Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the groundbreaking of the Jen-Hsun Huang and Lori Mills Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex at Oregon State University on April 13, 2024. The center, created with $50 million from Huang and more than $70 million from the state, will employ a Nvidia supercomputer. (Photo courtesy of Oregon State University)

Oregon is one of several states making deals with the trillion-dollar chip maker to get artificial intelligence lessons into K-12 and college classes

Months after Oregon signed an agreement with the computer chip company Nvidia to educate K-12 and college students about artificial intelligence, details about how AI concepts and “AI literacy” will be taught to children as young as 5 remain unclear.

An April agreement signed by Gov. Tina Kotek, as well as Higher Education Coordinating Commission Executive Director Ben Cannon and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, directs $10 million of state money be spent on expanding access to AI education and career opportunities in colleges and schools in partnership with Nvidia.

Despite the agreement encompassing K-12 schools, questions and requests for comment on the deal from the Oregon Department of Education went unanswered.

A spokesperson for the Oregon Education Association, the state’s largest teacher’s union, did not provide comment on the agreement with Nvidia but sent a 2024 group resolution on artificial intelligence that states that the use of AI tools should be transparent in schools, that data security and privacy should be a priority and that teachers should be trained in use of the tools.

Cannon said in a statement that the agreement will “position Oregon higher education institutions and workforce training providers to lead in preparing students for responsible application of AI and cutting-edge technologies needed in Oregon.”

California-based Nvidia is the world’s largest suppliers of computing chips used for artificial intelligence systems processing, and Huang has deep Oregon connections as a graduate of Aloha High School and Oregon State University. Huang recently donated $50 million to develop a supercomputing research center at the university, which in 2023 also got more than $70 million in state taxpayer funding.

Nvidia chips are used in generative AI systems like ChatGPT that are trained on troves of text and data taken from the internet and used to provide text, image or other outputs based on user prompts. The system has drawn the ire of many teachers and college professors, who see it being used deceptively by students to do their research and writing work for them. Many writers and publishers also distrust AI tools that take their work from the internet without pay or credit and use it to train the AI systems.

But as such AI tools gain users, there’s a growing push to teach younger and younger students in the country’s public schools and colleges about how they work, and how they could be applied in an increasingly technocentric future.

“Fast moving”

Just a week after Kotek signed the agreement with Nvidia, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “advancing artificial intelligence education for American youth” by establishing an artificial intelligence education task force.

Such announcements reveal a clear concern from politicians — without investing in AI education, Oregonians and Americans will be uncompetitive for the jobs of the future and get left behind.

“Nvidia is collaborating with the state of Oregon on workforce training and upskilling to address the rapidly growing demand for AI skills, foster economic growth, and ensure Oregon’s workforce remains competitive in the evolving tech landscape,” Nvidia spokesperson Liz Archibald said in an email.

Oregon’s agreement with Nvidia followed one made with California in August 2024 that is specific to higher education and job training. After Kotek signed Oregon’s agreement, Mississippi and Utah also signed agreements.

According to Oregon’s agreement, college faculty will be able to train to become “Nvidia ambassadors” on campus, and the Oregon Department of Education will work with Nvidia and K-12 schools to “introduce foundational AI concepts.”

“The MOU is intended to be broad and inclusive of Oregon’s workforce and training education ecosystem – which includes K-12 education – so Oregon can train and prepare students for high-paying jobs in a fast moving, crucial industry,” Kotek spokesperson Roxy Mayer said in an email.

Applications unknown

The agreement does not offer a lot of granularity about how AI lessons, concepts, ethics and literacy will be integrated into K-12 and college classrooms. It lists a number of industries that would be engaged and positively impacted, including renewable energy, healthcare, agriculture, microelectronics and manufacturing — specifically, semiconductor design and manufacturing.

Archibald, the company spokesperson, said that Nvidia will first focus on the “university ecosystem.”

There are more than 600 “Nvidia ambassadors” at college campuses in the U.S. and abroad, according to the company. Faculty can get certified via a company training that then allows them to teach advanced AI and machine learning technologies.

“That’s how we’ll see new startups, new research breakthroughs and a workforce ready for the AI era,” Archibald wrote.

A key metric of success for the private-public partnership is the number of ambassadors that colleges eventually have on their campuses. It is, Mayer of the governor’s office confirmed, the first time a corporation has gotten the state’s higher education agency to agree to promote its own “company ambassadors” on college campuses.

“We reject the premise that the company has coerced the state into allowing corporate actors onto college campuses to promote their company,” Mayer said.

Kotek in 2023 established an AI advisory council, meant to analyze potential benefits and risks of broader AI adoption in state government and agencies. The council shared its action plan in February, which included establishing a roadmap for AI integration grounded in protecting government ethics, privacy and security. But the Higher Education Coordinating Commission lacks any such framework or guidance for colleges and universities.

Oregon’s department of education was among the first in the U.S. to offer guidance to K-12 schools in 2023. Agencies in at least 28 states and the District of Columbia have issued guidance on the use of artificial intelligence in K-12 schools since.

“Because there is no existing law regarding the use of AI in schools, ODE’s role is to provide guidance and support to school districts – not requirements,” spokesperson Liz Merah wrote. Many of those guidelines are similar to media literacy guidelines, including teaching students to recognize biases, inaccuracies and plagiarism and understand copyright and licensing rights.

Risks and rewards

Shiyan Jiang, an assistant professor at North Carolina State University in Raleigh who researches how AI concepts are being taught to students in K-12 schools, said there’s a lot of variation in how schools and teachers handle that instruction.

“There is this huge gap in terms of how prepared different states are in terms of bringing topics to classrooms,” she said.

It’s important to have a common ground so students in Pennsylvania have the same knowledge to bring to arguments and conversations about the application of AI as students in California, she said.

“No matter what kind of attitude we have towards AI, I think that it’s good for us to have some kind of foundation knowledge about it, so that we can make solid arguments and think deeply about how we can or cannot better leverage these tools,” she said.

Tom Mullaney, a former public school history teacher and ed tech consultant who writes the Critical Inkling blog about tech applications in classrooms, said an agreement like the one Oregon is entering into with Nvidia leaves more questions than answers.

“When we talk about education and generative AI, is Nvidia an unbiased source for that? They have a lot invested in you and I thinking that generative AI is going to transform everything from education to employment. Are they an unbiased source for education for children?” he said. “I think that if this is to be brought into schools, it should be done by people who are willing to be critical, or at least hear and understand critical perspectives. It should not be done by those with a financial interest in you being enamored of generative AI.”

Mullaney pointed to startups in the AI and education space like the company School AI, that provides teachers and students with chatbots that imitate historical figures and AI-generated imagery of figures such as Anne Frank and George Washington Carver.

“For reasons of consent, of creepiness, of a white, male-dominated industry voicing people from marginalized populations, I mean there’s a lot of reasons not to use generative AI as a guest speaker,” he said.

Jiang said the best case scenario for AI in schools is that students at least learn enough “AI literacy,” including concepts, and ethical implications of AI applications, that they can participate as an “active agent” in conversations and development of a future that includes AI, not just as a passive consumer of AI tools developed by others.

Mullaney said what most students need is media literacy, not “AI literacy.” Students should be able to understand the quality of different source material and if an image is real or made by an AI program, he explained.

“We don’t need to be teaching students about being excited for generative AI. We need to teach students to be critical thinkers. That’s what we need, and that’s what I’m not seeing,” he said.