Moodle, where to with AI?

Moodle, where to with AI?

von Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Anzahl Antworten: 15
Nutzerbild von Particularly helpful Moodlers Nutzerbild von Translators

Hi all

Like everybody else in the IT world, I was receiving the AI news, more as yet another innovation. Now Moodle is getting active, I was reading its development with more interest, yet not really absorbing. Only recently did it dawn on me that Moodle is not only "researching" on AI but already propagating a connection to a big commercial service. In clear text, the Moodle sites which use this connection will pay that service.

How could you be short-sighted! Haven't you heard of the looming global energy crisis due to AI server farms? That some of them considering even commissioning their own nuclear reactors? All collectively cooking our atmosphere? Doesn't news like this reach you?

What's the latest on the Los Angeles wildfires, and what caused them? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyxypryrnko

That is today. What about the future? What about our next generation? Their children?

Mittelwert: Useful (2)
Als Antwort auf Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: Moodle, where to with AI?

von Marcus Green -
Nutzerbild von Core developers Nutzerbild von Particularly helpful Moodlers Nutzerbild von Plugin developers Nutzerbild von Testers

"the Moodle sites which use this connection will pay that service."
Could you clarify your meaning on that. Do you mean that if a Moodle installation enables the AI Subsystem and connects and connects to one of the two services that are included in the settings Moodle sites will pay have to for that service?

The two services that are included in Moodle 4.5 are OpenAI/ChatGPT and Microsoft Azure, though they are arguable two flavours of the same thing.

Als Antwort auf Marcus Green

Re: Moodle, where to with AI?

von Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Nutzerbild von Particularly helpful Moodlers Nutzerbild von Translators
To connect to OpenAI/ChatGPT or Microsoft Azure, don't you have to pay?
Als Antwort auf Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: Moodle, where to with AI?

von Marcus Green -
Nutzerbild von Core developers Nutzerbild von Particularly helpful Moodlers Nutzerbild von Plugin developers Nutzerbild von Testers
You definitly have to pay to make it work with the moodle integration. It has cost me (personally) around $US50 over the last 14 months.
Als Antwort auf Marcus Green

Re: Moodle, where to with AI?

von Marcus Green -
Nutzerbild von Core developers Nutzerbild von Particularly helpful Moodlers Nutzerbild von Plugin developers Nutzerbild von Testers
I wanted to make it clear that any payment was between the people installing and running the Moodle site and the providers of the AI system, in the same way that other Moodle integrations can have a financial cost. The significant difference is that the AI subsystem ships with Moodle and is not a 3rd party plugin.
Als Antwort auf Marcus Green

Re: Moodle, where to with AI?

von Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Nutzerbild von Particularly helpful Moodlers Nutzerbild von Translators
For full disclosure you should have added that you are the creator of the Moodle AI subsystem. wink

Anyway, I don't have anything to add to what I've said in my original post. Going silent - we don't want another painful exchange like the Privacy tool kit for moodle.org and related sites, 2025, (in case deleted ref. "Forums" link https://moodle.org/course on docs.moodle.org getting a alien code attached to it!), do we?
Als Antwort auf Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: Moodle, where to with AI?

von Marcus Green -
Nutzerbild von Core developers Nutzerbild von Particularly helpful Moodlers Nutzerbild von Plugin developers Nutzerbild von Testers
"For full disclosure you should have added that you are the creator of the Moodle AI subsystem. wink"
I am delighted to get the promotion, I must contact HQ about the going rate lächelnd...
But more seriously I am am only a (very) interested observer.
Als Antwort auf Marcus Green

Re: Moodle, where to with AI?

von Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Nutzerbild von Particularly helpful Moodlers Nutzerbild von Translators
OK. You may not be the creator, but definitely our "explainer"
Developer meeting - September 2024 (Meeting recording)
 
How do you explain us the recent shock wave in the AI-verse,
 
This is what that Tube brought me:
DeepSeek R1 - The Chinese AI "Side Project" That Shocked the Entire Industry!
https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=X5adgxV0gBE (remove the blank)
750 k views in two days!
 
I don't think another discovery will save the world but definitely that Chinese gimmick shook the oligarchs to their bones and joints and hopefully reduce the environment disaster!
 
Als Antwort auf Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: Moodle, where to with AI?

von Marcus Green -
Nutzerbild von Core developers Nutzerbild von Particularly helpful Moodlers Nutzerbild von Plugin developers Nutzerbild von Testers

I am also working on an assignment related thing and I should make it clear these are personal projects.


I see the arrival of Deepseek as part of an ongoing trend. I was interested in the arrival of Groq (note the q) that does inference (what happens when you send a prompt to a LLM)  many orders faster than its rivals.

I have run the Deepseek on a standard laptop 

And you can see the speed with which it creates terribly poetry here

https://fosstodon.org/@marcusgreen/113902126998028830

I have run it on a Raspberry Pi and it seems to do as well as competing tools. The performance on the Pi seems to be slightly faster than competing models but still very, very slow, as you would expect for a machine with its power. I anticipate availability of Raspberry Pi hardware to increase inference performance Real Soon Now.

I rather liked this recent quote

If you need to fire up nuclear power plants to do what are trivial reasoning tasks that our brains can do with a spoonful of glucose, you’re doing it wrong:


Als Antwort auf Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: Moodle, where to with AI?

von Eduardo Kraus -
Nutzerbild von Particularly helpful Moodlers Nutzerbild von Plugin developers Nutzerbild von Testers

Hello, Visvanath Ratnaweera and the entire Moodle community! 🌟

Yes, it is true that Moodle has been exploring connections with commercial AI services, but this is far from being part of the Moodle CORE or something fully integrated in a robust and native way. We are in an experimental phase, and there is still a long way to go. 🚀 In fact, I have already commented on this in another discussion, but it’s always good to revisit these points to reflect together. When checking the report of unapproved plugins in Moodle, I didn’t find any native AI plugins awaiting approval. This suggests that, so far, Moodle’s architecture is not yet ready or optimized to fully and efficiently embrace AI, encouraging developers to use it.

Regarding your concerns about the environmental impact of AI infrastructures, I fully agree that this is an essential debate! We need to move forward responsibly, aligning technological innovations with greater care for our planet. However, let’s remember that Moodle's strength lies in being an open-source platform, granting us the freedom to decide what to integrate and how to use it. Nothing forces us to follow centralized models or depend on large corporations.

On your concerns about the environmental impact of AI infrastructures... Moodle itself is already a robust and large platform, consuming significant resources in its operation. For example, there is still a lack of a solid campaign to encourage the use of CDNs, which would significantly help in saving resources and energy. This would allow content to be delivered faster, more efficiently, and with a smaller environmental footprint—something crucial for educational platforms dealing with high traffic volumes.

So today, a lot of energy is spent every day to access courses, while campaigns are made to save energy to create the courses...

References:

PS: Today, my operation is entirely GREEN. I preserve 178,000 square meters (1,915,974.2 ft²) of native forest, a true natural sanctuary home to various species of plants and animals, with multiple sources of fresh, crystal-clear water.

Eduardo Kraus
Teacher and Programmer

Als Antwort auf Eduardo Kraus

Re: Moodle, where to with AI?

von Marcus Green -
Nutzerbild von Core developers Nutzerbild von Particularly helpful Moodlers Nutzerbild von Plugin developers Nutzerbild von Testers

I reccomend Eduardos first link in his post. I am very interested in the use of low power systems for Running Moodle. Today I ordered a new 16GB Raspberry Pi. I have been experimenting with running the Maxima Backend for the STACK (maths) question type and also LLM's on the PI.  They run super slow  on the currently available hardware but I strongly expect there will be acceleration hardware in the near future to allow faster inference.

https://fosstodon.org/@marcusgreen/113797608303715451

Als Antwort auf Marcus Green

Re: Moodle, where to with AI?

von Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Nutzerbild von Particularly helpful Moodlers Nutzerbild von Translators
Good subject for our Hardware and performance forum. See the long-running thread Energy efficient Moodle servers: Ideas, examples,...
Als Antwort auf Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: Moodle, where to with AI?

von Marcus Green -
Nutzerbild von Core developers Nutzerbild von Particularly helpful Moodlers Nutzerbild von Plugin developers Nutzerbild von Testers
It is a good topic for Hardware and performance, but I feel any discussion of the financial and environmental cost of AI should mention the potential of low power/low cost ai solutions. I suspect the power/cost of AI inference is going to drop dramatically over the coming years.

The people at Groq (note the q at the end) are offering inference against Open Source models (a disputed term in AI) that offer performance many times faster than from the other market leaders and I suspect soon it will have a financial cost in the same way that internet connectivity has a financial cost.

One of the issues with AI is the expectation of a relatively instant response. There is scope for the use of something more like batch processing.
Als Antwort auf Marcus Green

Moodle, where to with AI?

von Eduardo Kraus -
Nutzerbild von Particularly helpful Moodlers Nutzerbild von Plugin developers Nutzerbild von Testers

Hi, Marcus! 😊

First, it's important to remember that the Raspberry Pi is excellent for low-traffic or testing environments, but when it comes to a significant number of simultaneous users, it will start to face difficulties. For Moodle running on a Raspberry Pi with a standard setup, you can expect it to handle well between 5 and 10 simultaneous users, depending on the types of activities being performed on the system (for example, simple navigation through courses).

If you're dealing with more demanding activities, such as tests with many students, videos, or large files being accessed, the performance will be impacted more quickly.

Eduardo Kraus
Teacher and programmer