Cogniti is one of a new generation of software that uses generative AI to augment human intelligence and work.
Steering a large language model #
Driving Cogniti’s abilities are powerful large language models (LLMs) developed by OpenAI. There are many LLMs out there, including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Claude 2, and others. These LLMs drive many of the generative AI tools used by the general public, including ChatGPT (powered by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4), Bing Chat (powered by GPT-4), and Claude AI (powered by Claude 2).
Those general purpose generative AI tools are powerful, but there are also some issues around using them in an educational context.
One of the issues that Cogniti overcomes is by allowing educators to ‘steer’ the LLM. This is done by providing a special message directly to the LLM which it respects each time it receives a user’s prompt and generates a completion. This ‘system message’ is crafted by educators, and not seen by student users, meaning that Cogniti ‘agents’ (customised chatbots) can behave in controlled ways that are more desirable for learning.
Giving the AI resources to draw upon #
Another important aspect of Cogniti is its ability to allow educators to provide ‘resources’ to the generative AI. These resources could be lecture notes, an open educational resource, marking rubrics, assignment guidelines, and more.
These resources can be considered by Cogniti when it generates completions in response to a user’s prompts – find out more about how this works.
The way this works technically is called ‘retrieval augmented generation’. This means that when a user types in a prompt, a Cogniti agent will search through the resources available to it, and find snippets from those resources – ‘retrieval’. After the snippets are retrieved, it will add the snippets to the user’s prompts in the background, so that the LLM can consider the information from the snippets when it generates its completion – ‘augmented generation’.
Secure and private #
Cogniti can be set to connect to the GPT family of LLMs, created by OpenAI, and hosted on the trusted Microsoft Azure platform. This ensures that prompts and completions are not used by OpenAI for training.
Alternatively, Cogniti can also connect to OpenAI’s LLMs hosted by OpenAI.
You can experience Cogniti for yourself from a student perspective:
If you’d like to create your own agents, get in touch and we can discuss collaborations.