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The pandemic changed education forever. In just a few days schools around the world had to move online. Teachers began teaching on Zoom, schools started issuing students, laptops and platforms like Google classroom became indispensable. Even with kids back in the classroom now, school is much more digital now than it was before 2020. And our guest today says that an even bigger change is on the way. A revolution that could transform the way kids learn even more than the pandemic did.
Salkon has been on the show before he's the founder of Khan Academy, an online teaching nonprofit that went from pixelated YouTube videos to a massive platform with hundreds of free tutorials in dozens of languages and tens of millions of users every month. Right now, Salk and his team are working on a new learning platform. It's called KonMiga, which uses the generative AI technology behind open AI's chat GPT to help students with their schoolwork.
And the people at Kon Academy think that KonMiga could act as a personal tutor for every student and a teaching assistant for every educator, but we'll get there. First, let's go back to 2020 and the early months of the pandemic when Kon Academy saw millions of new students begin to use its materials.
You know, the spike was interesting because that first week where you had global shutdowns in the US and other places, we talked about it last time, our traffic went from about 30 million learning minutes per day to about 90 million learning minutes per day, pretty much within that week. Wow. What was interesting is you fast forward a couple of months as we know a lot of school systems start to figure out how to do online schooling.
Yeah. And then we saw things actually normalize in maybe in a very abnormal way, mainly because I think people started to have screen time fatigue. And I think during the pandemic, people had a, you know what, if we can just kind of pretend like we're going through the motions of school, let's call it a day. And because of that, people weren't looking to improve necessarily. They were just looking to tread water.
What did you find? I mean, as you know, I mean, there have been studies over the past two years comparing students pre and post pandemic right there standardized test scores. And it's clear that student performance in both reading and math fell significantly math, I think even more than reading. Have you found that Kon Academy helped keep students on track during the pandemic or is that something you even measure?
Oh yeah, this is something we've been keeping a very close eye on. And the thing I always point out first of all is that the numbers were not good pre pandemic. Yeah. What we saw, we did an F.K. study in the first full school year, the 2020-21 school year and then we did another one in 2021-22. And what we saw in 2021 is that the students who put in an average of 15 minutes on Kon Academy a week in a school setting, they actually saw no COVID learning loss.
And that students who put in 30 to 60 minutes, they accelerated almost 40% faster than pre pandemic norms. And it's not a mystery. They're just getting more practice at their level with more feedback. And those that are supporting them, their teachers are getting more information about where the students really are and maybe can adjust their lessons a bit based on that. Tell me about what you, I mean, you must have learned.
And I think now this is probably the third time I'm talking to you since the pandemic started. And in each time I've talked to you, it's so clear how much you were learning in real time and how much you've learned from what happened to the overwhelming numbers of people coming to Kon Academy. Tell me how it sort of fundamentally changed, how you guys operate.
We always did a bunch of things that we always wanted to do, but this just accelerated things. We always wanted better ways for students to address gaps that they might have. The fashionable term now in education circles is unfinished learning. We all thought that the pandemic was only going to affect the school system maybe through that first summer. And by the time you go back to school, even then there would be some damage done back to school 2020. I mean, now we know how delusional that was.
But we started creating these back get ready for grade level courses, which essentially cover all the prerequisites that a student needs in order to be ready for their grade level work. And we saw that that was very popular. So that was accelerated. We created another sister nonprofit called schoolhouse.world. We saw how much people were leaning on Kon Academy, but we also saw that there was a gap of getting real human support.
And so the utopian idea was, well, what if they could get real human support for free based on volunteers out there on the internet. And then as we got to the tail end of the pandemic, and as we all know, people had very mixed feelings about COVID learning. Most people did not think it was, you know, spending time on video conference for several hours a day was a good thing.
We felt the need to show that there's a way to do this well. And so another sister organization, we have a lab school that I help start that's literally in the same building as Kon Academy. But we said, could we create an online version of this that can do online schooling, but do it well. Don't do it. So it's just students listening to lectures on zoom for hours a day.
Yeah. When people are on video conference together, make it interactive, make it so critic, and then use personalized learning and other tools for students to get more asynchronous support, but always feel connected to a community. So we started working on a lot of things like that as well. All right. Let's go now back to not that long ago, back to the summer of 2022.
You got an email from Sam Altman at OpenAI. And he said, he said, he said, you know, it said, hey, we've got this thing we're working on. And we'd like you to check it out. So you did tell me what happened to me the story. It's interesting, almost on a daily basis, we get emails from folks saying, hey, you have an interesting technology. We'd love to partner with Kon Academy.
And most of the time, you know, we look at it, we're like, oh, you know, it looks intriguing, but we just don't have the bandwidth. But I obviously knew of Sam and Greg and had deep respect for what many of the things that they've done in their lives. And I have been watching what's been happening with generative AI for the last, let's call it three to five years.
I didn't really think it had a place at Kon Academy because GPT two and three were good at writing, convincing text, but it really had no grounding and factual knowledge. So I'm like, I'm happy to meet with you all. I'm just curious what y'all are up to. Yeah. And they said, hey, we're going through our first training run of GPT four, which obviously is now out, but back then that was very confidential.
And we want to launch it with a small number of partners that we think can show social positive use case because we think it's going to change things. I was skeptical at first because I was familiar with GPT three. About two weeks later, I got another email from both of them saying, hey, what we're done. Can we show you a demo? I'm not sure. So they put up an AP biology question on the chat and they answered it correctly. I'm like, oh, this is pretty interesting.
And then I said, ask it to explain its reasoning and explained it. It gave the right answer. And then I said explain why the other choices aren't correct. It gave that. And then I asked, can you create 10 more questions just like that one? And it did. And as far as I could inspect, they were pretty good. That's when I started getting the goose bumps. I'm like, okay, this is different. Yeah.
And then they gave us access that weekend. And I spent hours with it. And it was doing very well, although definitely had some issues. We realized pretty quickly that you couldn't just have it generate a ton of questions and just put students in front of it. It would make mistakes, especially in those early days. It was pretty still pretty bad in math. Yeah. But at the same time, we also, we started to make it role play.
Role play as a tutor, role play as a character, role play, you know, do something in the style of someone else. And that's when I started to really say, wow, this really could be that holy grail that we've all been thinking about. Reading science fiction about for decades of an AI that can actually emulate a human tutor.
Before we really dive into what you did next, from what I gather, Sal, I think your initial reaction was the initial reaction that many people have which was like kind of terrified. I read a lot of science fiction and it was it was a moment in which I felt that all my science fiction reading had prepared me for. But you know, there were moments that even that first weekend where I was pushing a few of the limits where I asked it things like,
are there things that you think that you're not sharing with me? And it said yes. And you get a little weirded out by that. And I'm like, well, why aren't you sharing it with me? And it says, well, it might offend you or it might scare you. And it feels like you're talking to an alien. It feels like you're talking to a super intelligence. And I had to keep reminding myself I do understand how it works.
I have a master's in computer science. I understand how large language models work. And I started to say, okay, I can get how, if it's just modeling the natural thing to say of why you're not sharing a thought, it is why don't you or I share a thought it's because it might offend someone or it might scare them. So that's kind of what it was doing. But it was an other worldly feeling. And it was, you know, we had signed a non disclosure agreement.
So it was a very hard secret to keep. You know, every now and then I would go to dinner parties and I was like, I wish I could tell you, but the world is about to change. We're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, how Sal and his team struggled with the shortcomings and the dangers of G.P.T. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raaz and you're listening to how I built this lab.
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Welcome back to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Ross and I'm speaking with Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy. In 2022, Sal got early access to the large language model GPT-4 before ChatGPT was even released and he was amazed by its potential. So you sort of get over your initial kind of, oh my god, and you start to see obviously a huge potential here to kind of transform what you do, which is offering free education to people around the world.
So what did you do next? I mean, the ChatGPT wasn't going to be the exact right thing, right fit for what you do, but you could build on that foundation, right? That's right. The first thing we did is we sat in an org-wide NDA and I said, hey, how many folks in the organization can we get access to? And eventually we got about 40 or 50 folks in our organization to get access to GPT-4.
And even that, this was the first time that Khan Academy had to do a little bit of cloak and dagger type stuff. Folks at Apple are used to keeping secrets and things like that, but we're not used to keeping secrets. And we had to, this was obviously very sensitive stuff. And we immediately, we had a hackathon, which was well timed because then these 40 or 50 folks were able to at least for a couple of weeks say, okay, let's just be generative here, no pun intended.
Like, what is possible with this? And by the end of that two weeks, we had some really cool demos. And then we started to have the internal debate of like, okay, how aggressive do we get on this? What about bias? What about the math errors? What about hallucinations? What about just the PR implications? People trust us. And if they see us leaning way forward on something that's not perfect, that something that some people could be wary of, what does that do to our brand?
What does that do to the trust that folks have? On the other side, folks were arguing, look, this is a transformational technology. This is one of these things where it's either going to allow us to magnify our impact by an order of magnitude or it might make us irrelevant. And so we made a decision to say, you know, we have to keep moving forward, but we have to do it in a risk of wearway and a risk mitigating way.
All right, I think it's fair to say that you are a true believer in this and your team basically developed an AI that you call Khan Migo. And so this is now, I think in beta, but still integrated into Khan Academy. So tell me how how this works. What is it? So first was the guardrails like what in what context would we even feel comfortable doing this? And what's interesting is we were starting to do all this in earnest in September and October, then end of November chat GPT comes out.
And I remember the day that it came out, I slacked Greg Brockman at OpenAI and I said, hey, Greg, we're under NDA. And I thought we weren't launching anything until March of 2023. What's this chat GPT thing? And Greg says it's nothing new. It's based on GPT 3.5, which it had been out for many months already. No one really took note when they released GPT 3.5. And OpenAI just decided to publish a bunch of apps that use GPT 3.5.
One of them happened to be chat GPT and then being able to interface with the model and a chat interface, I think made everyone see what the power of it was. And at first, I was a little bummed. I was like, oh, this is going to steal the thunder. I've been telling all my friends at dinner parties, something's big coming in 2023. Just you see. But then I was, I think it was actually a blessing because as we know chat GPT goes out there.
It amazes people, but it also scares people. And then immediately it creates huge issues for education, like kids are cheating using this. Right. You can you can type in an equation and it'll give you the answer. And you can write your essays. It can write your essays. Right. Yeah. And that I think gave us more license at Khan Academy to say, look, the Genie has out of the bottle with chat GPT.
We need to double down on bringing a better version of out there that can mitigate all the risks and maximize the benefits. So we started saying, well, you know, first, whatever we make shouldn't be for cheating. It should be for actually helping students learn. So there's many things we're doing to make it so, Cratic, not just give you the answer to, it has to be accurate.
It's not okay. If it doesn't know what seven plus four is, yeah, it shouldn't it shouldn't hallucinate. And then we also were afraid of students misusing it or using it in some ways that might harm them or other folks. And just reassuring teachers and parents that they can keep track of what their students are doing with this very powerful tool.
And so that's why we made it so it logs all of the conversations. We have a second artificial intelligence that monitors conversations with the main artificial intelligence. If any of those conversations go into a gray zone, then it actively notifies the parents and the teachers that, hey, you should take a look at this conversation. And then we're continuing to add a whole bunch of other things, things where teachers can use it for less than planning, we're adding memory to it.
How teachers can essentially use it as a teaching assistant, get reports on what students are up to. I could go on. So essentially the idea is, hey, if we can get every single kid a personal tutor, then it will have an impact on their academic performance. And this has actually been studied and measured.
I know you gave a TED Talk back in March of 2023 and you cited a study that came out in the 80s, basically, that showed that when kids have one on one tutoring, their scores and grades just skyrocket. Like you can turn an average student into an outstanding student, for example.
That's 100% right. If you want to become a great pianist, you're not sitting in a class of 30 with your piano and persons lecturing you. If you're a great athlete, you have a coach who's optimizing you, not just giving a lecture to 30 students and saying, hey, you might want to improve your swim stroke in this way.
And then who knows if you actually do. So one on one tutoring has always been the goal standard when we did mass public education, which was a very utopian idea two or three hundred years ago. But we made compromises. We started batching students together, applying set standards lectures to them. Some kids get it. Some kids don't, even if you have a gap in your knowledge too bad, move on to the next concept.
And as you mentioned, Benjamin Bloom 1984, he articulated it well. He called it the two sigma problem, two sigma sigma, the symbol for standard deviation in statistics. And a way to think about it, two sigma improvement, two standard deviation improvement is dramatic. It's something that's going from the 50th percentile to I think the 95th or 96th percentile. But he reason why he called it a problem was, well, how are you going to give everyone everyone? A tutor. One to one tutor.
And he also in 1984 theorized, well, maybe you could emulate some aspects of that with technology. But I've been citing that study for many years in terms of what kind of academies trying to build. Essentially old Khan Academy or base Khan Academy trying to get to that first standard deviation. And but now with the AI, we can go to that second standard deviation.
So essentially the interface of if you know, if you're listening to familiar with the interface of Khan Academy, let's say you get a math problem. And you can essentially click a little sort of eyeball robot icon in the corner and say, hey, I don't understand this problem. Can you help me? It will not give you the answer. You can't say, hey, can you solve this for me? It's essentially you ask it to help you and then what happens?
Yeah. And if you say, give me the answer. Say, hey, I'm your tutor. I'm here to help you. You need to learn here. As I think a good tutor would do. And if say, okay, we'll give me a hint. It'll say, well, let's take a close work. What is the problem actually asking for? And if you say, well, I think they're asking for this. If I got it right, they have said, well, yeah, that's good intuition. Okay.
So what's where would you take that? Or let's say I say, I think the next step is x squared minus five. It's like, okay, take a double look at that. Are you sure it's minus five? Pay attention to your to your signs. And one of the things we've done to make it more robust on the math side is when a student presents their math to the AI saying, hey, I think this is the next step.
The AI behind the scenes comes up with what it thinks are reasonable responses from the student. It doesn't share those with the student. Then it compares its reasonable responses to what the student said. And if it gets something different, it'll tell the student, hey, I'm getting something different. Can you explain your reasoning, which is very pedagogically strong.
And so then if the student explains the reason, and it's a large language model. So it's very good at understanding when a student explains a reasoning. And sometimes, you know, the AI will say, okay, now that I see what you did, you might have missed that aspect of it. Or it might say, you know what? You got it right. I realized I made the mistake, which we actually heard feedback from students that they actually really like that.
And once again, I think this is very human like. This is what a human tutor would do. When I tutor, I got started tutoring my cousins back in 2004. And this would happen all the time. My cousins do something. And I'd say, hey, that's not what I got. Can you explain how you got that? And nine times out of 10, I was right. But one time out of 10, they were right. And I'm like, oh, my bad, you're right. And so I think people really appreciate that.
And this is now available. I mean, it's totally a feature of the interface. What we did is when we released it coincident with the GPT-4 launch in mid-March of 2023. And we did a limited release pilot where people had to go on a waiting list. And then they had to give a donation. And the reason why they had to give a donation is, this stuff isn't cheap. The computation costs.
Every interaction is going to like 5000 Nvidia GPUs that are crunching this. And so anyway, we have to pay open AI money, which then pays Microsoft Azure money, which then uses that money to go by expensive Nvidia chips. So that's something that we've had to grapple with because our mission statement is free world class education for anywhere.
But we have about 10,000 folks using it right now, some in mainstream school settings. And it's much more than just the tutoring interaction that we just talked about, which in and of itself is powerful. But we have activities that are standalone AI activities where students can talk to historical characters or literary characters that can get feedback on their colleges.
They won't write the essay for them, but it can give them feedback. It can coach them to help them think of their college essay. It can act as a guidance counselor in certain ways. It can help teachers create lesson plans, assessments. And what we're seeing the feedback has been very, very positive. So this summer, we're hoping to make it a more broad release so that we're expecting many tens of thousands of more folks are going to sign up.
So there's a part of me that's also asking like, am I not asking all the right questions? Am I not thinking of all the downstream consequences? I mean, obviously we're talking about Conmigo, but as you know, many school districts in the United States have essentially blocked chat GPT from school issued laptops. They banned them from being used, right? I think a bunch of school districts all across the country.
And so what is it that they they don't fully understand that you, you know, or what is it that they're not seeing that if you could make the case to them that this is a mistake, what would you say? We've shown Conmigo to many of these same districts and their general reaction has been, in fact, not general, all of their reactions has been.
This is what we need. This is, I guess a fair analogy might be what Khan Academy is to YouTube is what Conmigo is to chat GPT or standard gendered of AI, whereas we also know a lot of school districts ban YouTube. Even though YouTube has a lot of really good learning content on it. There's a lot of great stuff. A lot of great stuff, but it also has a lot of stuff.
A lot of crap. A lot of crap. A lot of stuff that can students at minimum is going to distract them and worst case is going to put them into some kind of weird rabbit hole and mess with their head. So they banned it, but something like Khan Academy where you can create curated safe environment, it's monitorable, etc. They feel much more comfortable. And so when we showed them it's not cheating, it's actually acting like a tutor.
It provides oversight by adults. It can flag when students are getting into suspicious areas with the AI. These are just the guardrails that we wanted. But you can see it. I guess you'd have to. There's nothing preventing a kid from using chat GPT to cheat. Nothing preventing. And so my best guess of where, let's say, term papers or homework is going to have to evolve to is especially in something like writing, you're going to have to do some in class writing.
And that's a place where I think Kan Migo can be really useful. We're working on activities right now where a teacher can say, hey, I want all the students in the class right now to write a five paragraph essay about the following. And then on the student interface, Kan Migo say, hey, Mr. and Mrs. Smith just wants your thoughts on this thing. Let's work through this together. And then the students can work on it right there. And Kan Migo won't do it for them but can help a system.
Well, are you really answering the question that they're asking or do you have more data to back that up and and simultaneously Kan Migo can tell the teacher like, okay, guys making a lot of progress but Sal seems a little bit stuck. You might want to go walk up to him. You know, Mary has already finished the assignment and she's now going back to working on her math or something like that. Super useful for the teacher.
And even for take home assignments, the teacher can say, I want you to do it on Kan Migo and the process is as important as the outcome as we know it often is in writing. Yeah. And then if there's some student who goes to chat GPT and just says chat GPT write this essay for me and just copies and paste it into Kan Migo, Kan Migo can tell the teacher like, there was no process here. That's he just showed up.
I see. I see. So Kan Migo could be the interface too for submitting assignments. It could be the interface. It could be the coach and it can it really acts as a teaching assistant. Imagine every student having a teaching assistant and teaching assistant is working with every student and can report back to the teacher like, yeah, I worked with that kid. I know it's their thoughts and I helped them a little bit but it's mostly them.
But one kid just showed up with an essay and really couldn't defend his argument. Let's take a second look at that. We're going to take a quick break but when we come back more from Sal on the future of Kan Migo and whether it could ever become a for profit product. Stay with us. I'm Guy Ross and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. If you're a small business owner, it isn't just your business. It's your life.
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They built a teaching AI called KhanMigo that could become a pretty lucrative commercial product but Khan Academy is a non-profit. This is a business show. I want to ask you to put your business hat on for a moment because we don't do many non-profits on how I built this. There are tons of ed tech companies out there that make money working with school districts.
Dream box and other programs where you can school or paying a fee for kids to use these products and Khan Academy products are free to use. I want to ask about KhanMigo. If this in fact could be a tutor for every kid and an interface with the teacher giving the teacher feedback on the student's progress, it strikes me that this is something that you could license to schools that you could actually turn into a product.
Obviously you're a non-profit and you're mission driven but is that something that you would consider doing? It's a simple interest yes and we're doing that a little bit of that already. I went out to our team. We're not for profit. We have free in our mission but still it costs on the order of 60-70 million a year to run Khan Academy. Just our server cost are $67 million a year and then obviously all of the engineers etc.
And historically we've been primarily funded with philanthropy. But with that said about five years ago we started going to school districts. Obviously we've had a lot of what we call grassroots usage in classrooms, hundreds of thousands of teachers. We said if we really want to reach all kids we have to work formally with the districts and we would go to the districts we would show them our efficacy studies.
But they said look for us to use this systemically inside of our district you have to give us support training integration with our rostering systems, district level dashboards.
We said okay to do all of this bespoke work someone has to put that bill and we said look we're not going to charge you for all of this stuff that's funded with philanthropy but at least cover some of the incremental costs here and so to a lot of districts and we now have about a million students in districts where they're paying on the order of about $10 per student per year to get all of these other things.
We have built this enterprise muscle and it is trying to build a little bit of a flywheel of sustainability. And to your point on Kanmigo Kanmigo has a very real marginal cost to it. It costs on the order of let's call it $10 to $15 per month. And so what all of these school districts that have come to us we are talking to them of like hey we need to at least cover our computation costs.
And then we do expect that the underlying computation costs are going to come down and so we are having these conversations on our team right now like okay right now it costs let's call it $10 per user per month just for the computation we have to charge that for Kanmigo not for base Khan Academy but let's say that cost goes down to a dollar per user per month. Do we just lower it to a dollar or do we lower it to two dollars and then we use that that incremental dollar to fund our R&D.
I mean I look at this the potential here right and what you developed and the amount of money you put into it already and but I wonder whether there's a world where you take a product like Kanmigo which if it says revolutionary as it looks like it could be I mean it can really change the face of education is there a world where that spun out into a for profit business.
There's always been this debate not at Khan Academy but about Khan Academy which it always confused folks what why we're not for profit you know we scale we're tech heavy I live in the middle of Silicon Valley most of my friends are entrepreneurs or or VCs of some kind and there's a there's a hard business
business school case about this should Khan Academy be for profit or nonprofit and to me the arguments for for profit have historically been access to talent and access to capital the reasons to be nonprofit are you really can truly make your mission the bottom line. And I think there's a trust aspect of it as well that we you know that our bottom line really is this it's not trying to improve our EPS or have an IPO.
Yeah what we have found is we are getting access not to just good talent but to the best talent people are here for the mission and they're here to work with other people like that and so the only reason that I could ever see trying to do some type of spin out or a wholly own sub that's is for some reason if we're not getting the risk capital from the foundations or we can't create a flywheel of sustainability then maybe certain pieces of it but I'm very afraid to do that I mean definitely wouldn't do that with the mothership because
I do see how you know a lot of good come I'm a diehard capitalist my old job was at a hedge fund a lot of good comes out of market incentives but I think education and health care in particular market incentives don't always align with our values.
So one of the incredible triumphs of Khan Academy has been the millions of kids who have benefited from it but in the United States a huge concern as you know and I know you've looked at this has been the gap between wealthier kids kids who are not as wealthy or or impoverished a gap in outcomes between black students and other students.
How can something like this change that in your view I mean I don't want to be too much of a techno optimist here but I do want to be optimistic I mean and I'm sure you are well how do you think they can change that equation. Yeah some of the stats with shock folks a majority of minority majority schools so that's a mouthful but a majority of minority majority schools don't offer courses like algebra two physics etc.
Not to even mention things like AP courses or I B courses and so if you're a young African American student you don't come from a lot of money you go to one of these schools you might be the next Albert Einstein you might be the next Murray Carey but there's no way that you're going to be able to tap in your potential if your school does not offer algebra two or many times in that algebra two class because kids are coming from.
In many cases tough circumstances have gaps in their education before that the teacher kind of tries to teach the middle or even to the bottom quartile saying that those are the most of your cases and once again that kid who could have been Marie Carey is not going to be able to prepare prepare themselves and then when they go to college they're going to feel inadequate compared to kids who had much better preparation so that was that's always the view of Khan Academy which is we want to raise the floor and then we want to provide as many supports as we can.
But we view Khan Mego is kind of in between traditional Khan Academy and schoolhouse dot world but that's just another layer of support. Now in order to access all of this you still need Internet access you still need a device and that's why we work so closely with school districts you know the technological side in the US has gotten a lot better on over the last 10 years but that's why we're working with school districts to try to get more kids at that level of engagement.
So just a broader question about AI as these products as other AI platforms become better and better you can imagine a future not too far in the distance where things like writing won't actually be that useful like you know we think of this as a skill we think of great writers as people who've honed their craft who have talent but I mean if these large you know language models can absorb.
Everything ever written in human history well you can also imagine that that skill and talent won't be particularly useful in a short period of time do you agree with that. That was my initial thoughts last year slash concern the more that I thought about it i'm writing a book about all of this right now so I've been interviewing folks and you know I interviewed Kevin Rus who famously on New York Times writer who had that famous conversation with Bing's Sydney and it was trying to convince.
And it was trying to convince him that he didn't love his wife and he loved her and all of these all of these things and I asked him that same question and I thought he brought up a very good point he's literally a writer and he's like look to be a great writer journalist there's the writing part of it and then there's the journalism piece of it and sure AI could help you with the first draft it can help give you feedback on your writing but it's going to take a lot to get to great writing it might not get quite there and that whole piece of journalism like talking to the right people.
Being creative about how you get your information connecting the dots AI is not going to do anytime soon and I think every job has that aspect of it so I actually think the imperative isn't that oh kids aren't going to learn to write I'm worried about the kids that only learn to write OK well to some degree they might be empowered by something like AI because now their writing is not going to hold them back in other domains but anyone in the let's call it a great question.
In the let's call it the writing lane they're going to have to become better they're going to have to move into the editorial role to be able to know how to manage to create great writing how do you know that it's that the AI is done a good job and that you can't coach it to be even better.
You won't make someone an editor of a newspaper unless they could be one of the best writers themselves and I think the people who really leverage AI well are going to be the people who can who can get into that how do you manage the AI how do you put the pieces together and how how do you do the things that it I won't be able to do.
So anyone who has a child who knows a child that's been in school during the pandemic knows how much education has evolved right I mean many kids are now issued laptops and not just in private schools but also in public schools and so much of the work is done through Google classroom right I'm in parents can interface with it and it's just a completely different world.
Forget about what they're learning it's how they're learning but I suspect that what you're talking about with things like Convigo and other AI platforms what we're about to see is something that is like going from I don't know like the stone age to the industrial revolution is that a fair analogy.
I think you might be right you know there's a world now where you can you can talk to historical characters and we're probably three to five years away where you could share a room with Benjamin Franklin or Julius Caesar or Cleopatra and immerse yourself it'll be literally the holodeck from Star Trek I didn't think that was going to happen in my lifetime I now think that's going to happen in the next five years I think for the most part this is positive because the students who are really motivated you know there's a class of students when they were they were in their math class.
And I was in this class of students I imagine how is describing the universe and I was like oh this is so beautiful this is so elegant wow this is so connected and that motivated me to go get through some of the grunge and the really hairy equations and all that but for a lot of kids they didn't see the beauty in it and so they weren't motivated but if you're motivated you can power through anything same thing on history when you just read the history book like this is dull but if you're like wow this actually happened to real people and I actually know about it and could you imagine what it would have been like to be a real person.
I would like to be in that moment when Caesar crossed the Rubicon you know what was going through his mind then all of a sudden history comes alive and you become incredibly motivated I think AI will really help on block folks as a tutor but also really help motivate I mean imagine having a tutor that not only can do what Aristotle did but it actually can be Aristotle sometimes it can role play with you it can take on tone that really captivates you this all would have been science fiction a year ago and it's literally happening now.
It puts to rest the question if you could have dinner with five living or historic people who would they be because you can actually do it at some point you can actually do it you know having the real dinner will always be better because we obviously the AIs are they're interpolating or extrapolating from from from so that there's there's definitely some imperfections and but yeah you're right in terms of the richness of experience it's even better than the dinner because probably in five years you could put some more of the things that you can do it.
So in five years you could put some goggles on and have the dinner actually in Rome in the first century BCE as opposed to on your dinner table. It's amazing it's absolutely amazing. Salcon thank you so much. Thanks for having me guy. That's Salcon founder and CEO of Khan Academy.
Hey thanks so much for listening to how I built this lab please make sure to follow the show wherever you listen on any podcast app usually is just a follow button right at the top so you don't miss any new episodes and it is entirely free. If you want to contact our team our email address is hivt at id.wondery.com. This episode was produced by Alex Chung with editing by John Isabella our audio engineer was Neil Rouse our music was composed by Remtean Arableui.
Our production team at how I built this includes Chris Messini Carla Estevez Casey Herman JC Howard Liz Metzger Sam Paulson Kerry Thompson Elaine Coats. Neva Grant is our supervising editor that Donovan is our executive producer I'm Guy Ross and you've been listening to how I built this. Hey prime members you can listen to how I built this early and add free on Amazon music download the Amazon music app today or you can listen early and add free with Wondery plus an Apple podcasts.
If you want to show your support for our show be sure to get your how I built this merch and gear at Wondery Shop dot com before you go tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery dot com slash survey. Hey it's Guy here and while we take a little break I wanted to let you know about an episode of how I built this we released a couple of weeks ago.
It's about how Salcon the creator of Khan Academy is using AI to make education more accessible we've all heard about the rise of generative AI technology and the popularity of things like chat GPT. Well at Khan Academy Salcon is working on ways to build this technology into a new tool to help students learn more effectively by providing a personal learning experience.
Of course like all technology this has its risks but Sal believes that generative AI could reshape the classroom for good and help us close the massive learning gap left by the pandemic by supporting students and teachers alike you can find this episode by following how I built this and scrolling back a little bit to the episode titled when AI is your personal tutor with Salcon of Khan Academy or by searching Khan Academy that's K H A and Academy wherever you listen to podcasts. .