the potential of killing critical thinking by inspiring cheating. Terwiesch’s findings have just confirmed the fear of these educators, some of whom are already banning the technology from schools.
New York City’s Department of Education, earlier this month, announced a ban on ChatGPT from its schools’ devices and networks.
It is difficult to differentiate between a ChatGPT-generated response from a human’s. This is because of the chatbot’s conversational speaking style and coherent, topical response style.
Against the backdrop, NBC noted that experts who work in both artificial intelligence and education have acknowledged that bots like ChatGPT could be a detriment to education in the future.
ChatGPT took the world by storm, racking up millions of users just days after it was launched. But OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has warned that the system cannot be trusted to provide accurate information for now, describing it as “a mistake to be relying on [ChatGPT] for anything important right now.”
Terwiesch also noted that Chat GPT3 “at times makes surprising mistakes in relatively simple calculations at the level of 6th grade Math.”
The present version of Chat GPT is “not capable of handling more advanced process analysis questions, even when they are based on fairly standard templates,” Terwiesch added. “This includes process flows with multiple products and problems with stochastic effects such as demand variability.”
Despite its limitations, Terwiesch said ChatGPT3’s performance on the test has “important implications for business school education, including the need for exam policies, curriculum design focusing on collaboration between human and AI, opportunities to simulate real world decision making processes, the need to teach creative problem solving, improved teaching productivity, and more.”
About two weeks ago, OpenAI announced it’s planning to launch a professional version of ChatGPT, which will address most of its inefficiencies. The AI company said services offered under ChatGPT Professional will be double the regular daily limit and the benefits will include no unavailability window, no throttling and an unlimited number of messages with the chatbot.