So anyone who's been paying attention
for the last few months has been seeing headlines like this, especially in education. The thesis has been: students are going to be using ChatGPT
and other forms of AI to cheat, do their assignments. They’re not going to learn. And it’s going to completely undermine
education as we know it. Now, what I'm going to argue today is not only are there ways
to mitigate all of that, if we put the right guardrails,
we do the right things, we can mitigate it. But I think we're at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest
positive transformation that education has ever seen. And the way we're going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent
but amazing personal tutor. And we're going to give every teacher
on the planet an amazing, artificially intelligent
teaching assistant. And just to appreciate
how big of a deal it would be to give everyone a personal tutor, I show you this clip from Benjamin Bloom’s 1984
2 sigma study, or he called it the “2 sigma problem.” The 2 sigma comes
from two standard deviation, sigma, the symbol for standard deviation. And he had good data that showed
that look, a normal distribution, that's the one that you see
in the traditional bell curve right in the middle, that's how the world
kind of sorts itself out, that if you were to give personal
1-to-1 to tutoring for students, then you could actually get a distribution
that looks like that right. It says tutorial 1-to-1
with the asterisks, like, that right distribution, a two standard-deviation improvement. Just to put that in plain language, that could take your average student
and turn them into an exceptional student. It can take your below-average student and turn them into
an above-average student. Now the reason why he framed it
as a problem, was he said, well, this is all good, but how do you actually scale
group instruction this way? How do you actually give it
to everyone in an economic way? What I'm about to show you is I think
the first moves towards doing that. Obviously, we've been trying
to approximate it in some way at Khan Academy for over a decade now, but I think we're at the cusp
of accelerating it dramatically. I'm going to show you
the early stages of what our AI, which we call Khanmigo, what it can now do and maybe a little bit
of where it is actually going. So this right over here
is a traditional exercise that you or many of your children
might have seen on Khan Academy. But what's new is that little
bot thing at the right. And we'll start by seeing one
of the very important safeguards, which is the conversation is recorded
and viewable by your teacher. It’s moderated actually by a second AI. And also it does not tell you the answer. It is not a cheating tool. When the student says,
"Tell me the answer," it says, "I'm your tutor. What do you think is the next step
for solving the problem?" Now, if the student makes a mistake,
and this will surprise people who think large language models
are not good at mathematics, notice, not only does it
notice the mistake, it asks the student to explain
their reasoning, but it's actually doing what I would say, not just even an average tutor would do,
but an excellent tutor would do. It’s able to divine what is probably
the misconception in that student’s mind, that they probably didn’t use
the distributive property. Remember, we need to distribute
the negative two to both the nine and the 2m
inside of the parentheses. This to me is a very, very, very big deal. And it's not just in math. This is a computer programming
exercise on Khan Academy, where the student needs
to make the clouds part. And so we can see the student starts
defining a variable, left X minus minus. It only made the left cloud part. But then they can ask Khanmigo,
what’s going on? Why is only the left cloud moving? And it understands the code. It knows all the context
of what the student is doing, and it understands that those ellipses
are there to draw clouds, which I think is kind of mind-blowing. And it says, "To make the right
cloud move as well, try adding a line of code
inside the draw function that increments the right X variable
by one pixel in each frame." Now, this one is maybe even more amazing
because we have a lot of math teachers. We've all been trying to teach
the world to code, but there aren't a lot of computing
teachers out there. And what you just saw,
even when I'm tutoring my kids, when they're learning to code, I can't help them this well, this fast, this is really going to be a super tutor. And it's not just exercises. It understands what you're watching. It understands the context of your video. It can answer the age-old question,
“Why do I need to learn this?” And it asks Socratically,
"Well, what do you care about?" And let's say the student says,
"I want to be a professional athlete." And it says, "Well, learning
about the size of cells, which is what this video is, that could be really useful
for understanding nutrition and how your body works, etc." It can answer questions, it can quiz you, it can connect it to other ideas, you can now ask
as many questions of a video as you could ever dream of. (Applause) Another big shortage out there, I remember the high school I went to, the student-to-guidance counselor ratio
was about 200 or 300 to one. A lot of the country,
it's worse than that. We can use Khanmigo to give
every student a guidance counselor, academic coach, career coach, life coach, which is exactly
what you see right over here. And we launched this
with the GPT-4 launch. We have a few thousand people on this. This isn't a fake demo, this is really it in action. And then there is, you know, things that I think it would
have been even harder, it would have been a little
science fiction to do with even a traditional tutor. We run an online high school
with Arizona State University called Khan World School, and we have a student who attends
that online school, based in India. Her name's Saanvi. And she was doing a report
on "The Great Gatsby." And when she was reading
"The Great Gatsby," Jay Gatsby keeps looking
at the green light off into the distance. And she's like, "Why does he do that?" She did some web searches,
and people have obviously studied this and commented about the symbolism of that, but none of it was really
resonating with her. And then she realized
that she had Khanmigo and that she could talk
to Jay Gatsby himself. And so, "Ah, splendid choice, old sport. I am now Jay Gatsby,
the enigmatic millionaire from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic.” And so, "Why do you keep staring
at the green light?" "Ah, the green light, old sport. It's a symbol of my dreams
and desires, you see. It's situated at the end
of Daisy Buchanan's dock across the bay from my mansion. I gaze at it longingly
as it represents my yearning for the past and my hope to reunite with Daisy,
the love of my life." And what was cool is, Saanvi then said,
“I had this long conversation,” she called him “Mr. Gatsby,” and at the end she actually apologized
for taking his time, which I thought was very polite of her. But you can imagine this unlocks
learning literature, learning ... You could talk to historical figures. We're even probably
going to add an activity you can talk to like,
the Mississippi River. It brings things to life in ways
that really were science fiction even six months or a year ago. Students can get into debates with the AI. And we’ve got this here
is the student debating whether we should cancel student debt. The student is against
canceling student debt, and we've gotten very clear feedback. We started running it at Khan World School
in our lab school that we have, Khan Lab School. The students, the high school
students especially, they're saying "This is amazing to be able
to fine-tune my arguments without fearing judgment. It makes me that much more confident to go into the classroom
and really participate." And we all know that Socratic dialogue
debate is a great way to learn, but frankly, it's not out there
for most students. But now it can be accessible
to hopefully everyone. A lot of the narrative,
we saw that in the headlines, has been, "It's going to do the writing for kids. Kids are not going to learn to write." But we are showing that there's ways
that the AI doesn't write for you, it writes with you. So this is a little thing, and my eight year old is addicted to this, and he's not a kid
that really liked writing before, but you can say, “I want to write a horror story,” and it says, "Ooh, a horror story,
how spine-tingling and thrilling. Let's dive into the world of eerie shadows
and chilling mysteries." And this is an activity where
the student will write two sentences, and then the AI will write two sentences. And so they collaborate
together on a story. The student writes,
"Beatrice was a misunderstood ghost. She wanted to make friends
but kept scaring them by accident." And the AI says, "Poor Beatrice, a lonely
spirit yearning for companionship. One day she stumbled
upon an old abandoned mansion," etc. I encourage you all
to hopefully one day try this. This is surprisingly fun. Now to even more directly
hit this use case. And what I'm about to show you, everything I showed you so far is actually already part of Khanmigo,
and what I’m about to show you, we haven't shown to anyone yet,
this is a prototype. We hope to be able to launch it
in the next few months, but this is to directly use AI,
use generative AI, to not undermine English
and language arts but to actually enhance it in ways that we couldn't have even
conceived of even a year ago. This is reading comprehension. The students reading Steve Jobs's
famous speech at Stanford. And then as they get to certain points, they can click on that little question. And the AI will then Socratically,
almost like an oral exam, ask the student about things. And the AI can highlight
parts of the passage. Why did the author use that word? What was their intent? Does it back up their argument? They can start to do stuff
that once again, we never had the capability
to give everyone a tutor, everyone a writing coach to actually
dig in to reading at this level. And you could go on the other side of it. And we have whole work flows
that helps them write, helps them be a writing coach,
draw an outline. But once a student actually
constructs a draft, and this is where
they're constructing a draft, they can ask for feedback once again, as you would expect
from a good writing coach. In this case, the student
will say, let's say, "Does my evidence support my claim?" And then the AI, not only
is able to give feedback, but it's able to highlight certain parts
of the passage and says, "On this passage, this doesn't
quite support your claim," but once again, Socratically says,
"Can you tell us why?" So it's pulling the student,
making them a better writer, giving them far more feedback than they've ever been able
to actually get before. And we think this is going to dramatically
accelerate writing, not hurt it. Now, everything I've talked
about so far is for the student. But we think this could be equally
as powerful for the teacher to drive more personalized
education and frankly save time and energy for themselves
and for their students. So this is an American history
exercise on Khan Academy. It's a question
about the Spanish-American War. And at first it's in student mode. And if you say, “Tell me the answer,”
it’s not going to tell the answer. It's going to go into tutoring mode. But that little toggle
which teachers have access to, they can turn student mode off
and then it goes into teacher mode. And what this does is it turns into -- You could view it
as a teacher's guide on steroids. Not only can it explain the answer, it can explain how you might
want to teach it. It can help prepare
the teacher for that material. It can help them create lesson plans,
as you could see doing right there. It'll eventually help them
create progress reports and help them, eventually, grade. So once again, teachers spend
about half their time with this type of activity,
lesson planning. All of that energy can go back to them or go back to human interactions
with their actual students. (Applause) So, you know, one point I want to make. These large language models
are so powerful, there's a temptation to say like, well, all these people are just going
to slap them onto their websites, and it kind of turns the applications
themselves into commodities. And what I've got to tell you is that’s one of the reasons
why I didn’t sleep for two weeks when I first had access
to GPT-4 back in August. But we quickly realized
that to actually make it magical, I think what you saw
with Khanmigo a little bit, it didn't interact with you
the way that you see ChatGPT interacting. It was a little bit more magical,
it was more Socratic, it was clearly much better at math than what most people
are used to thinking. And the reason is, there was a lot of work
behind the scenes to make that happen. And I could go through the whole list
of everything we've been working on, many, many people for over six,
seven months to make it feel magical. But perhaps the most
intellectually interesting one is we realized, and this was an idea
from an OpenAI researcher, that we could dramatically improve
its ability in math and its ability in tutoring if we allow the AI to think
before it speaks. So if you're tutoring someone and you immediately just start talking
before you assess their math, you might not get it right. But if you construct
thoughts for yourself, and what you see on the right
there is an actual AI thought, something that it generates for itself
but it does not share with the student. then its accuracy went up dramatically, and its ability to be a world-class tutor
went up dramatically. And you can see it's talking
to itself here. It says, "The student got a different
answer than I did, but do not tell them they made a mistake. Instead, ask them to explain
how they got to that step." So I'll just finish off, hopefully, you know, what I’ve just shown you
is just half of what we are working on, and we think this is just
the very tip of the iceberg of where this can actually go. And I'm pretty convinced, which I wouldn't
have been even a year ago, that we together have a chance
of addressing the 2 sigma problem and turning it into a 2 sigma opportunity, dramatically accelerating
education as we know it. Now, just to take a step back
at a meta level, obviously we heard a lot today,
the debates on either side. There's folks who take
a more pessimistic view of AI, they say this is scary, there's all these dystopian scenarios, we maybe want to slow down,
we want to pause. On the other side,
there are the more optimistic folks that say, well, we've gone
through inflection points before, we've gone through
the Industrial Revolution. It was scary, but it all
kind of worked out. And what I'd argue right now is I don't think this is like
a flip of a coin or this is something
where we'll just have to, like, wait and see which way it turns out. I think everyone here and beyond, we are active participants
in this decision. I'm pretty convinced
that the first line of reasoning is actually almost
a self-fulfilling prophecy, that if we act with fear and if we say, "Hey, we've just got to stop
doing this stuff," what's really going to happen
is the rule followers might pause, might slow down, but the rule breakers,
as Alexandr [Wang] mentioned, the totalitarian governments,
the criminal organizations, they're only going to accelerate. And that leads to what I am pretty
convinced is the dystopian state, which is the good actors
have worse AIs than the bad actors. But I'll also, you know,
talk to the optimists a little bit. I don't think that means that, oh, yeah, then we should just relax
and just hope for the best. That might not happen either. I think all of us together
have to fight like hell to make sure that we put the guardrails, we put in -- when the problems arise -- reasonable regulations. But we fight like hell
for the positive use cases. Because very close to my heart, and obviously there's many
potential positive use cases, but perhaps the most powerful use case and perhaps the most poetic use case
is if AI, artificial intelligence, can be used to enhance HI,
human intelligence, human potential and human purpose. Thank you. (Applause)
