EP #35 AI & GPT-4 Revolutionize Education w/ Sal Khan

In this episode, during this year’s Abundance360 summit, Sal and Peter discussed the opportunities AI can bring to education, Khan Academy’s new AI-powered guide, and the future of education systems across the globe. You will learn about: 02:21 | Chat GPT-4 Collaboration With Khan Academy. 09:08 | Virtual Learning Isn't A Research Issue; It's An Engineering Issue. 16:22 | Khan Academy: Changing Lives Across The World. Sal Khan is the Founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit that provides free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Khan Academy partners with more than 280 school districts globally, has over 145 million registered users across 190 countries and is offered in over 51 languages. Khan has been named Teacher of the Year and recognized as one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People. Learn about Khanmigo Join my Abundance360 community. _____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsor: Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots and Mindsets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:00Speaker 02

  There's a young girl in Afghanistan. Her name's Sultana. 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 lying to her parents, going to Pakistan to take the SAT because it's not offered in Afghanistan. I'm like, this young woman's amazing. I tried to figure out a way to forget her visa. Luckily Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, found out about her wrote an op-ed, "Meet Sultana: The Taliban's Worst Fear." She had no transcript, no grades. All she had was like eight years on Khan Academy and an SAT score. And Arizona State University admitted her. Credit to Arizona State University. Sultana now is a member of the research faculty at Tufts in quantum computing. You can imagine how many more Sultanas we can have if we have an AI supporting them. We've always aspired at Khan Academy to be,

• 1:44Speaker 02

  hey, every learner on the planet can essentially get a tutor. Every teacher could get a teaching assistant. OpenAI reached out to us and they said, hey, we're working on our next-generation model, which we all now know as GPT-4. And when we saw this technology, which now folks are familiar with, the GPT-4 technology, we said, wow, this might actually do the trick.

• 2:04Peter Diamandis?

  It's extraordinary and it really is about personalizing every student's education.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  The goal standard in education has always been personalized tutoring. I think this passes the Turing test 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.

• 2:34Speaker 04

  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 Sal Khan, and if you're unfamiliar with Sal, he's the founder of Khan Academy. And Khan Academy is literally revolutionizing education in every way imaginable. Peter and Sal 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 Sal really dissected how artificial intelligence and machine learning is and 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.

• 3:19Peter Diamandis?

  Sal, thank you for coming.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  That was very energetic.

• 3:23Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, they have an abundance of love for you.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:29Peter Diamandis?

  It was great to see you a few months ago, and Sal was playing chess against champions for a fundraiser. It was a fun event.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  It was humbling, yeah. It was the equivalent of like doubles tennis, but on chess. So it was like Silicon Valley civilian plus a grandmaster plus another Silicon Valley civilian and another grand... yeah, it was humbling. I lost to Magnus Carlsen and Yuri Milner's eight-year-old daughter.

• 3:57Peter Diamandis?

  I know, I know. It was a party Yuri Milner put on, and it was amazing. And, you know, you were losing in front of Sergey and Eric Schmidt and the entire Google team and every billionaire in Silicon Valley. Humbling, yes. It's been a busy week for you.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  Yes, it has been.

• 4:18Peter Diamandis?

  But it's like, it's like, do you feel like you just put, you know, the roadster in the fifth gear or something?

• 4:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, and just for context of what Peter's alluding to, it feels good to talk about it because I was under NDA for six months. But about six months ago, late July, early August, OpenAI reached out to us. And they said, hey, we're working on our next generation model, which we all now know is GPT-4. And they said, hey, we want to talk to Khan Academy for two reasons. One is we want GPT-4 to be truly good at knowledge. And we're going to benchmark it by things like the LSAT and AP exams. And you all have tens of thousands of items. Can we use them to train, evaluate? I'm like, yeah, maybe. But the second one is they said, 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.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  And so we're like, okay, whatever. And I was familiar with GPT-2, GPT-3. I was like, I don't know how good this is going to be.

• 5:17Peter Diamandis?

  You've been on Sam for some time.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  For a little bit, for a little bit. And but then two weeks later, they showed us the first run. This was early August. And showed us an AP bio question. It says, Sal, what's the answer? I was like, okay, I think the answer C. And then, you know, it was able to say the answer C. I'm like, well, ask it why? And it was able to explain it. And you have to realize this was three months before ChatGPT. When ChatGPT came up, I emailed Sam and Greg and Craig Brockman. And I'm like, I thought we were going to wait until Marsh to launch this thing. And they're like, no, 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 in August, we were seeing something that was far better than ChatGPT.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was like, oh, wow, this could do a lot. And 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. And when we saw this technology, which now folks are familiar with, the GPT-4 technology. We said, wow, this might actually do the trick. It was even good at math.

• 6:19Peter Diamandis?

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• 8:10Peter Diamandis?

  It's extraordinary, and it really is about personalizing every student's education in an extraordinary fashion.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  No, 100%. You know, I've always said, and this was before the AI stuff, that the gold 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 200, 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 you know, that got a lot of us to where we are now.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  But we know that a lot of folks weren't able to make it through because you get an eighty percent, seventy percent, too bad, the factory line keeps moving. What's exciting now is, and there's been tons of F P studies about personalized tutoring with a high quality tutor. Uh, but it's just never been economic and Khan Academy pre A I was.

• 9:19Peter Diamandis?

  You.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  What was, what was, well, I started as a tutor with my cousins and I saw what was happening with them. And then, you know, early Khan Academy was my attempt to scale that. And then we have actually, we created another nonprofit called Schoolhouse dot world, which does peer to peer tutoring. But what the A I does is it's the scale of Khan Academy, 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 Khan Migo working. So, I mean, you know, some of the things for those of y'all who haven't played around with how G P T four is different than Chat G P T or G P T three point five, those are very nuanced conversations.

• 9:58Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  That's the A I acting like a really good Socratic tutor. I think this passes the Turing test in, in, in a lot of the tutoring use cases.

• 10:05Peter Diamandis?

  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.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 10:26Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, how far are we from what I'm 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 A I of that N P C 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.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I mean, I would say ninety five percent of what you just described is not a research effort anymore. It's just an engineering effort. Someone just has to put the pieces in place. The, the, you know, the, the Aristotle is one of the folks you can talk to already on Khan Migo and you can have a very meaningful conversation.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  You know, the way we see it evolving, and every time we think about it for ten 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,

• 11:24Peter Diamandis?

  That's easy, yeah.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  That's easy, and it's gonna 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 gonna have, 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.

• 11:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  It doesn't know about your last conversation.

• 11:45Peter Diamandis?

  It doesn't remember your favorite sports star, movie star, or...

• 11:48Speaker 02

  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 did. To make the math work, people will find that Khanmigo, even though, you know, GPT-4 is available to a lot, that the math works a lot better on Khanmigo. And I'll tell you, one of the hacks we did, and when we realized 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 an error, let's say they don't distribute a number on both, all the terms in a parentheses, it doesn't always identify. Sometimes it'll say, correct, good job, but then it'll give the right answer, and we're like, wait, it wasn't a good job. 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,

• 12:32Speaker 02

  here's what I did, start talking, and you weren't allowed to think before you were to talk, your first word might be, good job, and then you start, like, the next words just come out. That's how a large language model works. But we says, well, no, we worked with the OpenAI folks, and it's like, well, what if we gave it a chance to have its own private thoughts first? And so what we do is essentially, it constructs its own private thoughts on how it would approach the problem, that the student does not see. And then, and in those private thoughts, I mean, it's funny, because we can read these private thoughts, even though we told them that we couldn't. 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 make it verbally compare the student's results to it,

• 13:17Speaker 02

  the math accuracy goes up by three or fourfold.

• 13:19Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  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 want 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.

• 13:46Peter Diamandis?

  And listen, I think debate is one of the highest forms of learning and is the most underutilized asset, uh, that we humans have in school. I, I, one of the thoughts, my kids love the game averse, right? From, uh, from Roblox and I'm respectful of the game designers who do an amazing job. And in the education world, everyone starts with a hundred percent 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, and the 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.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and you know, this is something that obviously we, we were attempting to do pre-AI as well. I, I will say it's, it's, it's hot. 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 of that. And education, we're like, no, the kids really don't learn how to factor a polynomial, 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.

• 14:53Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing. So let's talk about the scale of Khan Academy, what it's been. I mean, just the number I 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?

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, yeah.

• 15:10Peter Diamandis?

  How big, what's been the impact of Khan Academy so far? For students, teachers and such?

• 15:14Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, the very high level numbers, um, 150 million registered users, something like that.

• 15:21Peter Diamandis?

  Just give it up, 150 million registered users.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  You know, that's a little bit, kind of a vanity metric, but anyway. But there's, there's, there's, you know, depending, at the peak of the pandemic, we had, you know, 30 million students coming a month, but it's about, it averages about, about 10 to 20 million. The pandemic, we did see a threefold increase. Pre-pandemic, we had about 30 million learning minutes per day on Khan Academy. That grew up to about 90 million. It's in 50-plus languages. 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, 12 billion minutes, 12 billion minutes per year, and, you know, what would be the economic equivalent of that?

• 16:09Speaker 02

  But 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. And so what we've been trying to do, the schools you mentioned, we've always had a ton of teachers and schools use Khan Academy, but five years ago, we started going to a bunch of districts, we're like, look, a lot of the teachers are already using us, how do we get you 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 Khan 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, all this enterprise-level stuff.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  So we started doing it. We're like, look, if we're serious about, you know, our mission's free world-class education for anyone, anywhere, we genuinely think we can move the dial for nations, for the world eventually, we've got to do this, because that's how we get integrated. So that's where we went from nine school districts to, 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, those are ones that are formally working with us, we're doing all of this type of stuff.

• 17:22Peter Diamandis?

  So what is your, let's give it up for that. Yes.

• 17:28Peter Diamandis?

  So what is your, what's your moonshot? Where do you want to go next? How do you want to scale the use of this AI? What's your, where do you want to go?

• 17:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, you know, the, the goal has always been all of the core academic material from pre-K through the core of college, provided in a way that's personalized, master-based, try to emulate what Aristotle did for, for, for young Alexander. And then the other is-

• 17:56Peter Diamandis?

  We're gonna have warmongers all over the place.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  Exactly. Well, hopefully not that, but hopefully, hopefully the, well-skilled people, whatever they do. And then, and then, 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 eventually, jobs and opportunity? 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 Khan 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's Sultana. About 12 years ago, Taliban takes over her town, couldn't let, didn't let her go to school. She gets on Khan Academy, she self-educates.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  For her, the big aha was when she, she was learning more than her brothers in the Taliban-controlled school. And I'm like, not a high standard. But, um, but she ended up 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 about her. She met some people on the internet. I'm like, this, this young woman's amazing. I tried to figure out a way to forget her visa. Luckily, Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, found out about her, wrote an op-ed, "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 Khan Academy and an SAT score. And Arizona State University admitted her, and she, because she wanted to be a physicist.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  And Sultana now, who I now know quite well, oh, it's-

• 19:32Speaker 02

  There's more, there's more. That's like an infomercial. Sultana now is a, a member of the research faculty at Tufts in quantum computing. So, that's, yeah.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  Finish the thought, though. There are Sultanas in the world, but you could imagine how many more Sultanas we can have if we have an AI supporting them. Sultana could just power through.

• 19:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yes. Hey, everybody. This is Peter. A quick break from the episode. 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.

• 20:40Peter Diamandis?

  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 shape your neural nets with, go to dmandis.com backslash blog and learn more. Now, back to the episode. So, the question is, what changing role of a teacher should be today? And how do we train teachers to embrace, rather than fear, the new world of education? All right, teachers, heroes of society, underappreciated, underpaid.

• 21:25Peter Diamandis?

  Talk to me about what you're trying to do for the teaching community.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, 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 students. So even pre-AI, we're like, look, the role of the teacher does not have to be give the lecture. They shouldn't be grading things, et cetera, et cetera. Students can learn at their own pace and they can do 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.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  The AI, I think, just uplevels that even more. Now it can work in every subject and

• 22:17Peter Diamandis?

  Every language.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  Every language and it's not just what traditional Khan 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 really going to make their classroom an amazing experience, like truly experiential learning where they might use the AI, "Hey, everyone, we're going to talk to Zeus this morning. Let's get your questions together, special guest." Or AI, and I really see for the teacher, the AI becomes like an army of teaching assistants, which every teacher would love to have, which is like, "AI, I want you to group these 30

• 22:57Speaker 02

  kids, pair them up into pairs and have them debate each other on this topic and then give me a summary of how they did and who was engaged and what, and et cetera, and how I could work with them." 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 probably in teaching if it's used well. And you saw on the Khan Mego, 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 dead. Teachers are going to be able to, you could take something you already have and say, "Oh, 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."

• 23:42Speaker 02

  You know, when you ask Khan Mego, 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 it says, "Well, you know, if you want to be a soccer player." 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 this." So like, it also doesn't BS the students, which kids appreciate. But I think that's going to be the fun of the teacher, which is be the conductor of the orchestra.

• 24:09Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing, amazing. You're going to come back for questions after Jaclyn speaks. Give it up for Sal Khan, everybody.

• 24:27Speaker 01

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