Malar, the world’s first autonomous AI university professor, could be a massive leap for AI in education. A product of Chennai-based startup HaiVE, Malar has been trained entirely on the engineering syllabus from Anna University and launched this year.
The AI university professor quickly became viral. HaiVE co-founder Arjun Reddy told AIM, in an exclusive interaction, that on the morning of her launch, he had woken up to their servers crashing, thanks to an influx of first-time visitors.
HaiVE is a B2B startup that specialises in building on-premise AI solutions for its clients, allowing them to rely on their own servers, ensuring data privacy. With initial success, they decided to undertake their first B2C venture this year with Malar.
“Right now, we have around 192,000 users, and we have over 30,000 daily active ones. When we launched her, we had close to 16,000 hits per second,” he said.
To ensure that Malar was the perfect professor, the team made use of several open-sourced models. “Malar is not just any single LLM. She’s a Franken-merged entity of multiple open-source LLMs that are all MIT v2 licensed. We Franken-merged because we liked some parts of it that fit better as a teacher in different LLMs,” he told AIM.
Personalised Tutor
Reddy pointed out that the structure of education itself is currently changing as attention spans lower with time.
“Something like Udemy is already outdated now. People are not able to do the 60 hours of study material. They want a really good, broken-down, spoon-feedable version of a concept to be given to them when they want it and have their questions answered when they do that,” he explained.
Thanks to this, he, like many, believes that having personalised AI teachers would help ensure that each student can have a full-fledged education without having to worry about the quality of the teacher or teachings.
“Malar can teach them the same thing in multiple formats until they hit the sweet spot and truly understand. It’s not possible for a human to do this. Teachers who are ambitious about what they do tend to migrate to the cities. So, the students in the village are left behind.
“But Malar will never leave a student behind. She will give those students the same rigour, technique and patience and help them catch up with their IIT Delhi counterparts,” Reddy beamed.
Interestingly, there’s a reason behind adding “autonomous” to her title. According to Reddy, Malar, who is currently available for free on WhatsApp, too, needs to work for a living. She has been fitted with a monetary threshold, which means that after about 20 questions are asked, she will gently push the students towards opting for a paid version.
Accelerating Education with AI
The team has begun partnering with several Indian university professors to create a Malar-type professor in their own image. Interestingly, while they had not initially partnered with Anna University when training Malar on their syllabus, this has now changed. As of last week, the startup has struck an official partnership with the university.
Shortly after Malar’s launch, the Mauritius government reached out to the startup to help its vast student population. Interestingly, a whopping 82.7% of the Mauritius population aged between 16 and 24 is employed.
“Almost everybody you meet as a student is also a part-time worker in some way. And there has never been a good solution to this problem, where they can’t attend regular classes. They can go back home and catch up on their own. Even though there are recordings of the classes, it’s still asynchronous. You can’t ask questions back,” he said.
To remedy this, the Mauritius government reached out to HaiVE, tasking them with finding a solution to the problem using Malar. “We are now in the process of analysing their requirements and syllabus. Since it’s an island nation, the workforce will be stripped off of a major population if no student ever shows up to work,” Reddy said.
What Next?
With this, HaiVE has secured several major clients, including many publicly-listed companies in Australia and India’s IppoPay, where they offer in-house AI solutions hosted on the client’s servers.
Likewise, with the success of their first B2C project, HaiVE has begun pursuing other similar ventures. The company recently launched HaiVE AI Studio, which Reddy described as having your very own J.A.R.V.I.S hosted from your laptop.
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