University of Michigan to Introduce 2 New AI Assistants This Fall

In August 2023, the University of Michigan (U-M) released a first-of-its-kind, custom generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) platform designed for the campus community. Now, the university plans to release two more tools this fall aimed at helping first-year students and those applying to college.

The suite of AI tools released to the Michigan community on Aug. 21 includes U-M GPT, where community members can access popular AI models like ChatGPT, and U-M Maizey (aptly named after the university color “maize”), which can be trained on university and classroom documents and programmed into a personal AI assistant or tutor.

A handful of other universities have released similar tools to faculty only — including Harvard University and the University of California (UC) campuses in Irvine and San Diego — with hopes of making the tools available to students in the future.

However, Dr. Ravi Pendse, vice president for information technology and chief information officer, said U-M’s approach was different: They prioritized access for all.

Michigan’s culture is we learn by doing … what we wanted to do was put the tools in the hands of the entire community, not a piecemeal approach, which is what some institutions are doing, he told BestColleges.

What I didn’t want to do is release a product and maybe it’s available only to staff members, or faculty, or a select group of students. That wouldn’t be, in my view, the right thing to do with the Michigan culture.

U-M is using the technology behind U-M Maizey — which can be programmed into a personal AI assistant or tutor using university websites and documents — to turn it into two new tools for students.

The first tool — yet to be named — will be a personal AI system for first-year students to navigate campus and learn about extracurricular offerings.

We essentially had Maizey crawl and learn about all of the websites and all the information about Michigan that we have everywhere, Pendse said. This allows you to do contextual searches so it will provide everything you need to know about Michigan in a matter of seconds.

The second service will be a scholarship tool designed to take relevant information about a student, including their age, interests, and test scores, and deliver a list of scholarships they are eligible for.

Sometimes there are students and families who perhaps are not as privileged … [and] they may not have the necessary tools to find all the scholarship information and apply, Pendse said. So I challenged my team and said What if we could build a public version of Maizey, which [can] index all the scholarships that are out there?

The tool, called “Go to College,” will be open to the general public and available for any student to use, not just those interested in going to U-M. The developers aim to have it publicly released sometime this fall. It’s already in beta testing and has around 15,000 scholarships included, according to Pendse.

Pendse said the university started exploring the idea of bringing AI tools to campus during the summer of 2022. A couple of months later, when OpenAI announced ChatGPT, Pendse said he wanted to appoint a campus AI task force to start thinking about how U-M should approach GenAI.

He wanted the group to consider how faculty and students should think about GenAI, how it should play a role in research, and how to use AI responsibly and ethically — especially given plagiarism concerns.

The U-M Generative Artificial Intelligence Advisory (GAIA) Committee released a report in June 2023 that was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, including by other universities interested in developing similar AI tools for their campus.

The intention was while the report will be used for Michigan, we planned to release it publicly so any university, any organization can benefit from it, and that’s the right thing to do as a public institution, Pendse said. That kind of became the first model for other institutions to emulate and follow simultaneously.

From the report, Pendse challenged his team to release generic tools to the entire community that were equitable, fully accessible for visually impaired individuals, and private to the campus.

Currently, anyone who uses an OpenAI platform, including ChatGPT, has their information shared with the company. Pendse said building a private platform was a top priority.

The university partnered with Microsoft and its Azure OpenAI Service, building the U-M platform on top of large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4.0-Turbo and DALLE-3, released by OpenAI.

Lydia Smyers, vice president for U.S. education at Microsoft, said in a statement to BestColleges that the Azure OpenAI software allows developers, like U-M, to adapt the models for a variety of uses, including content, code, and image generation, summarization, semantic search, and unique chat experiences.

Azure OpenAI Service empowers universities to harness the capabilities of generative AI for their unique needs while benefiting from built-in responsible AI and enterprise-grade Azure security, she said.

U-M’s framework offers three tiers of tools for community members to use. The first, U-M GPT, is the most accessible service and provides access to popular AI models including Azure OpenAI and U-M-hosted, open-source LLMs. The service allows individuals up to 75 queries per hour — three times OpenAI’s limit on its platform.

The tool is very popular, boasting between 14,000-16,000 daily users, according to Pendse. Students have self-reported using U-M GPT for help on homework, for idea generation, and as a thought partner in assignments, although Pendse cautions students to follow the guidance of their professors before using the tool in the classroom.

One of the things [the instructions for students say] is to follow your professor’s guidance, no different than what you would normally do, with or without AI, he said.

The second tier is U-M Maizey, which Pendse calls the most amazing, game-changing platform that was released to the campus.

Faculty can train Maizey on classroom documents including:

Once Maizey indexes the information, the tool can be used as a personal AI assistant or tutor for classes, and answer students’ questions.

All of Maizey’s answers come from the custom data set that is uploaded, Pendse explains, so faculty and students can be more confident that the answers they are getting are accurate. Maizey also has a verify button — so students can get a link to exactly where the tool got its information from.

As a student, it is your responsibility to make sure you’re verifying the answer that you’re getting, Pendse said.

U-M Maizey has shown great promise. The tool has 750 different deployments across campus, from procurement to admissions, and library to IT operations, according to Pendse. Additionally, in a study of a class with 1,000 students, the university found that students who used U-M Maizey saw their grades improve anywhere between 5% and 9%.

The study also found that the tool saved faculty members between 10 and 12 office hours per week.

It’s giving faculty and staff members more quality time to spend with the students who need help, Pendse said.

The third and last tier is the U-M GPT Toolkit, which allows individuals who want full control over their AI environment to access GPT in customized ways.

Faculty members who research AI can use the toolkit to develop new language models and use the U-M’s AI framework to deploy the model in U-M GPT. This allows community members to explore a new model and gives the researcher thousands of users who can offer more feedback.

We have amazing, creative faculty members, and this is an incredible tool for them to enhance that learning, enhance that teaching and their pedagogy, Pendse said. When faculty members think like this creatively, with this kind of tool, and with our amazing students, there is magic that’s happening.

The effort to make U-M GPT and the other GenAI tools a reality took an entire team of faculty, along with undergraduate and graduate student testers.

Between June and August 2023, a team of six people worked 40-hour weeks, dedicating thousands of staff hours to developing and launching U-M GPT.

It wasn’t cheap, but it was definitely worth it in terms of our return on investment because the type of innovation that’s occurring across the university, the kind of work that we’re doing, has been just absolutely stunning, Pendse said.

As part of the rollout, the university hosted training sessions four days a week to teach faculty, staff, and students how to use the new services and incorporate them into their work.

Pendse attributed the success of GenAI at U-M to the support from the campus community, including U-M President Santa Ono, the development team led by Robert Jones, and those in the teaching and learning team.

Everybody is in it and supporting — that’s what you need to do when you have a technology like that. It is my very strong belief that GenAI is going to turn out to be the most impactful technology of this century … it will be a force of positive disruption. It is going to be as transformative as the internet has been, he said.

Since September 2023, institutions, including Harvard University, Washington University, and UC Irvine and San Diego, have designed campus-specific versions of ChatGPT. Pendse says he believes that colleges and universities are uniquely designed to prepare students for a future with AI.

I sincerely believe that [with] the kind of technology that we have, we’re going to need many educated people in this technology, to be able to be competitive, he said.

The only way we can take the lead in the AI race is by flying. And I always say, Who better to be the wind beneath the wings of this country than all the great higher education institutions across the country? That’s what is going to be needed.

But for the product to be successful, Pendse says it takes more than having highly educated engineers on his team. It’s a community effort. To develop new AIs, U-M gathers opinions from the entire campus community to ensure faculty, students, and staff can reap the new technology’s benefits for years to come.

Unity and diversity are critical. People questioning and keeping us honest and keeping us on our toes, that’s what made this product stronger, he said.

That’s the secret sauce of the University of Michigan. We may disagree. We may have passionate debates. But, in the end, we put out amazing products.