How AI Could Save (Not Destroy) Education

The Amazing AI Super Tutor for Students and Teachers| Sal Khan | TED

The Transformation of using AI in Education

So, anyone who's been paying attention for the last few months.

Has been seeing headlines like this, especially in education.

The thesis has been: students are going to be using ChatGPT and other forms of AI.

They're not going to learn.

And It's going to completely undermine education as we know it.

Now, I'm going to argue today.

is not only are there ways to mitigate all of that, if we put the right guardrails, we do the right things, we can mitigate it.

But I think we're at the cost of using AI for probably the transformation that education has ever seen.

Amazing Personal Tutor & Artificially Intelligent Tutor

And the way we're going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.

and we're going to give every teacher on the planet an amazing artificially intelligent assistant.

And just to appreciate how big of deal it would be to give everyone a personal tutor.

Examples In mathematics

I show you this clip from Benjamin Bloom's 1984 2 sigma study or he called it the "2 sigma problem".

The 2 sigma comes from two standard deviation, sigma, the symbol for standard deviation.

And he had good data that show that look, a normal distribution, that's the one that you see In the traditional bell curve right the middle, 

that's how the world kind of sorts itself out, that if you were to give personal 1-to-1 to tutoring for students, 

then you could actually get a distribution that looks like that right. 

It says tutorial 1-to-1 with the asterisks, Like, that right distribution.

A two standard-deviation improvement. 

Just to put that in plain language, that could take your average student and turn them into an exceptional student. 

It can take your below-average student. And turn them into above-average students.

AI in Khanmingo

Now the reason why he Framed it as a problem, was he said, well this is all good.

But how do you actually scale group instruction this way?

How do you actually give it to everyone in an economic way?

What I'm about to show you is I think the first moves towards doing that.

Obviously, we've been trying to approximate it in some way at Khan Academy for over a decade now, but I think we're at the cost of accelerating it dramatically.

I'm going to show you the early stages of what our AI, which we call Khanmingo what it can now do and maybe a little bit of where it is actually going.

So, this right over here is a traditional exercise that you or many of our children have seen on Khan Academy.

But what's new is that little bot thing at the right. And we'll start by seeing one of the very important safeguard which is the conversation is recorded and viewable by your teacher.

AI is not a cheating tool, It helps both students and tutor

It's moderated actually by a second AI. And also it does not tell you the answer. It is not a cheating tool. When the student saya, "Tell me the answer." 

It's says, "I'm your tutor."

What do you think is the next step for solving the problem?"

Now, the student makes a mistake, and this will surprise people.

Who think large language model are not good at mathematics.

Notice, not iya does it 

Notice the mistake, it asks the student to explain their reasoning, 

but It's actually doing what I would say, not just even an average tutor would do, but an excellent tutor would do.

It's actually, It's able to divine what is probably the misconception in the student's mind, that they probably didn't use the distributive property.

Remember, we need to distribute the negative two to both the nine and the 2m inside of the parentheses.

This is to me a very big deal. And It's not just In math.

AI Helps tutoring student not only In mathematics

This is a computer programming exercise at Khan Academy.

Where the student needs to make the clouds part. And so we can see the students started defining a variable, left X minus minus. 

It only made the left cloud part. But the they can ask Khanmingo, what's going on?

Why is only the left cloud moving?

And it understands the code. It knows all the context on what the students are doing and it understands that those ellipses are there to draw clouds which I think is kind of mind-blowing.

And it says, "to make the right cloud move as well, try adding a line of code inside the draw function that increments the right X variable by one pixel in each frame."

AI is dramatically accelerating education

There's folks who take a more pessimistic view of AI, they say this is scary, there's all three dystopian scenarios. We maybe want to slow down, we want to pause.

On the other side, there are the more optimistic folks, that say, we've gone through inflection points before. We've gone through the industrial revolution, it was scary, but it all kind of worked out. 

And what I'd argue right now is I don't think it is like a flip of a coin or this is something where we'll just have to, like, wait and see, which way it turns out.

I think everyone here and beyond, we are active participants in this decision. I'm pretty convinced of the first line of reasoning.

Is actually almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, that if we act with fear and if we say, "Hey, we've just go out to stop doing this stuff," what's really going to happen is the rule followers night pause, but the rule breakers, as Alexandr (Wang) mentioned, the totalitarian 

And that leads to what I'm pretty convinced is the dystopian state which is the good actors are worse AIs that the bad actors.

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How AI Could Save