he boss of Pearson has touted the explosion in AI development as a huge earner for the education giant, but it today conceded that some of its existing technology was imported from ChatGPT.
Chief product officer Tony Prentice said the firm’s ‘Pearson+’ software, which uses a chatbot to summarise lessons and create revision questions for students, is based on the Microsoft-owned tool and is operated by Microsoft servers.
“We do have our own machine learning team but…we’re actually using ChatGPT behind the scenes,” he said.
“We’re not running it locally on our servers.”
He added that the data inputted by students into the chatbots would not be used to train future models.
Pearson has developed some tools in-house, including Faethm, which uses AI to help businesses make workforce decisions, and its Pearson Test of English, which uses AI models to score written and verbal responses.
CEO Andy Bird said several artificial intelligence businesses had already expressed interest in using Pearson’s educational content to train their large language models. Bird had so far rejected their offers.
He said: “I don’t want to just take the first offer that comes along.
“We want to be very thoughtful and specific as to what we get out of this versus what a third-party get out of this.
“The space itself is moving at a highly fast pace, so being first for announcing a deal for the sake of being first…in hindsight might not be a great idea.”
Bird said Pearson had made strides in the development of its in-house AI technology, but warned of the difficulties of bringing new products to market – including the appearance of hallucinations, an industry term describing AI’s tendency to make up plausible-sounding facts.
“Generative AI is a phenomenal creation but it does come with a health warning around hallucinations…the challenges of maintaining accuracy and doing this well is really really hard,” he said.
Pre-tax profits for the first half of the year came in above City expectations, rising 28% to £236 million, led by a tripling of subscribers to Pearson+ to 938,000. But Bird said full-year guidance wouldn’t be revised up “to maintain a level of flexibility.”
“We don’t see any headwinds or banana skins in the second half of the year,” he said.
Pearson shares held flat at 871p.
A Pearson spokesperson said: “Our focus is building tools that are designed to actually help students learn. Beyond the summaries, the tools can also generate practice questions based on the Pearson content that students are studying.
“For difficult subject like the sciences, the tools are designed to give students prompts that help them work through tough problems and equations-rather than just giving them answers. This helps students learn and understand the material.”