Member Spotlight | GPTzero

“I think a big focus for us is finding a way where people are not just replacing learning using AI, but actually augmenting their learning. There’s been a lot of demand for that, and so we’ve grown pretty organically.”

Company: GPTzero

Workhaus Location: 180 Dundas St W

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What is GPTzero?

While the name may bring to mind ChatGPT, the company is not affiliated with the popular chatbot or its creator, OpenAI. “GPT” stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, a type of Large Language Model (LLM) known for its ability to produce text. To many of us, text produced by LLMs is indiscernible from something a human would write.

The skyrocketing use of these types of AI tools has made life easier for many of us, but has also presented new challenges for educators, writers, and publishers. This is where GPTzero steps in, offering software used to detect patterns in text that are indicative of AI. We recently spoke with Alex Cui, co-founder of GPTZero, about what those challenges mean for the future of education and how he plans to solve them.

“I think this is going to be important when looking at implications for spam, disinformation, and also for how it changes learning.”

For Alex and his co-founder Edward, it all started as a research project, asking the question “How would you detect AI?” Long before they ever considered forming a company, they launched a demo app, sending it out via a tweet. “It blew up like crazy,” Alex told us. “We had 8 million views on that thread. AI was always in the news, and my co-founder Edward was being invited to dozens and dozens of interviews.”

Needless to say, the tool exploded in popularity, to the point where the application crashed from all the traffic. The overwhelming interest forced the team to scale up their application and, before they knew it, they were getting offers to raise money and build a team. “We were really excited about that,” Alex recalled. 

Taking the Plunge

Eventually the time came when the team had to decide to take the plunge: “Edward turned down an offer for a job that he was really going to be passionate about with the New York Times as a journalist,” said Alex. “And I was leaving a job at Waabi here in Toronto, making self driving trucks. We both said, ‘Hey, this sounds really fascinating, and it’s really a passion of ours, so let’s do it.'”

Evidently, they made the right choice. In the years that followed, GPTzero’s popularity has only continued to grow. Since joining us at Workhaus in 2023, their Canadian team has more than tripled in size.

“We’re fortunate that we are kind of both leaders in this field, in terms of defining things like better technology, more interpretable AI detection and accurate AI detection, as well as being in a field that’s growing really rapidly. And in some sense, it grows proportionate to how much people are using AI, which is good because a lot of people are adopting it in various ways.”

Rethinking Learning in the Age of AI

While the company is best known for AI detection, they offer an impressively expansive suite of tools. Their primary focus has always been on education. With AI rapidly changing the face of education,  GPTzero is working hard to keep pace, delivering an ever-expanding suite of innovative tools to help both teachers and students. While AI detection is an inherent component, that doesn’t mean that GPTzero wants to put a stop to the use of AI.

For Alex, the real challenge lies in keeping learners actively involved in their work, ensuring that an increasingly automated world doesn’t lead to the stunting of essential skills. “My worry,” he told us, ”is that people are kind of losing their ability to think critically and solve a problem that AI can’t just solve on the first try.” 

A New Approach

Rather than preventing people from using AI, Alex sees it as a matter of teaching people how to use it properly. This is why they’ve begun focusing on tools that allow educators to evaluate a student’s process, not just the final product.

“For learners, how we see it is: What’s really important is that a teacher is able to actually evaluate your process and see, even if you use AI, how did you problem solve throughout the process of, let’s say, writing an essay? There’s the research side, there’s synthesizing, resolving things, composing. All those things are implicit when you write an essay. And now that essays are very difficult to grade, because AI can do all those steps, the focus should be on teaching people how to do those individual steps well.”

While the method of assessment that Alex is envisioning doesn’t exist yet, he believes that his team is in the process of building it. And their tools may very well pave a new way forward in the world of education. For students and other writers, GPTzero even provides tools that can offer writing feedback, help with finding sources, and even a Google Chrome add-on, to help writers prove the legitimacy of their work based on their typing patterns.

The ultimate hope behind all of these tools is to create a platform where teachers can evaluate students based on the process of composing that work, making sure that students are still critically involved at every step.

Beyond Education: New Challenges for Hiring Professionals

The challenges around critical thought and problem solving also extend to the workplace and hiring process. In fact, AI applications and cover letters have become so rampant that even Alex has been on the receiving end of them at GPTzero.

“Broadly speaking, we’ve seen a lot of AI being used in interviews and take home assessments. For us, it’s made hiring a little bit more challenging because, we’ll go halfway through the process with a candidate and just realize they didn’t really do anything in the application process that they said they did.”

The impulse to use AI is one that he understands, and isn’t opposed to it on its face. Nonetheless it raises challenges and concerns, like the impact of our increasing reliance on AI at the individual level, undermining critical thinking.

”We don’t prevent people from using AI, we actually encourage it at our company, but it’s still important that you know how to check its work. And that means that you should be able to at least do what it’s done in the first place.”

He says this phenomenon is consistent across his own hiring assessments, where candidates have been doing worse, especially when allowed to use AI. With reliance on AI already having a noticeable impact on professional adults, Alex is worried for the next generation, wondering what the implications are for children who have gained access to AI before they’ve built their own foundational skills. He believes that the next generation needs to be taught how to use AI responsibly.

“I really think that it’s important to teach people how to use AI in a graduated way, where they’re able to understand the task themselves, and then eventually delegate part of that to AI, but not the other way around.”

Safeguarding Trust in Information

The same larger issue underlies all of these concerns: the growing challenge of ensuring the information we find online is authentic. AI-generated content can undermine the integrity of everything from online reviews to academic research.

“There are platforms now that require you to write as a human for integrity reasons,” Alex explained. “We’ve seen this AI kind of slop, you could say, on Amazon for books and reviews. We’ve seen over 1000 new sites that are just AI generated click forms. We’ve seen it in financial news, as well as really percolating academia. That for me is probably one of the most concerning things.“

In a frightening example of how widespread the problem is, Alex spoke to GPTzero’s collaboration Wikipedia. The company created a tool to scan citations for new articles, a necessary step in response to the trend of users creating fake websites to act as citations for fake or inaccurate Wiki pages.

GPTzero helps that same challenge from the user’s end by equipping people with tools to quickly audit information. To do this, they’ve built a type of AI-powered fact checking tool. “In real time, we take an article like that and we would search and compare it against other resources and studies on the web to see if there’s actually a plurality of support, or if it’s controversial. Then we surface that to the user without them having to go do this for every single factual claim in, let’s say, a 25 page article.“

Tools like these highlight what Alex and his team are striving for: a world where AI helps us succeed – with us and for us, rather than instead of us. From teachers to students, hiring managers to publishers, GPTzero’s mission lies in creating ways for people to trust the information they read, and ultimately, preserving what’s human.

Building a Home at Workhaus

As their impact grows globally, they’ve also been building their home base right here in Toronto. Alex and his team first joined us at Workhaus in 2023, starting out with an office for 3 team members. “And now we have 15 people in Toronto, 27 globally,” he shared. “That’s been quite a journey.”

While the location and pricing were a big draw, what really sold him was a combination of the company’s culture and the space itself. “I really like the vibe,” he told us.

“Workhaus is a really nice balance for our team. I like how we have a lot of space in this location, and it’s super sunny, and I feel like it’s great to have a community here, but it’s not too distracting all the time.”

Alex ended our conversation by saying how happy he is to be a part of the community, and we feel the same. It’s inspiring to see a company not only grow so quickly but also tackle such important issues in a way that empowers people and promotes critical thinking.