In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gained a lot of attention and is now slowly becoming a part of our lives. Recently, An artificial intelligence-based app, PadhAI, cracked the UPSC 2024 exam and achieved a score of more than 170 out of 200. This score is significantly higher than the average general score, which usually remains below 100. According to the official notice, PadhAI's score places it within the top 10 nationally, potentially even at the number 1 spot.
A group of IITians developed this app and took it to the UPSC CSE 2024 exam on June 16 just after the exam and solved the entire paper within just seven minutes. The answers were also compared with broad AI models commercially available from big tech companies such as Open AI, Microsoft and Google by using answer keys released by top coaching institutes.
India TV exclusively spoke to PadhAI's CEO, Dr Karttikeya Mangalam who holds a PhD in AI from UC Berkeley to learn more about this new exam preparation tool.
Q. What was the motive behind launching this app?
Karttikeya Mangalam: We started working in August 2023. At that time, it was clear that modern AI and LLMs like chatGPT were about to revolutionise everything. And I've been very passionate about education for a long time. As it became clear that LLMs are going to change the way students learn, we started the company (SigIQ) to lead this change. PadhAI is the first product of SigIQ: AI test prep for UPSC.
The vision of PadhAI is to enable students to access high-quality personalised learning at a very inexpensive cost using modern GenAI. We have started with the UPSC exam where we have launched the PadhAI app on Play Store. The event on June 16 was to show that the PadhAI AI is not only a helpful teacher, but also the smartest aspirant — achieving 175+ marks, solving in just under 7 minutes on UPSC 2024 exam, and achieving rank 1 in UPSC Prelims nationally.
Q. Will it be beneficial for students preparing for competitive exams?
Karttikeya Mangalam: Absolutely, today students have to leave their parental homes, move to new cities and places, and pay lakhs of coaching fees to get quality test prep education. We want to democratise this access with GenAI and bring down the cost to make it affordable to students of every class of society.
Q. Can students 100 per cent rely on this app?
Karttikeya Mangalam: At present, the app acts as a support system for students, regardless of their primary method of preparation—be it coaching, self-study, online, or distance learning. The app is beneficial to everyone as it offers unique features that are essential for saving time and enabling faster and more accurate learning for UPSC.
Q. How have you tried to mitigate challenges associated with AI models such as hallucinations, factually incorrect data, and more?
Karttikeya Mangalam: We have developed our proprietary neuro-symbolic LLM technology that helps mitigate the challenges of hallucinations and outdated information. PadhAI provides the most recent information, avoids biasing on outdated info, and also supplements its statements with proper references and citations — to make students feel trust and reliability in our technology.
Q. Have you tried any other exams like NEET, CUET or others through this app?
Karttikeya Mangalam: We're focusing on one exam at a time to have a high-quality product. UPSC is our first and only market.
Q. Is your app free? If no, then what are the charges?
Karttikeya Mangalam: Completely free, no charge. The GenAI tech in education is in its infancy and we want to make it help achieve maturity before worrying about monetisation.
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