Erudite is now available for all staff (not for students) in Microsoft Teams. You need to add the Erudite app yourself, and then you can chat with it as if it were a colleague, one that always responds immediately and is never absent.
Strict agreements
The new AI chatbot does not leak any data, says Bas Smit, strategic adviser on digitalisation for education. Although Erudite uses a language model from OpenAI (the parent company of ChatGPT) that runs on Microsoft servers, these servers are located in Sweden or France. The questions and answers are not stored on those servers and are not used to further train the language model.
But how strict are these agreements if the CIA demands the data anyway? “That’s an issue with a much wider scope than just Erudite. There are experts who conclude from American law that the US government could still access data from an American company, even if the data is in Europe. But that hasn’t happened in practice yet. Should it happen, Microsoft promises to take legal action against it. But it remains something to stay alert about”, Smit assures.
Smit emphasises that Erudite is as secure as using Teams or SharePoint, and certainly handles your privacy ‘many times better’ than ChatGPT. “We know that OpenAI saves all your chats indefinitely, even if you ask it not to.”
No file uploads
There are still some limitations with Erudite, compared to ChatGPT. You can’t upload files to Erudite for analysis, it cannot generate images, and you can’t input more than 750 words, compared to 128,000 characters on ChatGPT. Therefore, summarising (or generating) a long text is not an option. The conversation also ends after seven questions.
The editorial team of EM tried Erudite. The answers from Erudite appear quickly on the screen. Erudite can also code: it conjured up a Python script in no time. The chatbot is eager to generate an essay for you. When we requested topics for an essay for the course in Media & Communication, it came up with ten suggestions. After we selected the topic Virtual Reality, it also provided a chapter outline for the essay and an introduction. We left it at that for now.
Smit also has a tip on how to use Erudite effectively. “Don’t try to create the perfect prompt yourself; let Erudite help you with that. Ask it to make a prompt for you and to ask what it needs for that. Much more effective!”
Frugal
At present, Erudite uses the GPT-4o language model from OpenAI. The university plans to switch to the newer o1-mini soon. That is cheaper and uses less energy, Smit notes. The difference in energy consumption between Erudite and the same language model on ChatGPT is likely not very significant. “ChatGPT saves all your chats permanently, and that storage consumes some extra energy”, Smit says.
According to Smit, the costs for Erudite are lower than if departments were to purchase their own ChatGPT accounts. The costs per active user amount to a few euros per year. The university is keeping an eye on the costs, but Smit does not expect to issue warnings for excessive AI consumption anytime soon.
A successor is ready
Due to the limitations of the Teams environment, Erudite will not quickly adopt all features of ChatGPT, but the successor that can do all that – and more – is already being prepared. Smit: “EdugenAI is a national project for a new privacy-friendly chatbot, with the pilot starting in September. In that chat, you will be able to upload files, open multiple chats, and generate images. Moreover, you can choose from multiple language models. Ultimately, we want to offer nearly all available language models, perhaps also the Erasmian Language Model, the language model currently being developed by researchers at EUR. Additionally, EdugenAI can operate completely independently of Big Tech. If a company it collaborates with misbehaves, we will simply remove them from the equation.”
