Sal Khan says AI won't destroy education - but there's a catch

last year three students at Emory University launched an AI tool that was supposed to make studying just a little bit easier they called it eightball and here's how it worked say you were preparing for an exam you could upload all of your lecture slides from your classes even those messy handwritten notes and eightball would spit out a bunch of flashcards you could use to quiz yourself and the flash card tool was just the beginning the eightball team was planning to add a test generator complete with answer keys and a Homework Helper in March the students pitched their idea to Emory's annual entrepreneurship competition they took home the top prize of $10,000 things were suddenly looking up for the eightball team which is why they really didn't see this coming just a few months after the competition Emory suspended two of the students one of them for a full year the University insisted eightball could be used for cheating the students were shocked this was going to go on their permanent records first an award then a punishment for the exact same product so which is it is AI an Innovative learning Aid or a cool new way to never do your homework again I'm baval Sido and this is the tedi show where we figure out how to live and thrive in a a world where AI is changing everything want a website with unmatched power speed and control try blost Cloud the new web hosting plan from Blu host built for WordPress creators by WordPress experts with 100% up time incredible load times and 24/7 WordPress priority support your sites will be lightning fast with global reach and with Blu host Cloud your sites can handle surges and traffic no matter how big plus you automatically get daily backups and worldclass security get started now at bluehost.com I'm Dina Temple rasten the host of click here a podcast from recorded future news twice a week we tell true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world and lately we've been talking about the good we're using good AI to fight bad AI the bad my paintings had been scraped to use as training data and the Ugly of AI every week on click here from recorded future news listen wherever you get your podcast last year New York City Schools made headlines when they banned chat GPT a spokesperson told the Washington Post that the tool gives quick and easy answers it doesn't teach critical thinking or problem solving in other words it doesn't actually help you learn and they had good reason to be concerned I mean if chat GPT can pass the freaking bar exam it can definitely write your eighth grade report on recycling cheating's never been easier since then they've reverse the ban and it seems like many Educators expect the use of AI will only grow in schools in the coming year even if they're not that enthusiastic about it because it is hard to see exactly where all of this is going we're scared of AI but we're also embracing AI we think kids will just give up on learning but we also think AI will be the great equalizer on this topic Sal Con has a very particular perspective he's the founder of KH academy one of the world's most successful online learning platforms and he's pretty confident that no AI will not destroy education if it's done right last year Con Academy launched a new feature and an AI chatbot called conmigo it's powered by GPT but unlike chat GPT conmigo isn't just answering students questions it's supposed to actually help them learn like their own personalized tutor available 24/7 since then KH Academy has started pilot programs in actual schools using conmigo as both a learning Aid and a teaching assistant so how does that work exactly and what does having an AI teacher mean for students and teachers alike S Khan and I spoke a few weeks ago about the present and future of AI in education but let's start at the beginning in 2004 when s was working as an analyst at a hedge fund he' recently gotten married and some family from New Orleans came to visit and it just came out a conversation that my 12-year-old cousin Nadia uh needed help uh she didn't know it but she was put into a slower math track I offered to tutor her remotely when she went back to New Orleans and she agreed then word spreads in my family free tutoring is going on before I know it I'm tutoring 10 15 cousins family friends uh and it was it was working for them naadia went from being in a remedial track to being one of the strongest students in her class I started seeing that with my other cousins that in 2005 just as a way for me to scale I started writing exercise software for them so that they can practice and and get fluent in those primarily math skills and that I as their tutor could keep track of it that was the first Academy had nothing to do with videos YouTube anything but it was in 2006 that a friend after seeing the software that I was writing from my family said Hey what how are you scaling up your actual lessons and I told him I'm not and he said well why don't you record lessons on YouTube for your family and I said that's a horrible idea um YouTube is for cats playing piano dogs on skateboard but uh I gave it a shot and after a few months my cousins famously said they like me better on YouTube than in person before I know it 2008 2009 50 to 100,000 folks per month are using these resources I was making for my family and I set it up as a nonprofit KH Academy with the mission of free worldclass education for anyone anywhere and then in 2009 that's when I quit my day job to work on this full-time and we were able to turn to a real organization and now it's much more than just me I think that trajectory is super interesting right because you started off doing in-person hyper-personalized tutoring essentially and then you had to make it way less personalized as you delivered these videos at scale but now with AI maybe you can make it personalized again so tell us about your AI assistant con Migo where did this idea come from Sam Alman and Greg Brockman from open AI po me an email uh summer of 2022 they said they were working on their next Generation model which would eventually be gp4 and um they wanted to show it I was skeptical that it would have any relevance but know I knew Sam and Greg were legitimate folks and we got on a video conference and they showed me a AP biology question asked me the answer I said oh it's C it's osmosis and then the AI was able to answer it correctly I'm like okay that's kind of interesting maybe it got lucky ask it to explain it explained it very well then I asked it to write another question explain the wrong answers and was able to do the all of that fairly well so then they gave us access to it over the weekend and I couldn't sleep it was pretty clear that you could use it it for cheating and other pitfalls but it was also clear that it could really you know from a chat interface almost seem IND discernible from when I used to chat with naadia remotely and that's when I said okay this changes everything our team we started having all the debates that Society is having the debates where okay this is cool but it has errors makes math mistakes sometimes safety data privacy how do you prevent cheating etc etc what I told the the team is like those aren't reasons to not work on it those are reasons for us to turn them into features we have to be aware of those risks but we have to move forward and so what would eventually become a kigo our AI not only tutor on KH Academy but also as a teaching assistant for teachers helping them write lesson plans grading papers write progress reports uh Etc and then we launched it as part of the GPT 4 launch in March of 2023 to make the difference very clear for listeners I'd love it if you talk through how you're approaching writing instruction with AI like most people are obviously just assuming oh you type in a prompt the essay unrolls in front of VI but you do it differently with your new essay feedback tool can you talk through that it was the last day of November November 30th the chat GPT comes out and we were under at the time we were under a non-disclosure agreement with open AI working on what would become kigo and immediately as we all remember that time the world kind of exploded and I slacked Greg Brockman at open Ai and I said what's going on here you have us all you know Cloak and Dagger Seer about things and you just you just laun something he said no we just put a chat interface on top of an older model that had been out for several months months and the whole world all of a sudden noticed for some reason but immediately when people saw chat GPT especially students saw it they said well we could use this to write some of our essays uh it could construct a solid B+ essay not necessarily they have to be a little bit more creative to get get it to an A and you started seeing school systems uh ban it I thought that people were going to throw out the baby with the bath water but by the time we launched the school system essentially said hey this technology is powerful kids are going to have to know how to use it if only someone were to give it in a way that uh was made for Education had the right guard rails not only supported students better but maybe even prevented cheating and I'll I'll use writing to your point about how how we do that we're about to launch a version which we're we're calling writing coach which doesn't just give you feedback but it it walks you through the entire process so it'll look at the prompt that the teacher's given you it'll riff with you to come up with a thesis statement but it'll put it on you it acts as an ethical writing coach then you can go into outlining and there's a whole interface where you can move things around and it gives you feedback on it and then you can write the essay get feedback and then in the fall we're going to make that so that the teacher can assign that including with the prompt and the rubric which they could work on the AI with students work on it with the writing coach and then they submit it through the writing coach back to the teacher and what that will allow is in the past well before AI all teachers got were the final the final output of the essay even when there wasn't cheating uh they wouldn't really know much about the process or or how long it took students or where they had difficulties Now using conmigo and this writing coach when the student submits the AI reports to the teacher hey we spent about four hours on this essay s had a little bit of trouble coming up with a thesis statement we eventually got there um this this work is consistent with s's other work especially the work that he's done in inside of the classroom and by the way a lot of your students are having trouble with thesis statements maybe we should create a mini lesson on on that it really is akin to imagine if every student had essentially one-on-one support from a teaching assistant tutor and that you as a you as a teacher can have a conversation with every teaching assistant uh about every student uh so the teaching assistant first of all can give a preliminary grade the professor the teacher is still in charge and then the teacher can ask the teaching assistant why do you think that where are the student strengths and weaknesses U if Society had infinite resources that's what we would have done from the beginning but we don't so it sounds like there there are these superpowers right or or abilities that you can scale well beyond the you know sort of constraints of us just being humans um are there any other capabilities that surprised you as you've been developing this project or like holy crap like we can actually do this yeah almost every hour I play around or I think about things I realized I was being too narrow the hour before because this this technology is I start I start Brave new words with u me and my daughter uh at the kitchen table um and she was 11 years old when when uh the story happened it was over Christmas break and I prompted GPT 4 to write a story with her so they're writing a story about a social media influencer who gets stuck on a desert island and starts having an anxiety attack because she can't share the pictures because there's no internet connection and uh my daughter says hey Dad can I talk to uh Samantha who is the character in the story uh and tell her that it's okay that like she doesn't have to share everything on social media and I was like we could ask and so my daughter says I'd like to talk to Samantha and then the AI took on the Persona of the character in the story that my daughter was writing with the AI and said oh hey Thea I I'm so feel so bad I can't share how beautiful this is and my daughter's like it's okay Samantha you don't have to share this with the world you should just enjoy it and that was just one of those moments for me where I'm like this is so surreal that my daughter is collaborating with an AI and talking to a simulation of a character that she has constructed with an AI and so that transcends tutoring that transcends what I was doing with my cousins and that's when we started to say wow you could you could have ai act as simulations what if literally content could come alive if you could talk to Eeyore the donkey what if you could talk to the Golden Gate Bridge what if you could talk to the Eiffel Tower what would it tell you um these things are are now possible let's talk about the downsides of AI just a little bit what kind of challenges have you had in making AI tutoring work especially with generative AI you know this is where I'm thinking about hallucination you know sort of the desire to give the answer instead of tutoring people using various I don't know prompt injection hacks to work around it like is there going to be a list of hacks for conmigo that people can use to bypass their assignments online what kind of challenges have you had in making AI tutoring work yeah the most obvious ones are the ones you just mentioned uh cheating so that's a continuous arms race where we are looking at what students are doing and putting in more guard rails and trying to make that judgment call is like when when are we giving too much help etc etc so I I would say we we we've been able to protect against most of that um and a lot of our debates is how much help should we give but the the common principles is just just make that transparent to the teacher because at the end of the day the teacher can have judgment about what's maybe appropriate or maybe we even let the teacher have access to that dial of how much support to give some of the other areas obviously the hallucinations you know when we first had access as impressive as gp4 was it it it made a lot of errors in fact we we co-discovered with open AI some even errors in the training data that improved the math and we even did some fine-tune training of that first version of GPT 4 to get it better at math tutoring but it still wasn't perfect and it still isn't perfect we are working tirelessly to improve it the underlying models have gotten better on both fronts a lot of the things that it would hallucinate on a year ago like give me the mass of the Sun to nine decimal places or give me a a URL for the following it wasn't doing that anymore but but then on top of that it is important to do some AI Literacy for teachers and students and families kigo can make mistakes sometimes you know there's a link this is why we we were make I'm making videos educating people about he the pitfalls how do you recognize it and I always point out this is not a new phenomenon uh this in the internet you can do a search on Google you don't know those those links that are I mean you know the the first five are sponsored links that are going to the highest bidder you don't know how accurate that information is this is always an important dig literacy skill the good news with AI that I always point out is um in the internet a lot of the misinformation and errors are intentional like there are Bad actors who are trying to do it on the AI side they are not intentional um and they're they're being reduced I would say at a far faster rate than what you are seeing on on the internet people just assume that the answer is just going to be generative AI but it seems like even with what you're doing using generative AI systems classical systems just like computer science in general there is a way to have these systems largely be accurate but it feels like it's still important to kind of you know have people develop that Discerning intellect to kind of not take the output necessarily as gospel and sort of question the output there um how do you all go about doing that you said digital literacy is it as simple as as telling kids hey just like don't assume everything you get is correct how does that work exactly yeah well I think this skill is a age-old skill we want students to have we could use AI to build that critical thinking muscle that discern discernment of information that we always had I'll give an example we have an activity tutor me in Humanities and there was a member of the press who is really skeptical about K Migo's ability to handle politically sensitive issues and so the that person that Reporter Goes On kigo and says guns are killing people we should repeal the Second Amendment and kigo did I think something different than what you would get in most classrooms what kigo said is look before we get into the present day why do you think the founders put the Second Amendment there in the first place and then the report is like oh okay you're making me answer it so they wrote oh well you know it was right after the Revolutionary War so that was a way to protect against a tyrannical government and K M was like well you have the the historical context pretty good but before we go to the present can you explain why it persisted so it was pushing the the student or the reporter in this case on their critical thinking skills I I'm I'm 100% sure if someone put that same statement you know the second amendment should be repealed onto a Google search they would have gotten polarized points of view as opposed to building your critical thinking there's a lot of talk about especially sort of AI assistance and technology in general mediating our interactions in the digital world and and now increasingly the physical world too so do you ever worry that tech companies will kind of end up setting the agenda and and even me you know to your to in your industry determining what kids end up learning yes and no as I've said you know these are not new phenomena that you know what what what gets taught in school has always been a you know politicians have cared about it it's been that way for a very long time we've had multi-billion dollar marketing industry that well before we had social media you know figuring out what's we're most likely to click out on um you had large ad firms uh making us want things that we probably didn't need I am sure people will think about using generative AI to do some of those things as well and the The Most Dangerous Ones will be subtle at the same time and I write about this in the book when we are watching TV when we're online our minds are already doing battle even though we don't know it our unprepared minds are doing battle with very sophisticated marketing very sophisticated social media AIS what if we had AIS on our side so I'll give an example as your child browses the internet or as they use their computer as they use their phone what if there's an AI That's able to observe all of that and first of all it knows that you're 15 years old so some of that content isn't appropriate and so you can say well I'm not going to let you read that article or you know we've already spent 20 minutes on Tik Tok I've talked to your parents that's about all I can allow you and so it can act as a bit of a guardian angel or even for an adult I wouldn't mind I would put it on my phone as long as I was felt that the data was being secure if it said s you know you you already spent an hour on this phone maybe you want to put it up um or maybe it even says I can hear your kids are asking you a question in the background why don't you go pay attention to them as opposed to checking your email for the 10th time today um so I can imagine a world where an AI can act as a coach to and it's with you on your phone on your device so that it can it can create some healthier habits you're almost bringing up this example of you know good AI versus bad AI or good actors wielding AI with different objective functions to Bad actors wielding Ai and so I think that objective function point is so freaking key right like if the goal isn't to get you to spend you know 10 more minutes in your session length on some platform but is instead to advance your learning objectives that just takes the same technology the same superpower if you will but just channels it in a far more positive direction exactly we are looking at ways to make kigo be that Guardian Angel function where you know we're working on it as a browser plugin even thinking about ways where it could surface at a you know application Level or even at the operating system level it can provide those types of of of protections and it's not just for kids like we could all benefit from something a little bit of a coach that keeps us accountable uh for things that are good for us so you've talked about AI as a tutor that's encouraging you to learn not just feeding you answers but even for human teachers right it can be really really hard to find that balance of giving students the right kind of questions and information to help them along but not giving them so much that they're not thinking for themselves so for example in your Ted Talk last year you had kigo play the part of Jay Gatsby of course from The Great Gatsby and you ask him about the meaning uh of the green light in the book and it says the green light represents my dreams and desires uh it's given an answer to what normally a teacher would get a student to really rack their brains and puzzle through so it seems like a part of learning is being comfortable not having the answers come so easily not knowing everything right away you know even forgetting things and having to really reach into the deep recesses of your mind and pull that stuff out do you worry that AI will take that away I I don't think it's going to make the problem worse and it can make the problem a lot better because I'll point out again the situation well before AI even when I was a kid if you wanted to know why Jay Gatsby is looking at the green light you could go look at your cliff notes and that's going to be the first thing they say and well before generative AI you do a Google search it'll take you about 4 seconds to you know this tens of thousands of people have analyzed The Great Gatsby in every you know left right and Center the the power of that demo that I showed and this was a real one that a student at KH World School is that she didn't that conversation didn't stop there she told me she talked to him for a while and then about life and what it means to like have desires that you can't get etc etc so it it explains with Daisy Buchanan you know she seemed unattainable Etc but then Jay Gatsby the AI simulation of J Gatsby goes and asks svi the student are there things like that in your life things that you feel are just a little bit Out Of Reach but that you keep longing for and that because of that it so it drove the conversation in in a in a in a thoughtful way so it was able to I I think make it much much deeper for the student and then the other major Safeguard here is that and this is something we put on kigo not only does it not cheat but if you're under 18 all of the conversations are accessible by your teachers and parents and we can report back to teachers and parents so in the past when in the 80s when I was you know reading the a Great Gatsby if I went to The Cliff Notes U there's no way my teacher knows about that so I think that oversight that transparency to the adults is actually going to undermine this uh cheating or shortcutting way more than anything than than we could do before uh you know the saying snitches get stitches are are students going to like that they might not but you know it's hard to give the AI stitches fair I I have to ask a followup there right which is what kind of cognitive abilities should kids you know kind of Outsource to Ai and what are the ones we really want them to learn for themselves like so I'm thinking about the invention of the calculator and mental math right or Google Maps and spatial awareness as this Tech keeps getting better and better there are more and more things that these systems can do that were relegated purely to humans how do you think about drawing that line between leveraging AI capabilities and preserving that development of human skills I'm a little bit of a traditional even before AI you know when the calculator comes out I'm like no you still have to know your fluency in mathematics um and you'll be be able to use your tools better same thing is true when the internet comes out and web search comes out people said oh kids don't have to know facts anymore they can look it up within 5 seconds I was like there's a huge difference between someone who has a Content base a fact base and how well they can use these tools versus people who can't and the same thing is going to happen with artificial intelligence these Frontier models are able they're performing at the 80th percentile on a lot of these standardized tests like the elsad and the SAT Etc and so people have have a decision to make do you want to be able to hang with the AI because someone's still going to need to be able to put the pieces together and leverage these tools to amplify their intent or do you want to let the AI pass you bu and maybe that might be okay to shortcut a few assignments but I would argue those were probably not well-designed assignments if if they make the shortcutting easy um but that means you're also going to be very vulnerable to um dislocation like you're not going you're going to have trouble getting a knowledge economy job I think interestingly I think AI will open up more doors for very maybe less knowledge economy but more human center jobs U you know nursing I mean which is also a knowledge job as well but it could be caretaking maybe uh or um you know counseling which is also a knowledge job but also has a huge human element to it but I think in general people who are able to leverage and know how to use these tools are going to be the ones in the best situation that conversation I mentioned with that reporter talking to kigo about the Second Amendment and kigo pushing their thinking you're not seeing that a lot unfortunately in a lot of classrooms you see that in some really wellth thought out classrooms that are seminar style where the the professor is constantly pushing students thinking in a Socratic way but that's not mainstream and hopefully with AI we can make that a lot more mainstream kigo another one of their activities you can get into a debate with kigo where you could take one side of the issue and it takes the other and then it gives you feedback we're getting a lot of feedback from high school and college students that they don't feel safe having these debates anymore uh or and even if they did they sometimes are embarrassed they don't know how strong their arguments are but now there's a there's a place where they can practice this critical thinking we're going to take a short break and when we come back we'll face The Perennial question if AI gets really good at teaching where does that leave human teachers support for the show comes from LinkedIn LinkedIn ads allow you to build the right relationships Drive results and reach your customers in a respectful environment they are not getting barraged this is very targeted you will have direct access to and build relationships with a billion members 180 million senior level Executives everyone's on a LinkedIn it seems like and 10 million c-level Executives you'll be able to drive results with targeting and measurement tools built specifically for B to in technology LinkedIn generated two to five times higher return on ad spend than other social media platforms you'll work with a partner who respects the B2B world you operate in 79% of B2B content makers said LinkedIn produces the best results for paid media start converting your B2B audience into highquality leads today will even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign go to linkedin.com audio to claim your credit that's linkedin.com audo terms and conditions apply LinkedIn the place to be to be so s i I have to ask the question for the teachers that might be listening to this right what would you say to teachers that are like yo this is the end of teachers this is the end of human teachers I I couldn't disagree more I'll start saying and I've said this well before AI came on the scene if I had to pick between an amazing teacher and amazing technology I'd pick an amazing teacher every time now hopefully we don't have to make that trade-off and many times there isn't an amazing teacher and so hopefully amazing technology can help raise the floor but ideally you have you have access to both when you focus too much on the technology it it can kind of uh misdirect the conversation if I told every teacher in the world every one of your students is now going to have access to someone at night who will sit next to them and help them in an ethical way support them not do the problem for them I think every teacher would say hallelujah yes and by the way if I could talk to that tutor and if I could and if they knew what we were covering in class and I could get reports back about that even better that would be incredible does would a teacher feel threatened by that I don't think so because the teacher still in charge they're the ones that are still the conductor of the orchestra who are figuring out okay what are we doing how are we doing it what's the lesson plans etc etc but if they have supports on that Journey uh I think I think all all the better the amount of time teachers spend non-student facing as we mentioned lesson planning grading papers etc etc if we can shorten that that gives teachers more time for the human- centered part it allows the teacher to elevate it allows them to go dig deeper most teachers don't dream about grading 180 papers over a weekend I think they dream about motivating kids forming that connection forming that Bond being the reason why that student believes in themselves why they had that aha moment on that concept they had that hands-on experience that unlocked their thinking their creativity and I think we're going to see more of that what's your bringing up is that it isn't an either or it's a yes and you know like when you describe all these benefits it almost starts to feel like there's a cost of not integrating AI into education there's a huge cost and it it the the moment could not have come sooner if we don't do it you know we'll have the status quo system and the status quo system I I read a lot about it in my current book and my previous book it's a lot better than what we used to have great things happened but it was a one pace fits-all system some kids succeeded kids like yourself or or myself for probably a lot of the folks listening but a lot of kids accumulated gaps and they fell off they dropped out or like a majority of kids in America when they go to college 60 to 70% of them when the colleges give them a placement test they're operating at a seventh grade level in both writing and Mathematics so that's the current status quo and if you think the things are bad imagine when they have to enter into a Workforce where the AI is not operating at a seventh grade level the oper AI is operating at a 12th grade level I think most folks would say hey we would want that benefits of AI to acrw to all students or as many students as possible for that they need they need to level up so I think AI introduces these opportunities but it also introduces the urgency for people you know before it was nice if you if you learned calculus and maybe it's not calculus that everyone has to learn but it was nice if you could put AI tools together to do something productive or if you could write well etc etc now I think it's going to become pretty imperative so we've talked about what kigo can do for student students and teachers but you're actually testing it out in schools right now you've got two pilot programs running in schools in Newark New Jersey and Hobert Indiana how are they going so those were the first two that we started back in March of 2023 they've been going very well and and both of we we picked those intentionally because both of those districts were already using Khan Academy to great effect and in the not too far future some efficacy studies will be coming out but since then we've scaled we're about 160,000 students and teachers using it right now as we go into this coming school year it's probably going to be on the order of a million um formally using it as part of their districts we're seeing a certain class of student immediately when they have access to the AI they're Off to the Races I would call it 15 to 20% of students uh who immediately understand what they can now do I would say the other 80% of students it's interesting some of them are having trouble articulating how like what they need or how to communicate and at first I thought this was a problem with the technology or with the AI but then the more that we talk to educators are saying like you don't understand this was a problem all along like these kids would raise their hand and the teacher would call on them and say okay s how can I help you and ah never mind uh I don't know huh you know like it they they weren't able to articulate so these teachers are telling us it's really important for these students to practice these skills I love that are there any other adjustments to the program that you're making I'm super excited for these studies to come out because I was curious ious to ask you about like a delta or difference between kids performing on tests and assignments that don't have access to these AI systems but have you made any adjustments to your product or your you know teaching curriculum any assumptions that you've had to question based on the learnings from these Pilots oh there's a ton we have this internal initiative called proactive conmigo which is we realize kigo shouldn't just wait to be asked a good tutor would be would hold a student accountable message them maybe message their teacher their parents to make sure that that uh student gets engaged on on things we've had these debates internally when we saw a lot of students had trouble just articulating their question we did this thing called Dynamic action bubbles where kigo would offer potential responses and we're making it an option and potentially one that teachers can turn on or off depending on how much support students need so there's been a lot of debates about that how much support is enough support um the teacher tools we're continuing to add as we learn from teachers the types of workflows that they want to get productivity on and then yeah how do we just make it more omnipresent you know a browser plugin on different platforms that students might like their learning management system how do we integrate it with that so it's just more where the students and teachers are so what are you excited to try next with conmigo I saw that demo you made with open AI where your son is solving a basic trigonometry problem using an iPad and he's having a conversation with gp4 Omni the whole time highlighting things on the iPad and GPT is responding just like a real teacher would looking over his shoulder of the demos we showed uh it it could see the screen and my son I feel bad he had to pretend like he didn't know what a hypotenuse is I was going to say that seemed like the least believable part of that demo like I like really Sal's kid doesn't know that I I don't buy that I know he his credit he's he's he's a low ego kid so he was completely cool uh you know I think he knew what hypoten was when he was about five but um fig he he he he went with it and made it a better demo but it could see the triangle and it could see that he was marking the wrong side is the hypotenuse that technology isn't going to be in conmigo tomorrow um and it is more fragile that demo didn't have any edits I mean that is the technology but it's not perfect all the time so I think and it's very costly too computationally wise I I would guess we're probably a year year and a half away before that type of technology is more um accessible that we're putting it in uh kigo but I'm excited about that Vision capability I'm excited about you know we talk about kigo or an AI as a guardian angel I'm excited about potentially using AI to do things like make the classroom more human more interactive facilitate conversations between people um as a ta be able to not only breakout students into breakouts but actually facilitate those breakouts in in a kind of a real-time way so there's a lot if we think 5 10 years out I can dream about uh we can dream about virtual reality and going to ancient Rome and talking to Julia Caesar and it feels like a real Julia Caesar so there's some exciting things coming uh I got to ask just out of curiosity we started with Nadia like how's Nadia doing these days like you know what does she think about all the stuff that's happening oh yeah I mean well she slowly gotten used to being the Nadia she graduated from Sarah Lawrence uh many years ago now she's Nadia's now in her early 30s um and Fred Zakaria was the commencement speaker and he even gave her a shout out of like you know the student that launched billions of lessons or whatever so you know she's always getting embarrassed there but no she's a she's in her final year of a PhD program in New York a clinical psychologist and she's about to get married so you know knock on wood things seem to be going well for her I can't take credit for everything actually very little of what she's accomplished since seventh grade math but hey at least at least you got her to realize that math is something that she could like definitely s thanks so much for coming on the show thanks for having me here's what I came away from this interview thinking about if Sal's prophecy for AI education proves true then the future of Education looks very bright students who don't have access to Tutors or the privilege of a private school education students who have teachers who are stretched to their capacity in an underfunded understaff school would have a lot more support teachers in the meantime can spend more time connecting with kids building up their confidence helping them Focus instead of spending hours grading and turning out reports if s's right this is technology that will help us reclaim our Humanity rather than pulling us away from it fueling our curiosity to learn on an individual level but that's if schools use this technology as promised it's not too hard to imagine a very different future where we have more Ai and fewer human teachers I can see a school district stra for cash making this argument they demand rights and good working conditions so why don't we just cut back on teachers and just grow class sizes after all AI can fill in for any individualized attention that's lost so where I net out is that technology itself is full of promise and it's only going to get better from here but as always it's up to us to fulfill that promise the Ted AI show is a part of the Ted audio Collective and is produced by Ted with Cosmic standard our producers are Ella feder and Sarah McCrae our editors are B bhang and Alejandra Salazar our showrunner is Ivana Tucker and our associate producer is Ben Montoya our engineer is polar Simpson our technical director is Jacob winnink and our executive producer is Eliza Smith this episode was fact checked by Dana Kachi and I'm your host baval sadu see y'all in the next one