Khan Academy announces GPT-4 powered learning guide

Hi everyone, Sal Khan here from Khan Academy, and I'm very excited to let you all know about the work that Khan Academy is now doing in artificial intelligence.

Obviously, over the last many months, there's been a lot of talk about artificial intelligence that has been both exciting and scary. We all see the potential that it could have to help people, to maybe even one day tutor people. But we also know that there are some drawbacks. It can hallucinate sometimes, make up facts, it doesn't always get the math correct, maybe it can introduce bias, or maybe students might try to do things with it that aren't fully appropriate or try to get it to do their assignments for them.

So us, we at Khan Academy, we view it as our responsibility as a not-for-profit with a mission of free world-class education for anyone anywhere, that also prides itself on being at the cutting edge of technology and how technology can be used to accelerate learning. We view it as our responsibility to start deeply working with artificial intelligence, threading the needle so that we can maximize the benefits and mitigate the risks.

Today, Khan Academy is launching Conmigo, and we're putting it behind Khan Labs, which is a new program we're doing as part of Khan Academy. We can take new technology that we think has a lot of promise, and we can give access initially to a smaller subset of educators, parents, students, and donors, so that they can begin to test it. As we refine it, we can bring it out to more and more people.

Conmigo is the artificial intelligent assistant that is integrated into everything that Khan Academy does. A student can use it, a parent can use it, a teacher can use it. For example, if you're doing an exercise on Khan Academy, you want a hint; you essentially want a tutor. We think artificial intelligence needs to be a tool for real learning and not for cheating, and that means that it's great to have Conmigo be a tutor.

The use case is especially powerful as we come out of the pandemic. All of us as educators want to address unfinished learning, but we know that tutoring can only work if it's connected to what students are already doing in the classroom, and ideally actually being able to do it in the classroom. This is exactly what we're doing as part of Conmigo.

What's really exciting about these next generation models that we're working with is that they can do math. They don't always do it perfectly, but it is improving dramatically and quickly week by week. So we thought this is the time to try it out. Artificial intelligence and large language models introduce the possibility of doing completely new activities that weren't possible before.

For example, teachers spend a lot of time writing lesson plans. What if they had an artificial intelligent teaching assistant that can help them write their lesson plan?

On the student side, instead of just doing things for the student, what if it could act as a coach to do things with the student? It could write something alongside the student, making sure that the student is doing the bulk of the work, but pulling it out of them, making it more fun, making it more engaging.

We're putting in a world which we actually are as part of our Labs activities, where students can debate any topic they like within reasonable topics. Here, the AI can take the other side, and they can really fine-tune their arguments. They can have conversations with historical figures or figures from literature, they can get help on problems that they might have to do in class or in homework. But once again, not in a way that it just gives them the answer, but in a way that a good tutor would do it; that it helps nudge the students for them to figure it out themselves.

The other thing we're doing is we're adding even more safeguards—safeguards within the activities themselves, but also ways for parents and teachers to monitor student activity. They can see a log of all of what the students have been up to and also get notifications if there are any conversations that seem to be on the edge or inappropriate.

So, to be clear, this is just the beginning, and we aren't launching these features to every Khan Academy user right now. Instead, we are prioritizing teachers and schools and districts that are already part of our Khan Academy District offering. We're also going to allow those of you who can help support these efforts as a donor. The efforts to build out and do all the R&D will also be a way to get priority on the waiting list to be an early tester of Conmigo.

I think together, all of us—teachers, parents, policymakers, district leaders—if we work together hand in hand, we can find ways to maximize the benefits of this powerful technology while mitigating the risks. And if we do that, we can literally empower the lives of billions, and it will be a very exciting next couple of years. Thank you.