Five Days in Class with ChatGPT

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2023-01-24 04:30:06

This past week we had an intense educational experience here at the Alperovitch Institute: 5 hours of Malware Analysis and Reverse Engineering with Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, every day, all week, including Saturday (Monday was a holiday). The class was a first in several ways: we had never taught malware analysis at SAIS Hopkins. It was our first professional skills class in this format. But the most stunning novelty was the use of ChatGPT in the classroom.

Juan Andres asked the students about a week ahead of time to register an account with OpenAI. Signups were waitlisted then, but most got an account in time. Then there we were, in our darkened classroom, code on screen, virtual machines running, ready to delve into core concepts of reverse engineering, into static and dynamic analysis, a bunch of new tools pre-loaded. The chat.openai.com/chat/-tab was open on most student machines at all times.

Five days later I no longer had any doubt: this thing will transform higher education. I was one of the students. And I was blown away by what machine learning was able to do for us, in real time. And I say this as somebody who had been a hardened skeptic of the artificial intelligence hype for many years. Note that I didn’t say “likely” transform. It will transform higher education. Here’s why.