Coursera, the US Edutech platform has seen a significant increase in the number of signups ever passing minute – with an average of one new signup ever minute – for its artificial intelligence courses in 2023. CEO Jeff Maggioncalda stated on Thursday that it was a clear sign of people upskilling and keeping up with the trend of the generative AI. They are trying to tap into the potential boom in generative AI.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT has created a stir amongst companies as they fight to create their own version of this viral chatbot.
“I’d say the real hotspot is generative AI because it affects so many people,” he told Reuters in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Coursera on the other hand is creating partnerships with companies that are forerunners in the AI race by providing AI coursers along with companies such as OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind.
Earlier there had been the fear by the investors that app based on generative AI might replace ed-tech firms. Yet in contrary, the technology has only encouraged more people to upskill which benefits companies like Coursera directly.
With more than 800 AI coursers, Coursera saw more than 7.4 million enrolments last year. All the students on the platform gets access to a ChatGPT-like AI assistant called ‘Coach’. Coach provides personalised tutoring.
The Coach, Coursera’s bot however is built using large language models from OpenAI and Google’s Gemini, stated Maggioncalda. He added that the company was not planning to build or train its own models.
“We’ll probably be fine tuning with proprietary data just on top of these large language models” – he said.
With this technology, coursera is also able to translate 4000 courses into different languages which only widens the scope of this platform. It plans to ramp up the hiring for AI roles this year too.
