Khan Academy CEO on how AI will change education

Tell us what exactly AI will do to change the experience for teachers and students in the classroom. So there's always been a dream. Science fiction authors have been writing about it for decades. That AI could be something of a tutor for every student, but maybe just as powerful. It can also be a teaching assistant for every teacher. Most teachers spend someplace between 5 and 20 hours a week doing things like writing lesson plans, grading papers, writing progress reports. AI can do those things, especially the frontier models, the ones that are the most computationally intensive. And So what we're really excited about, we've been working on these tools for over a year now, well before even ChatGPT existed. We were working on this with Open AI, but this partnership with Microsoft allows us to give these tools, which actually can cost a lot in terms of computation, but give it for free to teachers. So now all you as teachers are going to have access to tools that in any other industry you would have to spend a lot of money on. We're 10 or 15 years into the national experiment of having basically laptops in schools, and I think there's a lot of real questions about whether that's helped student progress or hindered it. Can you make the case that you think adding AI on top of that will be resulting in better outcomes for students going forward? Yeah, I think the important thing is to not put technology in front of the use case. The reality over the last 15 years is there are cases where technology and you know we have 50 plus efficacy studies and we're working with school districts where they are able to pretty dramatically accelerate some of their outcomes because of technology. But then there's many other cases where people bought the iPads, they bought the the laptops and they're just sitting there collecting dust and really they haven't seen things move. So it's very important to think about how you're going to use it and then think about the tools. And the tool might be a or it might be artificial intelligence. Another problem that we've had historically is we go to teachers and say, hey, if only you learned this one extra thing, it might improve your outcomes, but then they're already spread thin. What's exciting about AI, especially with these teacher tools we're now able to give, is, yes, it is one more thing for a teacher to learn, but we can immediately show them productivity improvements, time savings. We're working with school districts that are already saying it's saving their teachers 5 to 10 hours a week. So it almost in the the the journey of technology. It's the first time that we're able to tell teachers this is going to this is going to be less things for you to do. There's a little bit of a learning curve, but it's going to save you time, not not add to your workload. Interesting. And here's also what Luis von Ahn, the CEO of Duolingo, told us when he was on last week talking about how he thinks AI will make machine learn, machine learning more comfortable, perhaps more useful for people. Here's what he had to say. The thing that they really allow us to do is teach conversation better. I mean, there's many aspects of learning a language. You have to learn vocabulary, you have to learn how to read, how to listen, et cetera. But conversation is something we were never able to really teach you with a computer, but now that's something that we can teach you. Sal, it sounds to me like you're describing a lot of the AI implementation in the classroom as being the kind of off the classroom experience, things that could make teachers lives easier, like lessons plans. But do you also think AI will be used in the classroom setting itself, perhaps in the way he described? Oh, definitely. And to be clear, we already have on the other on the order of 100,000 students by. But next back to school is going to be approaching a million students and teachers in real classrooms in the United States. Using it during their classroom for the students to get tutoring support teachers. Getting reports from the AI. Having conversations with the AI students, being able to talk to AI simulations of literary characters or historic characters. AI being able to be the writing coach for the student but also be able to support the teacher. So it can undermine cheating. However, the student might want to do that type of cheating. So there's going to be a ton of use cases. There was, you know, during the GPT 4 Omni launched last week with Open AI. There's a demo with me and my son that's gone I think kind of viral where he's talking to the AI and it's it's you can see what he's writing and it's, it really is acting like a tutor for him. So I completely agree with Louis. You're going, you're going to see a lot more of of that type of thing happening.