AI in education potential | dstill.ai shared chat

1

The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups

(someone): We're like, well, if you use the AI to create rubrics, lesson plans, and then the AI essentially administers the assignment with the student and doesn't do it for them, but does it alongside them, then the AI can report back not just on the outcome of the assignment, but actually the process. Like, hey, I worked with a student, we brainstormed thesis statements, and then they were having a little bit of trouble backing it up, but then we eventually got there and it took us about four hours. And so you can be pretty confident in that situation that the kid didn't just copy and paste from chat GPT. So I think in the next year or two, it's going to be a really useful tool that's going to increase teacher productivity and support a lot of students. I think when you start going about three years out, we're already working on the notion of memory for the tutor. So the tutor, if you tell it, if you ask the AI, why should I learn this? And it says, well, what do you care about? And you say, well, I love women's soccer. The World Cup's going on, so that's front of mind. So I love women's soccer. It'll say, okay, it'll make a connection to that. But the next time, it should remember that you like women's soccer so that it doesn't have to ask you again. You like more casual language or more formal language or your reading level, whatever it might be. We're actually already prototyping that it remembers these things about you.

2

The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups

(someone): It's on the order schoolhouse is on the order of about 10,000 folks per month, but it's doing some pretty powerful things. Already a large fraction of the kids who take any given SAT are already using schoolhouse to get live human tutoring. Khan Academy has been the official practice for kind of the asynchronous tutoring aspect of the SAT or the individual practice, but now you can join cohorts and become part of that. And I think the power of Schoolhouse is, as powerful as it is to get help academically, I think that social connection, especially social connection across borders, et cetera, et cetera, hugely powerful. Same thing with Khan Lab School, Khan World School. We think it's all about the human-to-human connection. Khan World School, which is an online high school, but its anchor is a Socratic seminar where kids are getting together almost every day and they're debating things. Now, it's not, five hours on Zoom, we think that's wrong. That's mind-numbing. That was what was wrong with pandemic schooling. That's literally gonna ruin kids' eyes and ruin them. But an hour, two hours, but you also don't want completely asynchronous. You want some interaction. And at Khan Lab School, even though people think Khan Academy is downstairs from that, of course, yes, we do use Khan Academy, but if anyone visits, you're going to see far more collaboration and interaction amongst these students and far more talking amongst the students than you will see pretty much at any other school.

3

The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups

(someone): It was being truly Socratic. It had some big issues with it around the math and the hallucinations. We've been working pretty feverishly to mitigate those pretty significantly. It's pretty darn good now. And so it's already, and we've already started putting it out in real schools out there, We're already seeing it's increasing engagement. More kids are not only engaged, but they're not getting as blocked. We haven't done rigorous studies on it yet. It's very early, but anecdotal. Teachers are like, that's answering questions that the students either were afraid to ask or that I as a teacher would not have been able to get to. Teachers are already really enjoying the teaching assistant functionality. It's saving them a ton of time writing lesson plans, rubrics. They kind of feel less alone as a teacher. And now we're looking at ways that it can even help address some of the problems that Generative AI introduced, where we actually just made an announcement today with Instructure, the folks who make Canvas, the learning management system that goes out to its most of higher ed and a large chunk of K-12. We're like, well, if you use the AI to create rubrics, lesson plans, and then the AI essentially administers the assignment with the student and doesn't do it for them, but does it alongside them, then the AI can report back not just on the outcome of the assignment, but actually the process.

4

The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups

(someone): This is pre-generative AI. As of June, 70 percent of those 6,000 kids use Khan Academy at a level that's associated with pretty profound efficacy gains. We're still waiting on those test scores, but I think we're going to show for the first time in US history or recent history, a pretty large acceleration of a large urban school district in math, and that's pre-generative AI. So I'm feeling actually very optimistic about that. And then, yes, especially for those students whose families might not get an opportunity to, you know, put them in AI summer camps like we do with our kids or, you know, take trips or, you know, I think AI is going to bring the world to them in really powerful ways. They're going to be able to practice their debating skills. They're going to be able to connect things to other ideas. They're going to be able to create pretty profound things. They're going to be able to also go on that magic school bus, and it's not going to be something that requires a ton of resources. So I'm overall hopeful. You know, there's always forces of friction and cynicism and et cetera, et cetera. But because teachers have a lot to gain here, it's going to save them a lot of time and energy. I think you're going to see a faster uptake of this than you see of other solutions.

Elad Gil: There's the old saying that the future is here, it's just not equally distributed. And with things where you have sort of strong structure in place, like the education system,

5

The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups

(someone): So, you know, five years in the future, you might, when you just visit a classroom, you might not superficially see a lot of differences. But I think when you start double clicking on it and you realize that, wow, teachers have a lot more time now for student facing things, a lot fewer students are stuck. There's a lot more space for differentiation now. I think that that will be transformative. And I think you're going to see it in student engagement, motivation and in things like test scores.

Sarah Guo: So in this novel, The Diamond Age, like one of the things that happens is because these tutors are so powerful and they have memory, right? Some of the things you're working on and they're engaging because they have narratives and the dragons that's like teaching you calculus and physics with like your environment. There's a lot of engagement with that and much less interest in some cases in sort of like group schooling settings. Like, can you talk a little bit about how you think about that? Because you also started Schoolhouse. Schoolhouse.World with our mutual friend, Shashir, founder of Coda. And, you know, this is like small groups online and believing that there's still the importance of this. Can you talk about sort of how those pieces fit together and what the motivation was there?

(someone): Yeah, absolutely. And just a little bit more detail on Schoolhouse. We started during the pandemic. That was a moment where Khan Academy's usage went up 3x.

6

The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups

(someone): And then the more – I used to tutor peers in high school as well. And the more I did that, I just realized it was the same thing I saw with my cousins. And the benefit I had, and a lot of us that did well in topics like math and science, We didn't allow those gaps to fill. Whenever we felt a little bit uneasy about how fluent we were with something, we gave ourselves a little bit of extra practice. And we weren't just memorizing things. We always wanted to understand why, you know, why does the long division algorithm work? You know, let me think about that. Does it, okay, that makes intuitive sense. Why the place values work, et cetera, et cetera. So I think when you do that, then later and later, math frankly gets easier and easier, not harder and harder. And if you do the opposite, where you don't understand the conceptual ideas behind the algorithms and the equations, and then you also have fluency gaps. I mean, the number of classrooms I now visit where seventh graders, they understand exponents, but they literally, you know, three times seven, they're grabbing their calculator. I'm not exaggerating. I literally saw a seventh grader in the Bronx for three times seven grabbing their calculator, and I literally slapped their hand. I don't know if I can get in trouble for that anymore, but like, I literally slapped their hand. I was like, no, you figure out three times seven,

7

The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups

Elad Gil: You've said that we're on the cusp of the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen. How important do you think AI is relative to the broader set of access that you have through things through YouTube and online coursework and all the rest of it? Is this a complete game changer? Is it an add-on? What's the relative degree of importance of this shift right now?

(someone): I think in the very short term, it is going to be a meaningful add-on. I think if you go three to five years in the future, it will be a game changer. And the reason I say that is, going back to Benjamin Bloom, but I think this even predates Benjamin, the gold standard was always to have a personal tutor. If you were a prince, if you were Alexander the Great 2,300 years ago, you had Aristotle as your personal tutor. And Aristotle would speed up, slow down, motivate you when you're feeling down, do all of these things with you, and that was always the gold standard. two, three hundred years ago, utopian idea of mass public education. But in order to do that economically, we had to make compromises, one of which is you don't get a personal tutor. You don't get a one-on-one teacher. We're going to bat you into groups of 30. We're going to move you at a set time or pace. We're going to apply some lectures and standards and homework, et cetera.

8

The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups

(someone): You like more casual language or more formal language or your reading level, whatever it might be. We're actually already prototyping that it remembers these things about you. We're making it very transparent to the user so that they can say, no, I'm not into women's soccer anymore, I'm into gymnastics or whatever it might be. But we think that type of memory and the type of memory where it can refer to previous conversations, will allow it to graduate from being just a on-demand help for certain tasks to being something that can have a long journey with you, have a narrative. I know it sounds a little bit wild, but I could imagine in five or 10 years, you're going to get your best college recommendation from Conmigo. Because Kanemigo's like, I've been working with this kid for hours for the last 12 years, and let me tell you about this. And by the way, they love gymnastics. And you have a great gymnastics program at whatever. So I think that's, and you're going to have, you know, we're already playing with the text-to-speech. I know people have heard text-to-speech before. What's about to come will blow your mind. It's hard to differentiate from a real human being, which is scary on other dimensions of life, but it's good for tutors. And then I think in three to five years, yeah, you're going to be able to videoconference with your tutor, which then makes it like a real thing that you can have a long journey with.

Sarah Guo: Have you ever read the Neil Stephenson book, The Diamond Age?

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The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups

(someone): And that's some kid, he or she did it on a budget of $1,000, not $100 million. So how do we foster that? How do we give more time and space for that? But I think if you have kids, it's kind of very traditional advice. They should just get really good at reading, writing, math. I've never been a subscriber of like, oh, there's Google. You can search stuff. You don't have to learn anything anymore. Nope. the more that you have rapid access to knowledge in your head, the more that you are fluent with your mathematics, that you have information and concepts at the tip of your fingers, these tools will accelerate you more than anyone else. And the kid that has to get the calculator for three times seven or has to go to Google to figure out when World War II was, the world is going to pass them by.

Elad Gil: Amazing. I think that's a really great note in terms of an optimistic view of, you know, it's the same basic skills that will be important 20 years from now. And kids really just need to learn the basics. And you've provided such a great platform to achieve that by. So thank you for all the work you've been doing.

(someone): Oh, thanks for having me.

10

The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups

(someone): It's on the order schoolhouse is on the order of about 10,000 folks per month, but it's doing some pretty powerful things. Already a large fraction of the kids who take any given SAT are already using schoolhouse to get live human tutoring. Khan Academy has been the official practice for kind of the asynchronous tutoring aspect of the SAT or the individual practice, but now you can join cohorts and become part of that. And I think the power of Schoolhouse is, as powerful as it is to get help academically, I think that social connection, especially social connection across borders, et cetera, et cetera, hugely powerful. Same thing with Khan Lab School, Khan World School. We think it's all about the human-to-human connection. Khan World School, which is an online high school, but its anchor is a Socratic seminar where kids are getting together almost every day and they're debating things. Now, it's not, five hours on Zoom, we think that's wrong. That's mind-numbing. That was what was wrong with pandemic schooling. That's literally gonna ruin kids' eyes and ruin them. But an hour, two hours, but you also don't want completely asynchronous. You want some interaction. And at Khan Lab School, even though people think Khan Academy is downstairs from that, of course, yes, we do use Khan Academy, but if anyone visits, you're going to see far more collaboration and interaction amongst these students and far more talking amongst the students than you will see pretty much at any other school.

11

The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups

(someone): I think you're gonna have, and you're gonna have One of the things we do at Khan Lab School is just try to create more time and space for students' passions. And so you're gonna have a world where a middle school student is going to be able to create studio-quality techno music or a Lord of the Rings-quality epic science fiction movie or fantasy movie. So I actually think it's gonna be very exciting. And I think if you go into, let's call it more mainstream classrooms, I think we're going to go a lot further towards solving just the core fluency issue, and not just in math, but in writing as well, because that's the other thing. The main problem with writing, it's very resource-intensive. It's hard to get feedback. It's very expensive for the teacher to give feedback for 40 kids. It's mind-numbing, frankly. Kids have to wait a week to get that feedback. then they may or may not get a chance to iterate on it. And so most people aren't getting much practice. And that's why you're seeing a big problem with writing on top of the problem with math. So I feel confident. I mean, already this year in Newark, New Jersey, which is not a special case school district, The North Ward had just started using Khan Academy pretty intensively in November. This is pre-generative AI. As of June, 70 percent of those 6,000 kids use Khan Academy at a level that's associated with pretty profound efficacy gains.

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The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups

(someone): because there's no way you're going to be able to do that in a real classroom. Like, we don't have the resources to give everyone a tutor. And then he even, back in 1984, tries to see, well, what could you potentially do if you approximate a tutor using technology? And he kind of throws out the conjecture that you could get one standard deviation of improvement. And to a large degree, everything that we've been doing at Khan Academy was how can we approximate, start to scale pieces of what a tutor could do? So a micro explanation, that's what a video does, and it's on demand whenever you want it. Exercises with immediate feedback. that also starts to approximate. And then give teachers and give tutors and give parents information so that they can also act more like tutors, as opposed to just giving a lecture to everybody. They can look at the data where kids are and then do more focus interventions, have groups of three or four, the kids that need help with the negative numbers while the other kids keep working. Now work with the five kids who need help with decimals while the others. So it was all about, okay, in a class of 30, can we help approximate tutoring? What generative AI, and I didn't think this was gonna happen in my lifetime, So when we started playing with GPT-4 about a year ago, it blew my mind that you could actually get it not only to pretend to be a tutor, it actually had good, quote, tutor moves. It was being truly Socratic. It had some big issues with it around the math and the hallucinations.

13

The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups

(someone): We actually even wanna do it so it can eventually result in credentials. And so what we are doing, already on Khan Academy, so we have Khan Academy Kids, which is used by nearly two million kids primarily in America. It's actually kind of turning into like the Sesame Street of this generation. Really great efficacy studies. Kids are spending an average of 90 minutes a month on it, which is pretty high for an average. That's a large chunk of all of the kids in America between the ages of three and seven. We're using that. That's all subjects. That's math, reading, writing, character development, social, emotional, whatever you want to call it. Then as you get into older grade levels, let's call it big con, you know, that's where we just keep going from just the basics of math all the way through calculus and statistics and multivariable and on and on. Science, we have science, a pretty strong progression from, I would say, late elementary school through early college as well, going all the way to biology, chemistry, physics. And this is not just videos. Most of our resources are actually behind the exercise platform, where you can get as much practice as you need, deep item banks, immediate feedback. Teachers can keep track of what's going on and assign through the platform. We've added humanities, so American history, civics and government world history. We have art history. So we're filling out that grid of all of the core academic material, financial literacy, computer science. So all of that economics is happening.

14

The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups

(someone): And then the more – I used to tutor peers in high school as well. And the more I did that, I just realized it was the same thing I saw with my cousins. And the benefit I had, and a lot of us that did well in topics like math and science, We didn't allow those gaps to fill. Whenever we felt a little bit uneasy about how fluent we were with something, we gave ourselves a little bit of extra practice. And we weren't just memorizing things. We always wanted to understand why, you know, why does the long division algorithm work? You know, let me think about that. Does it, okay, that makes intuitive sense. Why the place values work, et cetera, et cetera. So I think when you do that, then later and later, math frankly gets easier and easier, not harder and harder. And if you do the opposite, where you don't understand the conceptual ideas behind the algorithms and the equations, and then you also have fluency gaps. I mean, the number of classrooms I now visit where seventh graders, they understand exponents, but they literally, you know, three times seven, they're grabbing their calculator. I'm not exaggerating. I literally saw a seventh grader in the Bronx for three times seven grabbing their calculator, and I literally slapped their hand. I don't know if I can get in trouble for that anymore, but like, I literally slapped their hand. I was like, no, you figure out three times seven,

15

The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups

(someone): I think in the next three to five years, almost everything that Neil Stevenson imagined, I think he wrote the book in 1994, I think is actually going to be a reality, which I didn't think was going to happen in my lifetime.

Elad Gil: How does that impact the structure of the actual school? Say that you think ahead five or 10 years, And you're in the context of an advanced K-12, maybe it's Conlabs, maybe it's something else. What happens or what changes or how do you interact with the tutor versus the classroom environment? And I know it's hard to predict the future, but I'm sure you've thought a lot about this stuff.

(someone): I think big picture at a place like Khan Lab School, where, you know, even before generative AI, we've been, and at Khan World School, actually, we just documented, we were almost embarrassed to say the results. Steve Levitt of Freakonomics fame, he actually looked at it himself because he was like, is this real? And he's like, oh, it's real. I mean, these kids are learning about three to four times faster, not 3% faster or 30% faster, three to four times faster. Wow. And at Khan Lab School, we've consistently seen at least 1.5 to 2 grade levels in a year. And this is before generative AI. So I think in some of these settings, we haven't had the same issues that the traditional school system kids are getting about 0.7 grade levels per year.

16

The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups

(someone): another online school with Arizona State called Khan World School. We just started last year with that, but that's now sixth through 12th grade, and there's some very exciting things happening there. And then most, well, I'm glazing over a lot. We are working on credentials, so we have a pilot with Howard University where kids in Title I high schools are getting mastery on Khan Academy, and that's resulting in college algebra credit, which is solves a major need. Happy to talk more about that. And then most recently, we're doing a lot with generative AI. We started partnering with OpenAI about a year ago, so well before it was really a big thing and we had to keep it quiet for a while. But Conmigo now In our minds, it's a tutor for every student. It's a teaching assistant for every teacher. It can support students while they do traditional work on Khan Academy, answering questions, making it relevant, motivating them, even advising them. We have functionality where it can be a guidance counselor, it can be an academic coach, but they can also debate the AI and fine-tune their argumentative skills. They can talk to simulations of historical or fictional characters. And on teachers, they can use it to create lesson plans, grade, create rubrics, refresh their own knowledge.

Elad Gil: You've said that we're on the cusp of the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen. How important do you think AI is relative to the broader set of access that you have through things through YouTube and online coursework and all the rest of it?

17

The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups

(someone): not only will it kind of shut down that thread of the conversation, but it will actively notify parents and teachers. And then we are trying our best to do digital literacy as well to students to recognize, like, look, here's what you could use generative AI for. Here's where you should be skeptical of generative AI, et cetera. And we are feeling increasingly confident that that And also, none of the interactions, and this is credit to OpenAI, none of the interactions are being used to train the AI. And arguably, there could be benefit in the future for that to happen, but because this is all new frontier and it's all very sensitive, we and OpenAI just said, yeah, let's just keep this as kosher as possible. Let's just make this as safe as possible.

Sarah Guo: If you think about, you know, going beyond Khan Academy, you've also spent 15 years generally thinking about education. Do you have a prediction for what happens to, like, university with all of these technologies?

(someone): Yeah, I don't think generative AI dramatically changes what was already going to happen to universities. I think it's not news to anyone that the return on investment for a university, especially if you have to take on debt, is mixed, depending on who you are and what you do with it. Obviously, we have a student debt crisis, and even if we were able to forgive some, it's not going to solve it for the next generation of students. And so universities are bloated with cost. they're not particularly good at, you know, either informing or preparing students for, you know, in certain cases they are, in other cases they're not, of preparing students for what they need.

18

The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups

Elad Gil: You've said that we're on the cusp of the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen. How important do you think AI is relative to the broader set of access that you have through things through YouTube and online coursework and all the rest of it? Is this a complete game changer? Is it an add-on? What's the relative degree of importance of this shift right now?

(someone): I think in the very short term, it is going to be a meaningful add-on. I think if you go three to five years in the future, it will be a game changer. And the reason I say that is, going back to Benjamin Bloom, but I think this even predates Benjamin, the gold standard was always to have a personal tutor. If you were a prince, if you were Alexander the Great 2,300 years ago, you had Aristotle as your personal tutor. And Aristotle would speed up, slow down, motivate you when you're feeling down, do all of these things with you, and that was always the gold standard. two, three hundred years ago, utopian idea of mass public education. But in order to do that economically, we had to make compromises, one of which is you don't get a personal tutor. You don't get a one-on-one teacher. We're going to bat you into groups of 30. We're going to move you at a set time or pace. We're going to apply some lectures and standards and homework, et cetera.

19

The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups

(someone): We're like, well, if you use the AI to create rubrics, lesson plans, and then the AI essentially administers the assignment with the student and doesn't do it for them, but does it alongside them, then the AI can report back not just on the outcome of the assignment, but actually the process. Like, hey, I worked with a student, we brainstormed thesis statements, and then they were having a little bit of trouble backing it up, but then we eventually got there and it took us about four hours. And so you can be pretty confident in that situation that the kid didn't just copy and paste from chat GPT. So I think in the next year or two, it's going to be a really useful tool that's going to increase teacher productivity and support a lot of students. I think when you start going about three years out, we're already working on the notion of memory for the tutor. So the tutor, if you tell it, if you ask the AI, why should I learn this? And it says, well, what do you care about? And you say, well, I love women's soccer. The World Cup's going on, so that's front of mind. So I love women's soccer. It'll say, okay, it'll make a connection to that. But the next time, it should remember that you like women's soccer so that it doesn't have to ask you again. You like more casual language or more formal language or your reading level, whatever it might be. We're actually already prototyping that it remembers these things about you.

20

The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups

(someone): So, you know, five years in the future, you might, when you just visit a classroom, you might not superficially see a lot of differences. But I think when you start double clicking on it and you realize that, wow, teachers have a lot more time now for student facing things, a lot fewer students are stuck. There's a lot more space for differentiation now. I think that that will be transformative. And I think you're going to see it in student engagement, motivation and in things like test scores.

Sarah Guo: So in this novel, The Diamond Age, like one of the things that happens is because these tutors are so powerful and they have memory, right? Some of the things you're working on and they're engaging because they have narratives and the dragons that's like teaching you calculus and physics with like your environment. There's a lot of engagement with that and much less interest in some cases in sort of like group schooling settings. Like, can you talk a little bit about how you think about that? Because you also started Schoolhouse. Schoolhouse.World with our mutual friend, Shashir, founder of Coda. And, you know, this is like small groups online and believing that there's still the importance of this. Can you talk about sort of how those pieces fit together and what the motivation was there?

(someone): Yeah, absolutely. And just a little bit more detail on Schoolhouse. We started during the pandemic. That was a moment where Khan Academy's usage went up 3x.

21

The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups

(someone): This is pre-generative AI. As of June, 70 percent of those 6,000 kids use Khan Academy at a level that's associated with pretty profound efficacy gains. We're still waiting on those test scores, but I think we're going to show for the first time in US history or recent history, a pretty large acceleration of a large urban school district in math, and that's pre-generative AI. So I'm feeling actually very optimistic about that. And then, yes, especially for those students whose families might not get an opportunity to, you know, put them in AI summer camps like we do with our kids or, you know, take trips or, you know, I think AI is going to bring the world to them in really powerful ways. They're going to be able to practice their debating skills. They're going to be able to connect things to other ideas. They're going to be able to create pretty profound things. They're going to be able to also go on that magic school bus, and it's not going to be something that requires a ton of resources. So I'm overall hopeful. You know, there's always forces of friction and cynicism and et cetera, et cetera. But because teachers have a lot to gain here, it's going to save them a lot of time and energy. I think you're going to see a faster uptake of this than you see of other solutions.

Elad Gil: There's the old saying that the future is here, it's just not equally distributed. And with things where you have sort of strong structure in place, like the education system,

22

The AI Tutor For Every Child and the Next Frontier of Education, From Khan Academy’s Creator Sal Khan

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups

(someone): So I think in some of these settings, we haven't had the same issues that the traditional school system kids are getting about 0.7 grade levels per year. Now, I think if you go to more fluent areas, areas where parents are college educated and they can afford more supports for their kids, you're probably seeing at least a grade level or maybe closer to what we're seeing at Khan Lab School or like 1.5, two grade levels a year. But I think in environments where basic fluency has been less of an issue. You're now going to free up more time for teachers. So they're gonna spend less time doing things like grading and lesson plans. Most teachers spend about half their time doing that kind of stuff. So that gives them more energy for themselves, but also more energy to just be with the students, which I think is really powerful. Students are gonna feel a lot more supported. And I think if you fast forward, three to five years, kids are gonna feel very supported in that basic fluency and that core academic, but I think it's gonna be like the magic school bus. You're gonna be able to put on your Apple visors or whatever, and you're gonna be able to go on with the teacher and jump into the circulatory system or time machine yourself to ancient Greece and have a debate with Socrates. I think you're gonna have, and you're gonna have One of the things we do at Khan Lab School is just try to create more time and space for students' passions.