The TLDR

Highlight: Some of us were lucky enough to grow up with Khan Academy and rely on it through our years in school. Earlier this year, the EdTech giant released Khanmigo, an AI-powered learning/teaching partner. Quick review below ⬇️

Musing of the Week: We’re taking a look at Google’s controversial announcement of their new Gemini model and what the inaccuracies say about the broader pressures in AI marketing.

🤖 Will AI improve learning outcomes?

Since 2008, Khan Academy has consistently been viewed as a positive, reliable force making a consistent impact on students across the globe. By assisting students, this non-profit organization also addresses major challenges faced by teachers, including learning loss, low student motivation, and resource scarcity.

As the next step in its evolution, Khan Academy has been piloting Khanmigo, an AI-powered teaching assistant, since spring 2023. The base model here is OpenAI’s GPT-4, trained on Khan Academy’s huge library of curriculum and trained to be a constructive, learning-focused coach.

The tool aims to be a connector of everyone involved in education: students, teachers, and parents. If successful, Khanmigo could alleviate another significant issue facing American educators: the lack of parental support and involvement in the educational process.The optimal approach appears to involve teachers incorporating Khanmigo into their classroom activities and setting up student accounts that can be utilized at home. These accounts can also be linked to parent accounts, fostering involvement and engagement in the learning process.

Khan Academy’s library of material starts at the Pre-K level, but using Khanmigo autonomously will require a student to type and chat with the bot. Depending on a student’s age, some more hands-on supervision might be required.

A parent’s account is $4/month, or $44/year (the cost covers GPT-4 usage). Teachers can only get class-wide access through a school or district partnership with Khanmigo.

📝 Khanmigo Use Cases:

• For students

  • Receive personalized 1-1 tutoring that encourages critical thinking

  • Get hints with homework in a way that helps them learn

• For teachers

  • Use for custom lesson planning and other administrative tasks

  • Mitigate learning loss and support students in a personalized way

• For parents

  • Refresh your memory on concepts that your child is learning

  • Get a summary of your child’s progress

🤓 Let’s take a look inside Khanmigo with a parent account:

• After setting up a parent account and connecting to your child’s student account, you can start exploring everything the tool has to offer

• This is super simple, and there are two key screens:

  • Dashboard

    • See your child’s progress at a glance

    • View Khan Academy’s library of courses across grades and subjects

  • AI Activities Chatbot

    • We’re assuming that the chatbot UX is similar across student, teacher, and parent experiences. This feels quite user-friendly

    • Use this to get some direction on what subjects your child is learning, refresh your memory on those subjects, or get a progress update

    • The refresher is particularly helpful, giving you the kind of plain-English context you need to help your kid with pre-algebra homework or structure their book report

  • How does Khanmigo teach and work with a student?

    • There are tons of modules and frameworks that a user can choose from. Here’s a sampling from the menu:

      • Tutor me

      • Practice my knowledge

      • Give me writing feedback

      • Help me craft an essay

      • Debate topics

      • Chat with a literary character

      • Chat with a historical figure

      • Play word games

If you have a child in your life (nieces and nephews count!), try out Khanmigo and let us know what you think :)

🧠 Musing of the Week

It’s no secret that Google has been chasing OpenAI to the forefront of the AI market for the past year. We’ve looked at Bard, Google’s ChatGPT competitor, multiple times since its launch and have been consistently disappointed by our experiences. A few weeks ago, we were excited when Google announced their forthcoming Gemini Ultra model with excellent benchmarks and a polished promo video showing the tool moving fluently between text, image, and video inputs. They simultaneously launched Gemini Pro, a lightweight version of the promised model, as a part of Bard.

Unfortunately, people quickly noticed problems with the announcement, accusing Google of faking their results after discovering discrepancies in the documented prompts and promo video. Additionally, the results from the lightweight Gemini Pro model proved underwhelming despite showing some improvements from the previous Bard models. We tested the model and decided against a full writeup because the performance differences didn’t significantly improve utility. We may revisit the issue once Gemini Ultra drops, if it proves to be the GPT-4 competitor that we do think the market needs.

Until then, the unfolding drama offers a lens into the incentives driving marketing in AI. Our expectations are shifting rapidly, and feats that seemed miraculous only months ago are now the baseline. As market pressure ramps up, so does pressure for companies to oversell their products. Sometimes, this leads to outright misrepresentation, but more frequently to selective showcases that don’t accurately represent the product experience. Technology is not yet indistinguishable from magic. For the moment, if a model appears too good to be true, it probably is.

🙌 If you’re hyped about the generative AI industry specifically, here are some of the coolest roles we’ve seen this week:

• GenAI GTM Specialist @ Amazon

• Lead Product Manager, AI Product R&D @ NBA

• Sr. Product Manager, Search & Discovery AI @ Amazon

• Principal Technologist - Generative AI - Remote @ Mayo Clinic

• Growth Lead, Generative AI @ Scale AI

🔨 Check out these other AI tools we’ve been looking at this week:

• Pika: A promising text → video model still in the pre-launch phase.

• Sameday: Sales AI ensuring customers can always book a meeting.

• Spark Studio: AI platform helping kids learn subjects more quickly.

That’s all for this week. See you next Tuesday!

Lorel & Reily