Love him or hate him, billionaire Elon Musk is often surrounded by a newsworthy innovation or controversy. This week, it was the artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, backed by Musk that made headlines because of its ability to score a B grade on an MBA exam set by a curious professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, as reported by Steve Mollman at Fortune.
Professor Christian Terwiesch went beyond wondering what these types of AI tools mean for MBA programs by publishing a research paper in which he examined ChatGPT’s performance on a typical MBA core course final exam, which in this case was Operations Management.
According to the study, the professor wrote that the AI chatbot “does an amazing job at basic operations management and process analysis questions including those that are based on case studies.” He stated that it did have certain drawbacks, such as not being able to tackle “more advanced process analysis problems.”
However, ChatGPT “would have received a B to B- grade on the exam,” he said, as per the outlet. Mr Terwiesch added that the bot has done well in the drafting of legal documents in other places and that “some believe that the next generation of this technology might even be able to pass the bar exam.”
Fortune stated that in his paper’s introduction, Mr Terwiesch mentioned the impact that electronic calculators had on the business sector and made the case that ChatGPT could have a similar effect.
In his study, he said, “Prior to the introduction of calculators and other computing devices, many firms employed hundreds of employees whose task it was to manually perform mathematical operations such as multiplications or matrix inversions. Obviously, such tasks are now automated, and the value of the associated skills has dramatically decreased. In the same way any automation of the skills taught in our MBA programs could potentially reduce the value of an MBA education.”
Read the full story at Fortune.com
