New York Times Op-Ed: A.I. Could Actually Be a Boon to Education, by Peter Coy:
Sal Khan is an uber-nerd, and that’s why people love him. In early 2020, to demonstrate that Khan Academy, his platform for free online education, was a worthy cause, he didn’t produce a brochure with smiling children and glowing testimonials. He made one of his teaching videos, with the usual black screen, colored pens and handwritten equations. The phrase “standard deviation” came up a lot. He multiplied the number of highly active users of his program by their average academic improvement, then linked that to the resulting increase in their projected lifetime earnings, compared it to operating costs and, presto, showed a benefit-cost ratio of 480 to 1, or around 240 to 1 if calculating only the benefits to students in high-need schools.
Those are crazy high benefit-cost ratios, considering that a lot of nonprofits would be happy with a ratio of 10 to 1. I’m not vouching for the calculation, though it seems reasonable at a glance. I’m citing it because Khan has a new plan to make the ratio, whatever it is, even higher. It’s all about harnessing artificial intelligence. I watched a TED Talk he gave on April 18 about his A.I. plans, and I interviewed him last week to get more information.
[W]hen ChatGPT came out, most of the buzz around A.I. and education was negative. … Khan saw it differently: “We said, ‘There’s a way that we can do this right, with proper guardrails.’”
Khan and his team used GPT-4 as the engine behind software called Khanmigo (“Khan” plus “amigo” — a little goofy).
Khanmigo isn’t supposed to give away answers. Like a good flesh-and-blood tutor, it engages students in a Socratic dialogue to guide them. It’s good at figuring out what they aren’t getting. Plus, Khan said, “it lets students do things you could never do before, like talk to literary or historical characters.” …
I hope it’s possible to get the good from A.I. while seeking to throttle back the bad. Khan, for one, has been using Khanmigo as his own intellectual amigo. Recently, he told me, he used it to satisfy his curiosity about an aspect of supernovas. He said it’s better at helping his kids with their programming homework than he is, even though he has a master’s degree in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It is eerily good,” he said.
