Discussions

Hello everyone!

I am working with a group of teachers who are interested in using ChatGPT in their classes to help students learn about it. For those of you who have taken on this challenge, how have you handled setting up accounts? I'd like to avoid having kids link their Google accounts through SSO. What have you all been doing?

Thank you for any advice you have!

Rachel

Hey Rachel,

We have been letting students use their school-issued Google accounts to sign into both ChatGPT and Claude AI for now. It's not ideal and we also have run into the issue of both services requiring students to enter a mobile phone number for verification. As far as I know, there's no reliable platform that gets around this issue. Moreover, while we are encouraging students to learn about using AI, we are still having discussions about the ethical implications of having students give OpenAI and Claude their ideas and information for model training.

That's why we're exploring alternative ways for students to use AI/LLMs. I'm waiting for OpenAI to get back about their new enterprise platform (though I imagine it will be ridiculously expensive even if they bother with a nonprofit discount). That's why I started experimenting with what hosting your own chatbots/LLMs would look like. Right now, I have a working version of GPT-3.5 integrated directly into Google Chat that makes use of OpenAI's API. It gets around most of the privacy concerns (there's still a 30-day data retention policy but it doesn't get used for model training), but it's free and could potentially be very expensive depending on usage/limits you choose to put in place. For reference, pretty much any cloud-based API for an LLM equivalent to GPT-3.5 will cost you $0.01/4000 words (either input or output) on average. It still seems much better than say paying for ChatGPT/ClaudeAI accounts for every student. Also, Google Chat can be audited if that's of interest to a school as long as strong governance is in place.

However, this does beg the question of the value of access to secure/private AI. Personally, I don't know if my school is at a place to say we're going to pay for schoolwide AI use, but maybe it depends on the price. I mean, we could be using Bard for FREE, but how good is it really?

The next step for me is to experiment with hosting open-source LLMs like LLama 2 either on AWS Sagemaker or GCP's Vertex AI, but my suspicion is pricing won't be any cheaper because of hosting costs for GPUs. Though, there would be less questions about where data is getting stored/how it's being used by companies like OpenAI.

If you or anyone is interested in exploring the idea of hosting your own AI, I'd be happy to chat/share more. Hope y'all are having success with your students!

Hudson