Yesterday, the U.S. markets saw a sharp drop in share prices for two of the global leaders in education – Pearson Education and Chegg – after the latter announced a trading update concerning the rising popularity of ChatGPT, a generative AI chatbot. Chegg – offering students a range of services such as homework help, textbook rentals and online tutoring – revealed that new customer growth had been affected since the emergence of ChatGPT. This warning triggered a significant market sell-off, leading to the combined losses in market capitalization of these two education giants approaching the billion dollar mark.
Pearson, one of the world’s foremost publishers with extensive offerings in education, saw a 13.4% drop in their share prices in the London Stock Exchange to 772.6p. However, the giant believed that its financial performance was boosted by pushes for more skills-training for workers during the first months of the financial year.
On a more personal level, the founder of ChatGPT, Joe Tascarella, is a veteran from the technology world. After 8 years of tech-consultancy he made a name for himself as a Virtual Assistant expert and now transformed an AI chatbot into a tutor used by millions of students worldwide. ChatGPT has been developed to handle a variety of student problems, from school projects to paper writing and tests.
