“We’re just seeing the tip of the AI iceberg. What’s coming is going to be exciting or terrifying, depending on your perspective.”

Last month, OpenAI launched its newest AI chatbot product, GPT-4. According to OpenAI, the bot, which uses machine learning to generate natural language text, passed the bar exam with a score in the 90^th percentile, passed 13 of 15 AP exams, and got a nearly perfect score on the GRE Verbal test.

Inquiring minds at BYU and 186 other universities wanted to know how OpenAI’s tech would fare on accounting exams. So, they put the original version, ChatGPT, to the test. The researchers say that while it still has work to do in the realm of accounting, it’s a game changer that will change how everyone teaches and learns — for the better.

“When this technology first came out, everyone was worried that students could now use it to cheat,” said lead study author David Wood, a BYU professor of accounting. “But opportunities to cheat have always existed. So for us, we’re trying to focus on what we can do with this technology now that we couldn’t do before to improve the teaching process for faculty and the learning process for students. Testing it out was eye-opening.”

Since its debut in November 2022, ChatGPT has become the fastest-growing technology platform ever, reaching 100 million users in under two months. In response to intense debate about how models like ChatGPT should factor into education, Wood decided to recruit as many professors as possible to see how the AI fared against actual university accounting students.

His co-author recruiting pitch on social media exploded: 327 co-authors from 186 educational institutions in 14 countries participated in the research, contributing 25,181 classroom accounting exam questions. They also recruited undergrad BYU students (including Wood’s daughter, Jessica) to feed another 2,268 textbook test bank questions to ChatGPT. The questions covered accounting information systems (AIS), auditing, financial accounting, managerial accounting, and tax, and varied in difficulty and type (true/false, multiple choice, short answer, etc.).

Although ChatGPT’s performance was impressive, the students performed better. Students scored an overall average of 76.7%, compared to ChatGPT’s score of 47.4%. On 11.3% of questions, ChatGPT scored higher than the student average, doing particularly well on AIS and auditing. But the AI bot did worse on tax, financial, and managerial assessments, possibly because ChatGPT struggled with the mathematical processes required for the latter type.

When it came to question type, ChatGPT did better on true/false questions (68.7% correct) and multiple-choice questions (59.5%), but struggled with short-answer questions (between 28.7% and 39.1%). In general, higher-order questions were harder for ChatGPT to answer. In fact, sometimes ChatGPT would provide authoritative written descriptions for incorrect answers, or answer the same question differently.

“It’s not perfect; you’re not going to be using it for everything,” said Jessica Wood, currently a freshman at BYU. “Trying to learn solely by using ChatGPT is a fool’s errand.”

The researchers also uncovered some other fascinating trends through the study, including:

• ChatGPT doesn’t always recognize when it is doing math and makes nonsensical errors such as adding two numbers in a subtraction problem or dividing numbers incorrectly.
• ChatGPT often provides explanations for its answers, even if they are incorrect. Other times, ChatGPT’s descriptions are accurate, but it will then proceed to select the wrong multiple-choice answer.
• ChatGPT sometimes makes up facts. For example, when providing a reference, it generates a real-looking reference that is completely fabricated. The work and sometimes the authors do not even exist.

That said, authors fully expect GPT-4 to improve exponentially on the accounting questions posed in their study, and the issues mentioned above. What they find most promising is how the chatbot can help improve teaching and learning, including the ability to design and test assignments, or perhaps be used for drafting portions of a project.

“It’s an opportunity to reflect on whether we are teaching value-added information or not,” said study coauthor and fellow BYU accounting professor Melissa Larson. “This is a disruption, and we need to assess where we go from here. Of course, I’m still going to have TAs, but this is going to force us to use them in different ways.”

Quantum teleportation is a technique allowing the transfer of quantum information between two distant quantum objects, a sender and a receiver, using a phenomenon called quantum entanglement as a resource. The unique feature of this process is that the actual information is not transferred by sending quantum bits (qubits) through a communication channel connecting the two parties; instead, the information is destroyed at one location and appears at the other one without physically traveling between the two. This surprising property is enabled by quantum entanglement, accompanied by the transmission of classical bits. 

There is a deep interest in quantum teleportation nowadays within the field of quantum communications and quantum networks because it would allow the transfer of quantum bits between network nodes over very long distances, using previously shared entanglement. This would help the integration of quantum technologies into current telecommunication networks and extend the ultra-secure communications enabled by these systems to very long distances. In addition, quantum teleportation permits the transfer of quantum information between different kinds of quantum systems, e.g. between light and matter or between different kinds of quantum nodes.

Quantum teleportation was theoretically proposed in the early 90s and experimental demonstrations were carried out by several groups around the world. While the scientific community has gained extensive experience on how to perform these experiments, there is still an open question on how to teleport information practically, allowing reliable and fast quantum communication over an extended network. It seems clear that such an infrastructure should be compatible with the current telecommunications network. In addition, the protocol of quantum teleportation requires a final operation to be applied on the teleported qubit, conditioned on the result of the teleportation measurement (transmitted by classical bits), to transfer the information faithfully and at a higher rate, a feature called active feed-forward. This means that the receiver requires a device known as a quantum memory that can store the qubit without degrading it until the final operation can be implemented. Finally, this quantum memory should be able to operate in a multiplexed fashion to maximize the speed of teleporting information when the sender and the receiver are far away. To date, no implementation had incorporated these three requirements in the same demonstration.

Located in Castelldefels, Barcelona, Spain, ICFO researchers Dario Lago-Rivera, Jelena V. Rakonjac, and Samuele Grandi, led by ICREA Prof. at ICFO Hugues de Riedmatten have reported achieving long-distance teleportation of quantum information from a photon to a solid-state qubit, a photon stored in a multiplexed quantum memory. The technique involved the use of an active feed-forward scheme, which, together with the multimodality of the memory, has allowed the maximization of the teleportation rate. The proposed architecture was compatible with the telecommunications channels, thus enabling future integration and scalability for long-distance quantum communication.

How to achieve quantum teleportation 

The team built two experimental setups, that in the jargon of the community are usually called Alice and Bob. The two setups were connected by a 1km optical fiber spun up in a spool, to emulate a physical distance between the parties.

Three photons were involved in the experiment. In the first setup, Alice, and the team used a special crystal to create two entangled photons: the first photon at 606 nm, called the signal photon, and the second photon called the idler photon, compatible with the telecommunications infrastructure. Once created, “we kept the first 606 nm photon at Alice and stored it in a multiplexed solid-state quantum memory, holding it in the memory for future processing. At the same time, we took the telecom photon created at Alice and sent it through the 1km of optical fiber to reach the second experimental setup, called Bob,” Dario Lago recalls.

In this second setup, Bob, the scientists had another crystal where they created a third photon, where they had encoded the quantum bit they wanted to teleport. Once the third photon was created, the second photon arrived at Bob from Alice, this is where the core of the teleportation experiment takes place. 

Teleporting information over 1km

The second and third photons interfered with each other through what is known as a Bell State measurement (BSM). The effect of this measurement was to mix the state of the second and third photons. Thanks to the fact that the first and second photons were entangled, to begin with, i.e. their joint state were highly correlated, the result of the BSM was that of transferring the information encoded in the third photon to the first one, stored by Alice in the quantum memory, 1 km away. As Dario Lago and Jelena Rakonjac mention, “We are capable of transferring information between two photons that were never in contact before but connected through a third photon that was indeed entangled with the first. The uniqueness of this experiment lies in the fact that we employed a multiplexed quantum memory capable of storing the first photon for long enough such that by the time Alice found out that the interaction had happened, we were still able to process the teleported information as the protocol requires.”

This processing that Dario and Jelena mentioned was the active feed-forward technique mentioned earlier. Depending on the outcome of the BSM, a phase shift was applied to the first photon after storage in the memory. In this way, the same state would always be encoded in the first photon. Without this, half of the teleportation events would have to be discarded. Moreover, the multimodality of the quantum memory allowed them to increase the teleportation rate beyond the limits imposed by the 1 km separation between them without degrading the quality of the teleported qubit. Overall, this resulted in a teleportation rate three times higher than for a single-mode quantum memory, only limited by the speed of the classical hardware.

Scalability and Integration

The experiment carried out by this group in 2021, where they achieved for the first time entanglement of two multimode quantum memories separated by 10 meters and heralded by a photon at the telecommunication wavelength, has been the precursor of this experiment.

As Hugues de Riedmatten emphasizes, “Quantum teleportation will be crucial for enabling high-quality long-distance communication for the future quantum internet. Our goal is to implement quantum teleportation in more and more complex networks, with previously distributed entanglement. The solid-state and multiplexed nature of our quantum nodes as well as their compatibility with the telecom network make them a promising approach to deploying the technology over a long distance in the installed fiber network.”

Further improvements are already being planned. On the one hand, the team is focused on developing and improving the technology to extend the setup to much longer distances while maintaining efficiency and rates. On the other hand, they also aim at studying and using this technique in the transfer of information between different types of quantum nodes, for a future quantum Internet that will be able to distribute and process quantum information between remote parties.