(NewsNation) — As artificial intelligence continues to be hotly debated in the United States, one college is going all in on letting the capability of computational systems perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence. Ravi Bellamkonda, provost and executive vice president at Ohio State University, joined “NewsNation Live” to discuss the school’s “AI Fluency Initiative” beginning this fall.
The “AI Fluency Initiative” will be required of all students at the school. The hope is that the program will help students become bilingual, meaning fluent in their major field of study and applying AI in that area.
“We’ve been using all sorts of tools to augment learning, augment our understanding of the world,” said Bellamkonda. “There’s no question we live in a data-rich world now, from politics, to news, to manufacturing, to medicine, to all these fields of study and interest for our students. We have lots and lots of data. And the power of AI is to synthesize that data and make meaning out of it.”
Pew Research Center said that in 2024, teens reported using AI twice as much as they did the year before. Over half say they think it’s okay to use AI for research, while nearly 30% acknowledge it’s acceptable to use AI for math problems. Less than 20% added that it’s okay to use AI to write an essay.
“We really want to build intuition, judgment, and ethical understanding,” Bellamkonda said. “When is it appropriate? When is it not appropriate? When is it hallucinating? When is it not? And we feel like having that conversation in the classroom with a professor in the context of the subject they are learning is really important for us.”
Apple says it has a new research paper out that says artificial intelligence might not be as intelligent as some want it to be.
The company’s new research paper claims that so-called “large reasoning models” and ‘large language models’ such as ChatGPT give up when trying to solve complex problems. Their researchers say this is proof of limited capabilities that keep artificial intelligence from reasoning the way you or I do.
“We had the same fear, if you remember, when we had calculators,” added Bellamkonda. “We were afraid that people would store formulas in there and not really understand. That’s the challenge we have as educators now is to still make sure that our students have a deep understanding of the subject and they’re not just letting AI do all the thinking.”
Bloomberg also reported that Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, is seeking a team to build an AI that could reason on the same level as a human. He wants to hire around 50 people for the project. This comes after Meta delayed the release of a big new artificial intelligence model last month over concerns it wasn’t good enough.
In addition, St. Petersburg, Florida, is installing AI or so-called “smart signals” that can connect with tech in some newer vehicles. That tech can alert the driver about upcoming hazards and traffic conditions, such as flooding or a pedestrian in the area. The city is looking to invest more than $1 million in the project.