Coursera Saw Signups For AI Courses Every Minute in 2023

U.S. edutech platform Coursera added a new user every minute on average for its AI courses in 2023, CEO Jeff Maggioncalda said on Thursday, in a clear sign of people upskilling to tap a potential boom in generative AI. Reuters: The technology behind OpenAI's ChatGPT has taken the world by a storm and sparked a race among companies to roll out their own versions of the 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 is looking to offer AI courses along with companies that are the frontrunners in the AI race, including OpenAI and Google's DeepMind, Maggioncalda said. Investors had earlier feared that apps based on generative AI might replace ed-tech firms, but on the contrary the technology has encouraged more people to upskill, benefiting companies such as Coursera. The company has more than 800 AI courses and saw more than 7.4 million enrollments last year. Every student on the platform gets access to a ChatGPT-like AI assistant called "Coach" that provides personalized tutoring.

How many people

[wakeboarder]

actually took those courses, I took mine 8 years ago.

Re:

[dysmal]

How many of these sign ups were actually humans vs bots?

The irony of a "bot" signing up for AI courses!

How it usually goes down

[Tablizer]

I suspect PHB's told their minions: "Everybody's doing AI, we gotta try something, staff! I signed you all up for these training courses we got a bulk discount on..."

Re:How it usually goes down

[narcc]

I'm okay with it. A lot of developers, the autodidacts in particular, tend to think that they're expert mathematicians and logicians because they can write computer programs. If these courses are anything at all like the one's I had, it's going to be quite the reality check.

Who am I kidding. These are probably mostly going to be of the "follow these steps to create your own LLM with Python" variety or the "here's how to write a prompt" sort for the extra specials.

Re:

[Tablizer]

I suspect someone will eventually come up with something comparable to Feynman diagrams to simplify a lot of the analysis. It would be like 90% as accurate as the fuller matrix processing viewpoint, but a lot quicker to grok, making it more mainstream.

Not really "own versions of the viral chatbot"

[ffkom]

There is hardly a "race among companies to roll out their own versions of the viral chatbot". There is only a race to replace as many jobs as possible as quickly as possible by paying OpenAI for their chatbot services. The company-specific configurations can hardly be named "own versions", especially because companies still pay per request(/response/token), not running instances of ChatGPT of their own.
And just like with the cloud hype, there will be some unpleasant surprises for those making themselves de

Re:

[toxonix]

Companies think they can run their own "internal" instances without building a multi-million dollar supercomputer. They're looking at "AI enabled" workstations thinking that the AI part is actually running on that hardware.
good luck morans

Re:

[narcc]

There is only a race to replace as many jobs as possible as quickly as possible

That's just a sociopath CEO's wet-dream. Oh, how they long for the days of slavery! More realistic, but still lofty, expectations have long-changed from "replace workers with NPCs" to "make workers more productive so that we don't need as many". Sure, people might think this nonsense makes them more productive, and you might even be able to measure an improvement initially, but that's just what happens [wikipedia.org] when you try to measure the effects of a workplace change on productivity.

there will be some unpleasant surprises for those making themselves depend on other people's chatbots

It seems like some people are

Master Of AI Prompts

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Ah yes, the lofty and highly sought-after "Master Of AI Prompts" certificate.

Hey, the 80's just called and said they want their rebranded 'MBA degrees' back.

I thought I enabled my ad-blocker

[ratbag]

This "story" is an advert. I don't need no stinking AI to tell me that.

Feedback?

[TJHook3r]

Did anyone complete the course or put the content into practice? Seems like an obvious attempt to include those two magic letters on a cv in order to differentiate themselves. Maybe I'm wrong and they were actually creating models rather than just learning 'prompt engineering', which has to be the most ridiculous IT term this decade

There is a sucker born every minute

[gweihir]

What will all these "experts" do when the hype is over in a few years, just like all past AI hypes were because at some point the absence of clothes from the glorious leader became impossible to ignore?