India’s ed-tech unicorn PhysicsWallah is using OpenAI’s GPT-4o to make education accessible to millions of students in India. Recently, the company launched a suite of AI products to ensure that students in Tier 2 & 3 cities can access high-quality education without depending solely on their enrolled institutions, as 85% of their enrollment comes from these areas.

Last year, AIM broke the news of PhysicsWallah introducing ‘Alakh AI’, its suite of generative AI tools, which was eventually launched at the end of December 2023. It quickly gained traction, amassing over 1.5 million users within two months of its release.

The suite comes with several products including AI Guru, Sahayak, and NCERT Pitara. “AI Guru is a 24/7 companion available to students, who can use it to ask about anything related to their academics, non-academic support, or more,” said Vineet Govil, CTPO of PhysicsWallah, in an exclusive interview with AIM.

He added that the tool is designed to assist students by acting as a tutor, helping with coursework, and providing personalised learning experiences. It also supports teachers by handling administrative tasks, allowing them to focus more on direct student interaction.

Govil further explained that students can ask questions in any form—voice or image—using a simple chat format. “It’s a multimodal.”  He said that even if the lecture videos are long—about 30 minutes, 1 hour, or 2 hours—the AI tool will be able to identify the exact timestamp of the student’s query.

When discussing Sahayak, he explained that it offers adaptive practice, revision tools, and backlog clearance, enabling students to focus on specific subjects and chapters for a tailored learning experience.

“Think of Sahayak as a helper that assists students in creating study plans. Based on the student’s academic profile and the entrance exam they are preparing for, it offers suggestions on a possible plan to follow. It includes short and long videos, and a question bank,” said Govil.

On the other hand, NCERT Pitara uses generative AI to create questions from NCERT textbooks, including single choice, multiple choice, and fill-in-the-blank questions.

Moreover, PhysicsWallah has introduced a ‘Doubt Engine’ which can solve students’ doubts after class hours. These doubts can be either academic or non-academic. 

“Academic doubts can be further divided into contextual and non-contextual. Contextual doubts are those that our system can understand, analyse, and respond to effectively. Non-contextual doubts are the ones where we are uncertain about the student’s thought process,” explained Govil.

He said that with the help of the slides that the teacher uses to teach and the lecture videos, their model is also able to answer non-contextual doubts. “Today, 85% of the doubts are solved in real time. Previously, it used to take 10 hours for doubts to be resolved by human subject-matter experts.”

The company has also launched an AI Grader for UPSC and CA aspirants who write subjective answers. Govil said that grading these answers is challenging due to the varying handwriting styles, but the company has successfully developed a tool to address this issue.

“Over a few months, we have done a lot of fine-tuning. Today, we are able to understand what a student is writing. At the same time, some students may use diagrams, and we are able to identify those as well,” said Govil.

The Underlying Tech

Govil said that they use OpenAI’s GPT-4o. Regarding the fine-tuning of the model, he said the company has nearly a million questions in their question bank. “We have over 20,000 videos in our repository that are being actively used as data,” he added.

On the technology front, he said that the company has developed its own layer using the RAG architecture. “And we have a vector database that allows us to provide responses based on our own context,” he said.

PhysicsWallah built a multimodal AI bot powered by Astra DB Vector and LangChain in just 55 days. 

Talking about the data resources for RAG, Govil said, “Our subject matter experts (SMEs) regularly update the data, including real-time current affairs and question banks. This continuous updating has helped us build a question bank with over a million entries.”

When asked about LLMs not being good at maths, Govil agreed and said “It’s a known problem that all the LLMs available today are not doing a great job when it comes to reasoning, and we are aware of it.”

“We are working with partners leading in the LLM space. At the same time, this is really an issue only for high-end applications. For day-to-day algebra and mathematical operations, they are performing well,” he added. 

Alakh AI is Not Alone

OpenAI former co-founder Andrej Karpathy recently launched his own AI startup, Eureka Labs, an AI-native ed-tech company. Meanwhile, Khan Academy, in partnership with OpenAI, has developed an AI-powered teaching assistant called Khanmigo, which utilises OpenAI’s GPT-4. 

Speaking of its global competitors, Govil said, “I won’t really like to compare [ourselves] with the others, but I can tell you that the kind of models we have, and the kind of responses and the skill at which we are operating, are not seen elsewhere.”

Moreover, recent reports indicate that Lightspeed Venture Partners will lead a $150 million funding round for PhysicsWallah at a valuation of $2.6 billion. 

In conclusion, PhysicsWallah’s innovative suite of tools under the Alakh AI umbrella, which includes Sahayak, AI Guru, and the Doubt Engine, is set to reshape the ed-tech industry with its advanced features and real-time capabilities.

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About a week ago, a 30-second clip of a security guard locking the main gates of an office went viral. In the video, the security guard can be heard saying that he was following orders from a senior official to lock the gates so that employees do not leave or take breaks “without permission”. The incident happened at the Gurugram office of Coding Ninjas, an online programming platform backed by Info Edge.

Several Reddit users have condemned the act drawing parallels to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that took place in 1911 in New York City killing 146 workers as the doors were locked from outside. This tragic event raised awareness about dangerous working conditions and led to improved labor laws and safety regulations in the US.

However, if you scratch the surface, you would see that toxic work culture in Indian edtechs is not uncommon. Byju’s, which has jumped onto the AI bandwagon with its own predictive AI model Badri, is not only hailed as the country’s biggest edtech but is also infamous for a lot of things discussed widely. 

Read more: Edtech Awakens to GPT-4, Indian Regulators Stay Asleep

Toxic Work Culture Plagues Indian EdTech Giants

Byju’s employees have often reported harsh working conditions, including prolonged working hours, physical and verbal abuse, and the pressure to “mislead customers”. Evidence such as messages, emails, and recordings highlighted how managers coerced employees into working long hours without breaks. Clients also shared experiences of being coerced into purchasing courses even when suffering financial losses. 

According to a report by Context, Byju’s former employee Pratik Makhija said, “We are treated like slaves. At what cost are they making their revenue and their valuation? By crushing us.” Similar complaints have been reported in other edtech companies like Vedantu and Unacademy where they revealed stressful work environments, pressure to engage in unethical selling practices, arbitrary salary deductions and the lack of job stability.

Unacademy’s SVP of design Hardik Pandya faced backlash on his Twitter post after he glorified hustle culture and working hard, even beyond stipulated hours. In an earlier conversation with ET, Unacademy employees revealed about toxic work culture, pushy sales and working beyond the hours of the company. 

Growing Fast, Falling Faster

The Indian edtech sector witnessed a rapid growth during the pandemic, becoming the lifeline for remote learning. This surge led to significant investments and valuations. India is the home to more than 11,000 edtech startups with six unicorns, namely, Byju’s, Unacademy, PhysicsWallah, Vedantu, Eruditus, and upGrad, as of June 2023. With a surge in funding, the six edtech startups became unicorns in the past three years. 

However, as schools reopened, challenges like intense competition, lack of regulation, digital divide, and a decline in demand, caused a drop in engagement and valuations.

From 2014 to March 2020, edtech startups raised $1.32 billion, but in 2020 alone, they raised $1.43 billion, surpassing the previous five years. In 2021, the sector received $4.73 billion in funding, making it the most-funded startup segment in India. However, in 2022, funding declined by 44.18% due to the reopening of schools and tuition classes. 

To combat the slowdown, like many other tech counterparts, these edtechs have resorted to handing over pink slips in abundance. Edtech companies have been the most affected, with 18 startups in the sector laying off over 8,200 individuals. After laying off 2,500 employees last year, Byju’s cut jobs of another 1,500 employees primarily from engineering, production and design.  Lido Learning, an online education platform, asked over 1,200 employees to resign, primarily from sales and marketing departments. 

SoftBank-banked Unacademy followed suit by terminating around 100 employees and later downsizing its workforce by an additional 600 employees. Vedantu shed 11% of jobs.This downsizing trend also impacted other edtech companies like WhiteHat Jr, FrontRow, Udayy, and Eruditus. Udayy had to ultimately shut down. 

Education Should be Affordable & Accessible

Edtech struck gold when schools shut down during the pandemic. However, education should be driven by a purpose greater than mere financial gains, focusing on holistic growth and personal development of students.

One of the sticklers to this ideology is Alakh Pandey, the man behind PhysicsWallah that became a unicorn last year. Unlike other struggling edtech companies, PhysicsWallah stands out for its profitability. Pandey started out in 2014 by providing free physics classes on YouTube. With over 10,000 enrolled students and a growing user base, PhysicsWallah earned its success by listening to students’ demands and delivering what they needed. 

Krish Naik, the co-founder of iNeuron, provides free online sessions on deep learning and is revered by the masses. Even Andrew Ng, who is considered to be one of the Godfathers of AI, is providing free courses on prompt engineering, among others, to upskill everyone. American edtechs like Coursera and Udemy too provide free courses. 

Read more: No Need to Study Maths Anymore

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