When OpenAI announced ChatGPT 5, they claimed that it had PhD-level intelligence. In addition, about a month before the release of ChatGPT 5 they added a study mode to their chatbot interface. These two recent enhancements have me curious about the quality of an education that one could potentially obtain by using an LLM as a personal college professor.
I have an MBA, and have been considering going back to school to obtain a PhD in Computer Science with an emphasis on AI technologies. I am using AI technology heavily in my role at my full-time job, and I feel like I could leverage this tech more if I knew more about how it works. There are a few Computer Science PhD programs within 100 miles of where I live, however the universities do not offer these classes online or in the evenings. I would have to leave my full-time job to pursue this PhD goal, which I am definitely not willing to do (I have a great job that I love.)
I decided that I would embark on what I’m calling an aIDoctorate, an AI-mentored doctoral-level portfolio in Computer Science and AI. I started a project in ChatGPT and asked it to create a full set of courses with complete syllabi that it could use to teach and tutor me through a PhD-level Computer Science program, with an emphasis on AI technology. I’m very interested to see if it pushes me to learn the material and how it tests me to confirm that I have learned the material.
Also, when I was browsing the PhD programs at the universities relatively near to where I live, I couldn’t help but wonder if the days of paying 10s of thousands of dollars for a certificate from a school are coming to an end. I worked and studied hard for my undergraduate degree and my MBA, but I didn’t have a professor who worked with me personally, customizing the content to fit my learning style and pushing me to learn the concepts which were most difficult. Like so many home schooled children have shown, there is a chance that the quality of education that I will receive from AI will be better than the education that I could receive in a classroom setting.
And so, I’m beginning. I’ll post as much content as I can — to both document my experience and demonstrate the rigor behind the aIDoctorate. If you’re curious about pursuing your own aIDoctorate, follow along here — I’ll share all the materials, projects and reflections publicly.
The first milestone: refreshing the math foundations for AI. Stay tuned.