The Exchanges

Q You've said that, um, we're on the cusp of the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen. How important do you think AI is relative to the broader set of access that you have through things through YouTube and online coursework and all the rest of it? Is this a complete game changer? Is it an add-on? Like, what's the relative degree of importance of this shift right now?

A I think in the very short term, it is going to be a meaningful add on. I think if you go three to five years in the future, it will be a game changer. And the reason I say that is going back to Benjamin Bloom, but I think this even predates Ben, the gold standard was always to have a personal tutor. You go back to, if you were a prince in most of, if you were Alexander the Great, 2300 years ago, you had Aristotle as your personal tutor and Aristotle would speed up, slow down, motivate you when you're feeling down, like do all of these things with you. And that was always the gold standard. Two, 300 years ago, utopian idea of mass public education, but in order to do that economically, we had to make compromises, one of which is you don't get a personal tutor. You don't get a one-on-one teacher. We're going to batch you into groups of 30. We're going to move you at a set time or pace. We're going to apply some lectures and standards and homework, et cetera. On the test, some of you are going to get a hundred percent. Some of you are going to get 80. Some of you are going to flunk it. Too bad. The, the batch needs to move forward. And somehow we expect those of you who didn't know 20 or 30 or 40% of the material on the simpler stuff to understand the more advanced stuff. And what, what, what happens, those gaps accumulate and kids start falling off and then you eventually put kid…

AI assessment note: “in the very short term, it is going to be a meaningful add on”

Q Have you ever read the, the Neil Stevenson book, The Diamond Age?

A Not only have I read it, I used to give it away to people. Every employee at Khan Academy, uh, used to get the diamond age. And, you know, you're referring to it because, you know, this, it takes place in this like Neo Victorian, not too far off future in like China. And this member of this like Neo nobility gets this AI tablet app for his granddaughter to educate her, the young lady's illustrated primer. And it gets bootlegged and it gets in the hands of 200,000 orphan girls who live in barges, and then they essentially just take over. And so, uh, I've always used young lady, young ladies illustrated primer to our team at Khan Academy. It's like, this is what we're hoping to build in the long run. And I never thought we were going to fully build it. I thought we were going to be able to approximate it, but already conmigo can do some things that are maybe even beyond what the young ladies illustrated primer did, where you can talk to Don Quixote. In any language that you want, uh, you can get into debates with it, et cetera, et cetera. And I think in the next three to five years, almost everything that Neil Stevenson imagined, I think he wrote the book in 1994, um, I think is actually going to be a reality, which I didn't think was going to happen in my lifetime.

AI assessment note: “Not only have I read it, I used to give it away to people.”

Q of like group schooling settings. Like, can you talk a little bit about how you think about that? Because you also started Schoolhouse Schoolhouse.world with our mutual friend Shashir, founder of CODA. And, and, you know, this is like small groups online and believing that there's still the importance of this. Can you, can you talk about sort of how those pieces fit together and what the motivation was there?

A Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, just a little bit more detail on Schoolhouse. We started during the pandemic, you know, that was a moment where like Khan Academy's usage went up three X and it was clear that it was great if people are using Khan Academy, but they, they needed, everyone was isolated and they needed more human support as well. And I'm always thinking about, okay, how can you give something at scale that used to feel really expensive and tutoring, live human tutoring For the most part is expensive, but I was like, well, what if you could leverage volunteerism? And so it was a bit of a, you know, optimistic idea that there would probably be a lot of people who want to do, you know, what I did with Nadia, that a lot of people would actually love to do that. And so we set up schoolhouse.world as a way, you know, it's, it's, it's another nonprofit, a sister nonprofit to Khan Academy. Its mission is to connect the world through learning. And the whole idea is, is that you get free tutoring and who gives the tutoring. It's, it's, Volunteers. And a lot of those volunteers could be near peers. They could be high school students, college students, but some of them also are teachers who teach at a fancy private school and want to give back. They might be a retired professor, et cetera, et cetera. It's, it's gone well. I mean, it's definitely at a smaller scale than Khan Ac…

AI assessment note: “they needed, everyone was isolated and they needed more human support as well.”

Q If, if you think about, you know, going beyond Khan Academy, you've also spent 15 years generally thinking about education. Do you have a prediction for what happens to like university with all of these technologies?

A Yeah, I, I think, I, I don't think generative AI dramatically changes what was already going to happen to universities. I, I think it's not news to anyone that the return on investment for, for university, especially if you have to take on debt is, is, is mixed. Depending on, on who you are and what you do with it. Obviously we have a student debt crisis, and even if we were able to forgive some, it's not going to solve it for the, for the next generation of students. And so universities are bloated with cost. They're not particularly good at, you know, either informing or preparing students for, you know, in certain cases they are, in other cases they're not, of preparing students for what they need. I think you're going to have a world where the very elite universities People join those. Yes. It's, it's almost like you're joining a cast. You're joining a club. So I think they're going to be fine. I think that, you know, whether or not they can justify the ROI, they're going to be fine. I think now there's some interesting things that are happening around, you know, legacy admissions, et cetera, et cetera. So that'll, that'll be interesting. I think the community colleges at the other end of the spectrum, they're very flexible and they are very good at thinking about what are the needs? Like, okay, are there, are there employees Are there industry certifications that could be …

AI assessment note: “I don't think generative AI dramatically changes what was already going to happen to universities.”

Q Did you still have the hedge fund job?

A The same hedge fund job, but actually it's interesting. I have a whole theory that we can keep referring to that benevolent aliens are using Khan Academy to prepare humanity for first contact. And because there's a series of things in, in, in my journey that seem like it was almost like, you know, People were moving me around in a way that, that, that benefited this, but one of them was my boss. I mean, it was a two-person hedge fund at the time. His wife decided to become a law professor, and it was interesting because at first she thought she was going to go to UVA, and in case, you know, we would have ended up living on a farm in Charlottesville or something, but at the last minute she decided that she wanted to take the job at Stanford, and so, uh, my wife and I, Came out here, and my wife ended, who, who's a physician, she ended up doing her fellowship at Stanford because of my boss's wife, not wife's choice, but that, that landed us here in Silicon Valley, which I think ended up becoming very important for the future of Khan Academy. And then I was showing this off at a dinner party in, in, in Silicon Valley to a friend, and he said, well, you know, this is cool, but how are you scaling your lessons? I'm like, well, I'm not. Like, it's hard to do with 15 cousins what I was doing with one. He said, you know, there's this YouTube thing. Why don't you record some, your lesso…

AI assessment note: “The same hedge fund job”

Q It's an amazing story. At some point, did you, like, learn more about education? Because this feels very much like, ah, I know algebra, and I have some instincts about what these kids don't yet know about algebra. Like, was there, like, reading about, you know, the two sigma problems somewhere in there? Like, pedagogy, any of it?

A Symblanters, in the early stages, no. In the early stages, it was very intuitive-driven, and it was really, Yeah, I think a lot of, I'm guessing that both of y'all, we were all in the category of kids that did pretty well academically when we were in school. And I think when you do well academically in school, there's one of two narratives you can tell yourself. One narrative is, hey, I'm just special. I'm just good at this. I'm just gifted. The other narrative is, you know, what I'm doing, It doesn't really feel all that special. And some of my peers that are flunking the same classes that I'm getting A's in, they can beat me at chess. They can, you know, learn a video game or a puzzle or solve a puzzle faster than me. So I don't think it's about like pure cognitive capability. And then the more I used to tutor peers in high school as well. And the more I did that, I just realized it was the same thing I saw with my cousins and, and the benefit I had, and a lot of us that did well in topics like math and science, we, We didn't allow those gaps to fill whenever we felt a little bit uneasy about how fluent we were with something. We, we gave ourselves a little bit of extra practice and we weren't just memorizing things. We always wanted to understand why, you know, why does the long division algorithm work? You know, let me think about that. Does it?

AI assessment note: “in the early stages, no. In the early stages, it was very intuitive-driven”