OpenAI Hires Former Coursera Executive to Lead Education Initiatives

Report: OpenAI Hires Coursera's Leah Belsky as First General Manager of Education | PYMNTS.com

OpenAI has reportedly hired its first general manager of education: former Coursera Chief Revenue Officer Leah Belsky. In this role, Belsky will work to bring the artificial intelligence (AI) startup's products to more schools; boost its engagement with teachers and students; and work with OpenAI's own teams on their partnerships with the academic community, Bloomberg reported Wednesday (Sept. 18). These efforts will span elementary schools, higher education and continuing education, according to the report. "Leah will accelerate our work with leading academic institutions to ensure that people working across all disciplines and industries have the training they need to maximize the benefits of AI," OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap said in the report. Reached by PYMNTS, OpenAI confirmed the report. The company launched a version of ChatGPT built for universities in May, saying ChatGPT Edu allows the schools to responsibly deploy AI to students, faculty, researchers and campus operations. The product can help with tasks like tutoring, reviewing resumes, writing grant applications and grading. This is one of three business products that OpenAI rolled out since August. A year after the launch of the first product, these offerings collectively have more than 1 million paying business users. When announcing ChatGPT Edu in a May 30 blog post, OpenAI wrote: "Powered by GPT-4o, ChatGPT Edu can reason across text and vision and use advanced tools such as data analysis. This new offering includes enterprise-level security and controls and is affordable for educational institutions." As AI matures and use cases continue to develop, the technology is impacting higher education operations from the dean's office to the financial aid office, PYMNTS reported in January. In July, one of OpenAI's founding members said he is launching an "AI native" school called Eureka that will meld education and AI. Andrej Karpathy, who had been a key researcher for the company until February, wrote in a post on X that subject matter experts "cannot personally tutor all 8 billion of us on demand." "However, with recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels tractable," Karpathy wrote. "The teacher still designs the course materials, but they are supported, leveraged and scaled with an AI Teaching Assistant who is optimized to help guide the students through them."

OpenAI Hires Former Coursera Executive to Expand AI Use in Schools

OpenAI has hired former Coursera Inc. executive Leah Belsky to be its first general manager of education, leading the artificial intelligence startup's efforts to bring its products to more schools and classrooms. Belsky, previously the chief revenue officer at the online learning platform, will be tasked with boosting OpenAI's engagement with instructors and students across K-12, higher education and continuing education, the company said Wednesday. Belsky will also work internally with the startup's product, policy, marketing and other teams on partnerships and sharing feedback from the academic world. After OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022, the chatbot quickly took off with students -- so much so that the product saw a seasonal spike in usage at the beginning of the school year last fall. Some teachers tried to crack down on AI's use in classrooms over concerns that students are using it to cheat on assignments. But other educators have accepted AI is here to stay and begun incorporating the technology into their lesson plans and research. OpenAI has been working to develop partnerships with academia alongside a broader revenue push. In May, the startup released a version of its chatbot called ChatGPT Edu, with more custom controls and special pricing for educational institutions. The University of Oxford, Arizona State University and Columbia University are among the schools currently subscribing to the product.