In November 2023, OpenAI announced ‘GPTs’, which are “custom versions of ChatGPT that you can create for a specific purpose” (see their announcement). GPTs allow you to give specific instructions to OpenAI’s large language models, as well as provide the models with “extra knowledge”. In May 2024, Microsoft announced Copilot Studio, which also allows you to create custom agents through specific instructions and knowledge. These overlap somewhat with Cogniti’s functions.
We believe in using the right tools for the right purposes, and are excited by the possibilities enabled by OpenAI’s GPTs and custom Copilots. There will be some educators for whom OpenAI’s GPTs will be the right solution, and others for whom custom Copilots will work best. There will be others for whom Cogniti, or another platform (like Poe, or Zapier) is the right solution.
We are actually quite pleased that OpenAI and Microsoft’s approaches to tailored agents is similar to our approach with Cogniti. It tells us that we’re onto something.
For now, we see that Cogniti has a number of benefits for an educational context, compared to these other tools.
- No need for staff or students to create an account with OpenAI
- Access (and cost) are provisioned by the institution
- LMS integration (e.g. agents can be embedded as a plugin into an LMS, allowing seamless access for students)
- Conversations are logged and available to educators and administrators, increasing safety for students
- Students can flag and rate AI messages, and this feedback is provided to educators and administrators for continual improvement
- Cogniti is hosted on private and secure Microsoft Azure services, which are not connected with OpenAI’s servers
We encourage all educators to experiment with a range of generative AI tools and platforms to find the one(s) that work for them and their students.
