Professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison use artificial intelligence in their classrooms to aid student learning.

This essay is excerpted from a new Chronicle special report, “Leading in the AI Era,” available in the Chronicle Store.

These days, large language models such as ChatGPT are omnipresent. Yet their inner workings remain deeply mysterious. To Naomi Saphra, that’s an unsatisfying state of affairs. “We don’t know what ...