A Harvard Professor on How You Can Harness Gen AI

Professor Anand (Vice Provost for Advances in Education at Harvard, Henry R. Byers Professor of Business Administration) talked about how we should focus on how we can use AI in our daily work, instead of waiting for it to get smart enough to help us in more challenging tasks.

In the future, we might see the first billion-dollar company with one person, as AI is enabling us to wear multiple hats. We can use it for customer support, drafting legal agreements which we can review, creating social media content, designing slides, and research. 

Earlier it used to take a Harvard professor a week to draft a case study, but with AI? 71 minutes. That’s possible as an expert is using AI, who can prompt it with increasingly specific questions, like “Give me statistics for the last 5 years about this company’s revenue.”

He also spoke about how students at Harvard learned better from AI tutors than they did from teachers, because AI tutors were more engaging. Often students are too shy to ask a question in front of 300 other students in a classroom, but if they can type out their question in a LLM? The LLM summarizes questions, so the professor can immediately see the class sentiment.

Professor Anand pointed out that learning is not just sitting in a classroom listening to a lecture, but it takes effort. He mentioned a study in which students who had access to Google only, were able to apply their learning better than students who had access to AI; although they took longer.

When alumni returned to Harvard and the professor asked them why they said their years at Harvard were great for learning, they didn’t remember even one concept taught in class. They were talking about the experience, the way the professors delivered the learning. 

So AI is making learning more accessible — now even someone in a village can access high-quality learning. It is also however, deepening the digital divide. More educated people completed Harvard’s free online courses than less educated people. 

When an audience member asked the professor about the risks related to AI, he narrated an anecdote. Students are using AI to write their homework. Professors are using AI to come up with a teaching plan for a case study. 

Watch the talk here, or like me, read the transcript, which is quicker.