Russian ChatGPT rival passes university entrance exams
The YandexGPT 2 neural network has succeeded in passing Russia’s Unified State Exam (EGE) and scored enough points to be admitted to university, the AI’s creators at Yandex announced in an interview with the Russian Gazette (RG).
According to the Yandex team, this marks the first time in Russia that any generative neural network has been able to pass the exam and complete all of its tasks, including the creative ones. They noted that the event proves that the participation of artificial intelligence in education is inevitable and that adjustments will have to be made in how exams and other knowledge evaluations are carried out.
Yandex’s chatbot managed to successfully pass an EGE on literature, which is considered to be particularly difficult for algorithmic neural networks to solve as it simultaneously tests several skills at once, including erudition, writing style, and creativity.
As reported by RG, YandexGPT 2 was able to complete both parts of the literature exam, and managed to correctly analyze a work of literature and answer questions about it. The AI was also able to write an essay on a given topic.
In the end, the chatbot managed to receive a weighted score of 55 points, which is close to the average result achieved by Russian students in 2022 – 63 points – and well above the minimum passing requirement of 40 points for Russian universities.
The team at Yandex explained that when they were developing the neural network, they paid special attention to make sure the database being used to teach YandexGPT did not contain any answers to EGE exams so that the chatbot would have to answer and solve all the problems just like any regular student would.
Despite this success, the Russian education watchdog Rosobrnadzor has stated that it does not view YandexGPT as a danger, as regular students will not be able to employ the help of AI when passing the EGE, since all devices are strictly prohibited during the exam.
Nevertheless, neural networks have already started being actively used to prepare for and sometimes pass exams. Earlier this year in the US, OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3 chatbot managed to pass final exams at the University of Minnesota Law School, and also passed the final test for a Master of Business Administration degree at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
Yandex launched its AI system in May. Last month it announced that YandexGPT’s basic model had already been “steadily surpassing” its US competitor – OpenAI’s ChatGPT 3.5 – particularly when it comes to generating answers in Russian, and in many cases provided “higher quality answers” than ChatGPT 4.
