Last week Dr. Elizabeth Childs and I had the privilege to do our first presentation about the Open GenAI project. A big thank you to the Canadian Association of Research Libraries for the invitation to come and share about the project. If you would like to watch the recording from the session, you can do so here. If you would like to review our slide deck from our presentation, you can find it here. We have a few more presentations coming up over the next month so we will be sure to share recordings here once they are available.

This past week I also reached out to the authors of the 25 open textbooks we will be using for Opterna, our AI study companion. This week I met with some of those folks, and it was really exciting to hear how interested folks are in the idea of an AI study companion with their open textbooks. The longer the project goes the more I am learning about both the technical considerations for working AI and some of the tensions that we often face with openly licenced resources. 

As I have mentioned before, we are only committed to the development and testing of a prototype and whether we host Opterna beyond the project will be informed on what we hear at the focus groups we will do in 2026.

A couple considerations that I am already contemplating are;

1. Cost and stats, open textbooks get a lot of traffic, but not all traffic is actual learning, bots mess with our stats, so it won’t be until we are in the testing phase before we have a true sense of cost to host the tool. 

2. The other tension we will have to navigate is the fact we are using an existing, pre-trained LLM so the tool is not being “trained” so it will not be going out beyond the 25 textbooks we have chosen. The pro for that approach is less inaccurate information in the responses Opterna generates. A challenge we already know we will face is that open textbooks will eventually become outdated so deciding how to know when it’s time to remove a textbook and replace with a more current version. We will need to understand what that work entails and whether we have capacity to manage that.

Anyways, that is it for now, we are having lots of fun learning, engaging with folks, and we are looking forward to lots more conversations in the near future.