there’s a young girl in Afghanistan her name is sulana about 12 years ago Taliban takes over her Town didn’t let her go to school she gets on Khan Academy she self- educates she ended up um lying to her parents going to Pakistan to take the SAT because it’s not offered in Afghanistan I’m like this this young woman’s amazing I tried to figure out a way to forget her visa luckily Nicholas Kristoff New York Times found out about her rod and opad meet Sultana the taliban’s worst fear she had no transcript no grades all she had was like 8 years on KH Academy and an SAT score and Arizona State University admitted her credit to Arizona State University Sultana now is a uh a member of the research faculty at tus in Quantum Computing you could imagine how many more sultanas we can have if we have an AI supporting them we’ve always aspired at Khan Academy to be hey every learner on the planet can essentially get a tutor every teacher could get a teaching assistant open AI reached out to us and they said hey we’re working on our next Generation model which we all know now know is gp4 and when we saw this technology which now folks f FKS
[00:01:00] are familiar with the gp4 technology we said wow this might actually do the trick it’s extraordinary and it really is about personalizing every students education the goal standard in education has always been personalized tutoring I think this passes the Turing test in in in a lot of the tutoring use cases it constructs its own private thoughts on how it would approach the problem that the student does not see we think this is going to be both exciting and scary for folks I would say 95% of what you just described is not a research effort anymore it’s just an engineering effort hey everybody it’s Nick I’m Peter’s producer we just got back from a360 it was a phenomenal event Peter actually sat down with sa Khan and if you’re unfamiliar with s he’s the founder of KH Academy and Khan Academy is literally revolutionizing education in every way imaginable Peter and S sat down to discuss the future of Education not just in America but in the world we all know there’s an education crisis and Peter and sa really dissected how artificial intelligence and machine learning is and
[00:02:00] can be used to solve these challenges within education over the course of the next decade and if you’re interested in understanding how we’re going to solve the American and Global education crisis this is the podcast for you this podcast was taken as an excerpt from a360 which is Peter’s private Community if you’re interested in learning more we’ve included the link in the bio enjoy the episode so thank you for coming that was very energetic yeah yeah they have an abundance of love for you yeah uh it was great to see you a few months ago and uh Saul was uh playing chess against uh champions for a fundraiser it was a fun event it was humbling yeah it it was it was the equivalent of like doubles tennis but on chess so it was like uh Silicon Valley civilian plus a grandmas plus another Silicon Valley civilian and another grand yeah it was it was humbling uh I lost to Magnus Carlson and Yuri Milner’s 8-year-old daughter I know I know it was it was a part of Y mner put on and it
[00:03:01] was it was amazing and you know you were losing in front of uh Sergey and Eric Schmidt and uh the entire Google team and every billionaire in Silicon Valley um humbling yes uh it’s been a busy week for you yes it has been but it’s like it’s like do you feel like you just put you know the Roadster into fifth gear or something yeah and just for context of of what Peter’s alluding to uh and it feels good to talk about cuz I was under NDA for 6 months but about uh 6 months ago Late July early August open AI reached out to us and they said hey we’re working on our next Generation model which we all know now know is gp4 and they said hey we want to talk to KH Academy for two reasons one is we want gp4 to be truly good at knowledge and we’re going to Benchmark it by things like the elsat and AP exams and Y all have tens of thousands of items can we use them to train evaluate like yeah maybe um but the second one is they said
[00:04:00] we think this is going to be both exciting and scary for folks and we want to launch with a handful of organizations that can show a social positive use case and so we’re like okay whatever you know and I I was familiar with gpt2 gpt3 I was like I don’t know how good this is going to be you’ve known Sam for some time for a little bit for a little bit and but then in two weeks later they showed us the first run this was early August uh and and showed us an AP Bio question and said s what’s the answer I was like okay I think the answer is C and and and you know it was able to say the answer see I’m like well ask it why and it was able to explain it and it was and you have to realize this was 3 months before chat GP when chat jpt came up I I emailed uh Sam and Greg and Craig Brockman and I’m like I thought I thought we were going to wait until Marsh to launch this thing and they’re like no this we didn’t launch anything this is just a chat app on top of stuff we’ve already launched but people are excited about it but you could imagine when you’re August we were seeing something that was far better than chat GPT right um yeah it was like oh wow this this could do a lot and uh
[00:05:01] we’ve always aspired at Khan Academy to be hey every learner on the planet can essentially get the a tutor every teacher could get a teaching assistant and when we saw this technology which now folks folks are familiar with the gp4 technology we said wow this might actually do the trick it was even good at math this episode is brought to you by levels one of the most important things that I do to try and maintain my Peak vitality and Longevity is to monitor my blood glucose more important L the foods that I eat and how they Peak the glucose levels in my blood now glucose is the fuel that powers your brain it’s really important High prolonged levels of glucose what’s called hyperglycemia leads to everything from heart disease to alzheimer’s to sexual dysfunction to diabetes and it’s not good the challenge is all of us are different uh all of us respond to different foods and different ways like for me if I eat bananas it spikes my blood glucose if I eat grapes it doesn’t
[00:06:00] if I eat bread by itself I get this prolonged spike in my blood glucose levels but if I dip that bread in olive oil it blunts it and these are things that I’ve learned from wearing a continuous glucose monitor and using the levels app so levels is a company that helps you in analyzing what’s going on in your body it’s continuous monitoring 247 I wear it all the time really helps me to stay on top of the food I eat remain conscious of the food that I eat and to understand which foods affect me based upon my physiology and my genetics you know on this podcast I only recommend products and services that I use that I use not only for myself but my friends and my family that I think are high quality and safe and really impact a person’s life so check it out levels. l/ Peter give you two additional months of membership and it’s something that I think everyone should be doing eventually this stuff is going to be in
[00:07:00] your body on your body part of our future of medicine today it’s a product that I think uh I’m going to be using for the years ahead and hope you’ll consider as well it’s extraordinary and it really is about personalizing every student’s education um in an extraordinary fashion no 100% I you know I’ve always said and this was before the AI stuff that the the goal standard in education has always been personalized tutoring if you were to go back 2,300 years not many people got an education but the ones that did got a pretty good one if you were Alexander the Great Aristotle whose mentor’s Mentor was literally Socrates like he knew how to do a Socratic conversation which is the inspiration for a lot of what you just saw there but then two 300 years ago when we had Mass public education which was a major Innovation for Humanity but we to do it economically we had to borrow the ideas of the Industrial Revolution which is batch students together move them at a set pace and look that got a lot of us to where we are now but we know that a lot of folks
[00:08:01] weren’t able to make it through because you get an 80% 70% too bad the factory line keeps moving what’s exciting now is and and there’s been tons of f studies about personalized tutoring with a highquality tutor uh but it’s just never been economic and KH Academy pre- aai was you could come was well it was well I started as a tutor with my cousins and I saw what was happening with them and then you know early KH Academy was my attempt to scale that and then we have actually we created another nonprofit called schoolhouse.com but you can essentially give the you know those weren’t made up interactions that we just said oh let’s just dream those were actual screenshots of kigo working so I mean you know some of the things for those of you all who haven’t played around with how gp4 is different than chat GPT or GPT 3.5 those are very nuanced conversations that’s the AI I acting like a really
[00:09:01] good Socratic tutor I think this passes the Turing test in in in a lot of the tutoring use cases extraordinary we’re this is amazing and it’s a hint of what is possible right and this is a interaction over typing I guess we can add a voice to text and text to voice version of that but a lot of people are experiential Learners MH uh how far are we from what on hoping we’ll see which is I enter into a metaverse into a virtual world and Aristotle is sitting on a piece of marble over there uh and that AI of that NPC is all knowledge about Aristotle so when I speak to Aristotle it’s as if I’m speaking to Aristotle and I say can you show me around and and and tour me and I learn about ancient Greece through that conversation yeah I mean I would say 95% of what you just described is not a research effort anymore it’s just an
[00:10:01] engineering effort someone just has to put the pieces in place the the you know the the con Aristotle is one of the folks you can talk to already on kigo and you can have a very meaningful conversation um you know the way we see it evolving and every time we think about it for 10 more minutes we’re like oh maybe we’re being too narrow we could also do this we could also do that but I think you know a speech to text text to speech that’s I mean that’s easy that’s easy and it’s going to come literally in months and it’s amazingly good I mean it’s almost once again hard to differentiate it from a real human being then you’re going to have I I think a layer of memory you know right now every interaction that you have with if you’re a student it only knows about the current conversation it doesn’t know about your last conversation doesn’t remember your favorite sports star star Orly but that’s just an engineering thing and we’ve already started making it pass variables to a persistent store and back I mean there’s some interesting things that we’ve did to make the math work people will find that Migo even though you know gp4 is available to a
[00:11:02] lot that the math works a lot better on kigo and I’ll tell you one of the hacks we did and when we realize it’s not even really a hack is that if you just ask it the solution to a problem it’s pretty good it can say here are the steps but then when a student makes a an error let’s say they don’t they don’t distribute a number on both all the terms in a parenthesis it doesn’t always identify sometimes it’ll say correct good job but then it’ll but then it’ll give the right answer and like wait it wasn’t a good job you have you should say hey it looks like you made a mistake and what we realized is if you were a tutor and if I just said here’s what I did start talking and you weren’t allowed to think before you were to talk uh your first word might be good job and then you start like the next words just come out that’s how large language model works but we say well no U and we we worked with the Open Eye folks and this like what if we gave it a chance to have its own private thoughts first and so what we do is essentially it it it constructs its own private thoughts on how it would approach the problem that the student does not see
[00:12:00] and then and and in those private thoughts it I mean it’s funny because we can read this private thoughts even though we told them it we couldn’t um it’ll say well I think the student might have made a mistake here because this is how I did it and then when we comp and then when we make it verbally compare the students results to it the math accuracy goes up by three or four fold amazing and so there’s this idea of like think before you speak and even though at first we’re like it’s a hack but then we’re like no that’s actually how we operate so um yeah I think you give it memory uh I think it’s an engineering effort to put it behind uh some type of uh um you know if you wanted to put it in VR or whatever but I’m also really interested in it facilitating more human- to human interaction so one of the things that I’ve been uh you know I’m hoping in the next year we can have it facilitate you know we have a debate where you can debate with the AI and listen I think debate is one of the highest forms of learning and the most underutilized asset uh that we humans have in school I one of the thoughts my kids love the game AV verse right from
[00:13:00] uh from Roblox and I’m respectful of the game designers who do an amazing job and in the education World everyone starts with 100% score and every time you get something wrong your score goes down and the gaming world every time you start with you start with zero time you do something right your score goes up that gamification hits very fundamental neural uh processes are we going to start to see that level of gamification coming in I saw a little bit of it here yeah and and you know this is something that obviously we we were tempting to do pre aai as well I will say it’s it’s it’s you know education is a one thing because you know we have a the games get to change the objective function to optimize around the game mechanics and the dopamine hits and all that in education like no the kids really need to learn how to factor a polinomial how do we do it uh but you’re absolutely right I think this is only going to make it more um there’s more opportunity for positive gamification amazing so let’s talk about the scale of Con Academy what it’s big in I mean just the number I
[00:14:00] have here that uh before the pandemic you had nine public school districts involved and then afterwards was 500 public school districts is that an accurate assessment how big what’s been the impact of KH Academy so far students teachers and such oh you know the very high level numbers um 150 million registered users something like that and then give it up 150 million registered users no and you know that’s a little bit kind of a vanity metric but anyway but but there’s there’s there’s uh it’s you know depending at the peak of the pandemic we had you know 30 million students coming a month but it it’s about um it averages about um about 10 to 20 million uh the pandemic we did see a three-fold increase we pre- pandemic we had about uh 30 million learning minutes per day on Khan Academy that grew up to about 90 million uh it’s in 50 plus languages um in terms of the impact there’s a lot of ways you can measure the impact you could say okay how many you know it’s on the order of 12 billion um uh 12 billion minutes uh
[00:15:04] 12 billion minutes per year and you know what would be the economic equivalent of that uh but we we’ve looked at some of our school pilots and we pretty consistently see that if students are able to spend even 60 Minutes a week 30 to 60 Minutes a week they’re accelerating 30 to 50% over their peers and you could you know the economic value of that is pretty high if you think about how much we spend on education um and and so what we’ve been trying do the the schools you mentioned we’ve always had a ton of teachers and schools use KH Academy but 5 years ago we started going to a bunch of districts we like look a lot of the teachers are already using us how do we get used systematically or systemically in your district and the districts almost always say oh well yeah thanks you know my niece got through the SAT and this and that because of KH Academy but for us to use it in that way you got to give us support you got to give us training you got to give us integration with our rostering s all this Enterprise level stuff so we started doing it we’re like look if we’re serious about you know our missions free worldclass education for for anyone anywhere we genuinely think
[00:16:00] we can move the the dial for for Nations for the for the world eventually uh we’ve got to do this cuz that’s how we get um integrated so that’s where we went from nine school districts to I mean I arguably almost every school district definitely in the US and much of the world is already using Us in some way shape or form but those nine which are now about 500 uh those are ones that are formally working with us we’re doing all of this type of stuff so what is your let’s give it up for that yes I mean that’s so what is your what’s your moonshot where do you want to go next uh how do you want to scale the use of this AI what’s your where do you want to go yeah well you know the the the goal has always been all of the core academic material from prek through the core College provided in a way that’s personalized Master based try to emulate what a you know what Aristotle did for for uh for young Alexander and then the other is we’re going to have warmongers all over the place hopefully well hopefully not that but
[00:17:00] hopefully hopefully the uh well skilled people whatever they do um and then and then this this is what most people don’t associate with us right now but we’re actively working on is that how does that work on Khan Academy translate into credit and and and eventually jobs and opportunity and and we’re starting to work on that what I think the AI does even pre-ai there were certain I’m guessing a lot of folks When We Were Young could have gone on a KH Academy and just gotten obsessed with it and we have a lot of kids around the world who are already doing there’s a young girl in Afghanistan her name is sulana um about 12 years ago Taliban takes over her Town couldn’t let didn’t let her go to school she gets on KH Academy she self- educates for her the big aha was when she she realized she was learning more than the her brothers in the Taliban control school and I’m like not a high standard but um but she ended up um lying to her parents going to Pakistan to take the SAT because it’s not offered in Afghanistan and that’s when I found out out about her she met some people on the
[00:18:01] internet I’m like this this young woman’s amazing I tried to figure out a way to forget her visa luckily Nicholas Kristoff New York Times found out about her rod and oped meet Sultana the taliban’s worst fear that got her um and and credit to Arizona State University because she had no transcript no grades all she had was like eight years on KH Academy and an SAT score and Arizona State University admitted her and uh she because she wanted to be a physicist and so now who I now know quite well oh it it there’s more there’s more that’s like an infomercial um Sultana now is a uh a member of the research faculty at tus in Quantum Computing so that’s yeah finish the thought though the um there there are sanas in the world but to but you could imagine how many more sultanas we can have if we have an AI supporting them Sultana could just power through yes yeah hey everybody this is
[00:19:01] Peter a quick break from the episode you know I’m a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming I don’t watch the crisis News Network I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the World by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology how entrepreneurs are solving the world’s Grand challenges what the breakthroughs are in longevity how exponential Technologies are Transforming Our World so twice a week I put out a Blog one blog is looking at the future of longevity age reversal biotech increasing your health span the other blog looks at exponential Technologies AI 3D printing synthetic biology AR VR blockchain these Technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do if this is the kind of news you want to learn about and
[00:20:00] shape your neural Nets with go to demand.com back/ blog and learn more now back to the episode so the question is what changing role of the teacher uh should be today and how do we train teachers to embrace rather than fear in your world of Education I that’s teachers Heroes of society under appreciated underpaid talk to me about what you’re trying to do for the teaching community yeah I I I I think the big there will be no you know when people think I mean the whole topic today is abundance when people talk about what we’re going to do with all this abundance I think there’s never going to be like more human connection than what we know what to do with and I think that’s what fundamentally the role of the teacher is going to be optimized and I think that’s why most teachers become teachers to become connected to their to their students so even pre AI we’re like look the role of the teacher does not have to be give the lecture that they shouldn’t be grading things etc etc students can learn at their own pace and they can do
[00:21:01] workshops do more Socratic dialogue they can do labs they can do more experiential learning take the kids on field trips or just tutor them while other kids are able to use the technology to learn at their own pace the AI I think just up levels that even more now it can work in every subject and every language every language and it’s not just what traditional KH Academy could do which is like traditionally machine gradable type of exercises where you can go pretty high level but now you can have students write free form and it can grade for you and all that so I think the teacher of the future is um really going to make their classroom an amazing experience like truly experiential learning uh where um they might use the AI hey everyone we’re going to talk to Zeus this morning let’s you know get your questions together special guest uh or uh Ai and I really see for the teacher the AI becomes like a an army of teaching assistance which every teacher would love to have which is like AI I want you to group these 30 kids pair them up and into into into Pairs and
[00:22:00] have them debate each other on this topic and then give me a summary of of how they did and who was engage and what and and Etc and how I could work with them um I I I I actually think you know we could talk about all the different areas where AI is going to be interesting but I think it’s going to be most fun in education and and and probably in teaching if it’s if it’s used if it’s used well and you could you saw in the kigo one of the first things we’re launching with is tools for teachers tools for teachers I think the age of static you know I’ve always talked about personalized curricula but the age of static curricula is is dead uh teachers are going to be able to you could take something you already have and say oh my my team just won the Super Bowl last night make it about that or there was a SpaceX launch make it about that or my kids are into this you know when you ask kigo if a student says why do I need to learn this it says like well what are you interested in and then the student and they have a conversation and says well you know if you want to be a soccer player I and it’s honest with kids too it’s like all right you might not use this if you’re playing but if you want to go to NCA scholarship or this that you might still need to do
[00:23:01] this so like it it also doesn’t BS the students which kids kids appr appreciate but I think that’s going to be the fun of the teacher which is uh be the conductor of the orchestra amazing amazing you’re going to come back for questions after Jacqueline speaks give it up for Salan [Music] everybody