What does AI mean for education?

I would hate to see a future where teachers outsource to AI the parts that I think really make good education, which is the connection pieces when you really understand your students, it can spend time with them. And AI can be used in so many ways that allow teachers to have more time to do that kind of work. And I'm excited for us to talk with institutions and discuss with them ways where we can amplify that knowledge they already have. Hi everyone. We're here to talk about my favorite topic, which is AI and education. My name is Drew Bent. I lead our work here in education on beneficial deployments. Formerly was a high school math teacher, parents or educators. I worked in education on profits, and would definitely consider myself a lifelong learner. I'm joined here by my wonderful colleagues who work in education across the organization. Do you want to start, Zoe? Happy to. Yeah, hi, I'm Zoe. I'm on our education team here at Anthropic, and I support all of our non-technical audiences, including educating teachers and students about both our products and AI in general. Hi, I'm Maggie, and I founded and currently manage and support said education team, which we fondly internally call the Ministry of Education. Hi, I'm Efrem. I'm a Product Engineering Manager, and I've also helped build some of our products for the pacing education. So I think it's helpful to start here with why are we discussing education in the first place? Or why do we even work on education in the first place at this general purpose, AI lab? We all know, of course, that at Anthropic, we care a lot about studying both the potential of the technology that we're building, but also the risks. I think education is the perfect example and sort of embodiment of that, because of course there's massive benefits as we'll talk about in this conversation, but there's also a lot of concerns we have about the impacts of AI in education. And so when we think about the benefits, we think about, if had many conversations with you all about how AI can prevent teacher burnout, how it can transform, and really to marketize access to high quality learning and tutoring, how it can change, how and what teachers teach. But then we also, of course, see the other side of it, which are all the risks and the concerns around the teachers have about how AI could lead to more cheating and is leading to more cheating, of course, but also serve the more existential risks of how do we make sure that these tools are actually enhancing an augmenting human thought as opposed to replacing it? And so my hope for this conversation is that we can sort of dig into all of these nuances, but also talk about the practical type of work that we're doing in anthropic to work towards these issues. So maybe to get started, I would love to hear, you know, I know all of you, I've known you for a while, but I don't necessarily know all of your stories on what got you interested working on education in the first place. So Maggie, you would love to start with you and what brought you into this work? Well, my interest education is twofold. I think professionally, education and communication has always been part of every job that ever held up into anthropic. And I think personally, I, you know, have two lovely kids in my life, and I am grappling with just as every other parent is in this era. What can I do to help nurture them to being kind of intelligent, thoughtful thinkers, and critically engaged individuals as they grow up in the AI age? One is a lot more professional interest and where I feel like I can make a difference. And a latter is like pressingly concerning to my immediate core as someone who is a guardian to young minds. How are you, Afram? Well, so I started my career in academia. I studied physics, maths, and I assumed I was going to be doing research for most of my life before switching to tech. And I've taught classes when I was at MIT, I've been on a junk faculty, so education has been something I've always been interested in. When it comes to AI and education, I have two children on college, so I worry every day about what they're learning, how they're learning, what will they do once they graduate. I'm also very passionate about what I'm sure we'll talk about later on, how do institutions deal with AI and their education. So just a lot of stuff here that is both personal, but also looking forward to society. What does AI mean to education that I'm really interested in? I mean, I think you and I both have children or lives is one of the most pressingly concerning things where it makes it so real for you right now. And I think that your kids are college age, and so they're trying to figure out what they're doing in their lives. And then my kids are younger, but I see it on the horizon that very soon, there's a strong decision points where you can decide how to start nurturing this kind of thinking. And I feel like if you don't catch it early, which is why we care about education at all the different ages, that it can go pretty badly and compound, right? Yeah, I feel like that's hitting on a lot of why I got into education in the first place, which is I've just very deep-seated belief that education is one of the most important things we can do to make change in our society. I think most people can agree on that. And when I pivoted from the classroom into tech, it was because I wanted to work for organizations that could do that change at scale. I think there's some things with our education system that I would fix if I had a magic wand. And I'm hoping that AI can help accelerate some of that change for the better, but also very much recognizing that we've had a responsibility to make sure that that change goes well today. And then 10 years into the future. There was a great quote from a professor that I talked to at some point where they were saying that all the problems in academia have existed for a while as an institution. It's just that AI is the forcing function that makes everyone deal with it now instead of putting it down. I guess kicking the can down the road, right? Yeah. So I'm excited for us to deal with our terrorists. I'm just realizing now we have the parents on this side in the front. We bring a good center for our actors here. And yeah, I think on my end also my parents are educators. And so it's always looking up to them and wanting to do what they did. But I think it's helpful to also ground this conversation and some of the research that we've all been working on here. And so it was I think late last year that our societal impacts team at Anthropic had done research into all the ways that users are using Clawd and found that some of the top uses were in education. I think we had seen this serve in all chatbots to some extent, but I think it was also a wake-up call for us because what's interesting about it is that these LLMs, as we all know, were built not with education in mind, very much on answering questions. They're fine-tuned that way. They're meant for, you know, these productivity tasks. And then it's kind of this interesting emergent, you know, phenomenon that they're very helpful for education, potentially sometimes destructive as well for people's learning. And so we start to dig deeper into that. But I think what stood out in the research is one stat that always comes up is 47% of the student interactions on Clawd were very direct transactional types of interactions with little engagement. I know in Magnair, we're looking at data first as sort of a wake-up call because again, we have all these incredible ways that you can use as a psychotic tutor, but then to see that in some cases, you know, people are using it to just do their homework. And I know as a teacher, like for me, I sort of think about the different cognitive skills that I want, you know, my students to learn. And, you know, at the base level, it may be things like remembering a fact and understanding some knowledge. But then you want to eventually get them to the level of synthesis and, you know, creation, of course, you know, we call this blooms tax onomy. But what we saw in the data that I think was fascinating was we started to study Clawd's interactions in these conversations and saw how well Clawd is performing on these cognitive tasks. And found that Clawd was performing at the these top levels of creating and analyzing when, again, as a teacher, that's what you want your students to do. Yeah, I think the students are kind of flipping the script on this in a way that's concerning to us as educators. And I don't know if that's necessarily, I think the first blush reaction is that that's a bad thing. But I think part of what I want to challenge us to think about and the world to think about is, is there like a novel taxonomy where that's the baseline. And then you can build on top of that to something new that hasn't been possible for AI. We've also explored how the, you know, educators are using it and they're experimenting with it for, you know, great lesson plans, grading. I think it was one Northeastern professor who told us that they're never going to assign a traditional essay again because they just had too many students submitting, you know, these AI assignments. Whether these Clawd or not, we don't know. But I think that's that sort of raised law of questions for us. I feel like you really hit on two of the things that we talk about a lot with educators, which is like AI is both changing how students learn in, in like also what they need to learn, right? Like I don't actually know if it's important that students have the same memorization that they would have needed to have like 10 years ago, because they have AI tools readily available or in theory they should have AI tools readily available. And then, you know, when you get into like higher levels of academia, there are potentially skills that we're teaching today that won't be as important in the future. And so it's, it's a ton for teachers to grapple with. I'd love to hear from all of you. What is one thing to really excited about to is how AI can transform teaching and learning? I think one thing that really stands out to me is interactive learning experiences. I have this very vivid memory of when I was in the classroom. My students did a virus simulator game that was fully programmed. They were the virus and they worked into the cell and they replicated. And the engagement that I saw from my classroom that day was unlike anything else. And I think most teachers have seen something like this. But I really let's you do this at scale with any subject, right? Like imagine you're talking to a historical figure and teachers can put a lot of guardrails around this with the right tools. But I just am very excited to see that space developing over time. I think the interactivity is also really interesting to me. There's so much assistance you can get from AI that is really hard resourcing wise to get the interactivity especially in like low resource regions where, you know, many students don't have access to like a personal career coach that can walk you through how to interview properly, right, at an organization. And with the power of an AI like clog, you can like upload like the job listing your resume and so on and just ask Claude to help you roleplay through these things. I think there's a lot of really engaging interesting roleplay experiences, whether or not with a dead historical figure or with some sort of like coaching situation that can really help you through a lot of experiences where an external perspective would be a men's help is just really hard to get that other human being to find time to sit down with you especially in regions with low resource. Related to that, I've been very excited about how teachers are transforming their assessments with it. I was talking to a teacher a few weeks ago who at one point, I think during the pandemic had taken time over, you know, Zoom to basically do oral interviews with all the students and really get to assess them on a more holistic way. But of course, that didn't scale very well. And so stop doing it. But then with these AI tools coming out was able to now sort of use the same rubric and start to have, you know, all the students doing on regular basis, these sort of assessments back and forth with the chatbot. And then the professor, the teacher, is able to review them and assess them based on the process of going back and forth with the AI. I think assessment is a very interesting use of AI. I could envision in the future where it isn't a specific moment in time where you get assessed. But there's a continuous of interaction with the AI developing a much deeper understanding of the early understanding of the concept behind this algebraical concept or not. One thing that I'm really excited about, AI could provide this personalized learning. There was a research stand on 101-2 training. And what they found is that on average, the average student that had 101-2 training is better than the 98 percentile of students that didn't have 101-2 training, which is a classroom setup. And that was with you and two during? That was with humans hard to scale. Exactly. Hard to scale. The student may be like an hour of 101-2 training a day. With AI, you get continuous 101-2 training. And that is available to everybody throwing out on the world. So I think that has a great potential to transform the world and how people learn. Yeah, I agree. I think there's a course of lots of challenges that as people have looked into those studies and how do you replicate best in all of it. But I think it's a very useful north star of what could be possible if you can have a very personalized but also personal type of tutoring experience. Absolutely. Everything today, we have classes maybe segregated by students out in the top. Or you take an AP class, if you're in that student group or not. But every student could have their own journey. Those that are able to advance, get advanced very quickly. Those that need help can get that personalized help. So it reminds me of a really interesting use case that I talked to a teacher about where you kind of always want to meet students where they're most interested. That's a very modest story type of approach where it's like, what is your favorite topic and then what kind of match all the subjects to that? That's really hard to scale. But there was a teacher I talked to that's just like, I asked my students what their favorite things are. They tell me a little story. And then now every single handout that you have like the same math concepts, maybe even same problems. But each handout is made for each student. And it's like exactly according to their interests. It's got a story that's engaging to them problems they actually care about. And like she's noticed an uptick in the engagement for sure because suddenly these students have a throughline through every subject in the classroom is building on itself in a way that's super personalized to their interests which like if that was in every classroom, imagine how much students would just lead into exactly. So how are you thinking about that question of what's worth learning in the age of AI? As somebody who is in product development, what I see is this absence of product layer that would help both students and teachers use AI very effectively. For example, my daughter's class is just taking Python. So both of my children are studying computer science. So very relevant for their exams writing Python, they want them to write on a piece of paper because they're afraid about cheating. What the reason it is such a challenging now is there aren't products for the students could use to learn. There is also not products for the teachers to use. It was a sign in grade homeworks. All of this are very light-lifts like from what we can do as a product offering. But in the absence of an intentional product that is built on soap of LLM's, exposes a lot of uncertainty, fear and abuse of the technology that we're building. So that's my take on this is that it was a little bit of support in product thinking so much of the uncertainty and cheating and so on could be mitigated. One of the things I struggle with is we can backtrack from how jobs are changing and start to think about how university education should be changing. But then when we think about kids to the age of your kids in K12, it's an even harder question about what will be the skills, the durable skills that they need years from now. So I don't have the answer, but I always look to you, you're the you-maggator. Oh man, it's a challenging one. I think that what resonates a lot with the teachers that I talk to is that a lot of the skills you teach young minds about how critically think about the world around them in the world of humans can be quite applied to AI, especially in the world of just critical thinking about the facts that you're presented with. There's a stage of development where you go from trusting every single thing everyone says to you to starting to think about well, what are the other things that you need to know in order to believe that this is true. With my kids, it's like a two part framework where part one is just the importance of education. I think it's more important than ever where you can't tell if an AI is bad at math, if you're bad at math or you don't actually know what the right answer is, right? We're not at the stage where AI is like always reliable, like a calculator or something. And so just understanding that and emphasizing that learning, reading, writing, science, math and so on is still very important. And the latter part is developing them into like critical consumers of information where it's not just about this is what a fact that's given to me is but like why is that the case, how do I trust that's true? What are the areas that need to check in order to ensure that I can kind of corroborate what I'm learning here? And that kind of critical thinking skill, you can develop from a pretty young age, regardless of if it's an AI giving you the information or another human being giving you the information, that kind of critical thinking I think is one of the most important things to get at a like an early age. That skepticism, curiosity and combination. Yeah, I want to add on to that because I feel like a lot of the like teachers and parents that I talk to feel this like really intense pressure to have the answers and to know what to teach their kids and to know like how to conduct the lessons in their classroom. And I think like kids are so much smarter than we give them credit for. And so there's something really profound about just sitting with whether it's your students or your actual children and just like learning with them, asking AI something and then evaluating what comes out of that together and like having kids reflect in building their own frameworks for interacting with AI that I think is really, really powerful. And we all hear, we don't have the answers. Therefore no one does. Obviously we're working really hard to figure out what they are. But I think just encouraging that reflection at any age wherever it's developmentally appropriate is like one of the best things people can be doing right now. You know, I recommend sitting down with your kids and going through AI together, right? Like ask a question and then say, well, this was was really confidently said. But is that enough when someone says something confidently? Is that enough for you to believe that? And hopefully the answers no, right? What else can you check? Can you look somewhere else? What information do you need to think about this and genuinely internalize that that's correct or not? That exercises, I think super fruitful. And I think the the the converse side is to kind of demonstrate what it's like to not know something. I think that a lot of times like showing uncertainty and modeling for your kids when you don't know something. What is your own process of finding that out? Right? What is your process for learning? I think that like what I want to impart upon my kids is like finding the answer is just the start of your learning journey. And I think for many institution schools is so on. Getting to the answer is really what we're testing right now. But if we make that the beginning of someone's journey, especially learning with AI, then that I think opens up a whole series of doorways. And so yeah, at home, I, you know, tried to show my process for discovering something and that adults don't always have the answers. Kids are super smart and they're able to find answers on their own in ways that if we just talk and ask the right questions, then they'll be able to discern for themselves what is true and what isn't and not just trust things at face value. Yeah. And I love the way you framed out of like modeling how to work through that problem. Modeling uncertainty is just such an important thing. We're all uncertain. So let's use that to our advantage. And we don't do that nearly enough. I think like we want to project this kind of confidence. And I think sometimes it can be detrimental to development of a child to kind of just tell them to trust everything everyone says or they adults around them always know what they're talking about because I think that that gives them it's a crutch right to not actually have to think through like truth for yourself and to find your own truth. I think one thing that sort of remains unchanged is that how human things learn. Right. We learn basic things first. We learn addition subscription and sort of keeps building up. So that will remain true whether we have AI to reach an edge or next generation AI. So I think where I see I don't know what is that I feel the study is, but either way we still have to go through this process of learning. And I think the great problem is now is that you can actually use AI to advance your learning to gain greater even understanding. So uncertainty may be in two different ways. In one way sort of personal is I study physics because of all this curious as a child. So if you are a curious person who wants to learn about the world, my god, what an opportunity now because AI could just teach you about anything you want to know. But if you're thinking about sort of a career like what happens next, how do I make it living, then no matter what we'd have to be able to use the AI technology to make yourself like you plus AI be a more capable employee. I agree, although I do think some of the fundamentals are changing in terms of the order in which we learn things. So one example I go back to is you talked about programming and what computer science, you know, when I learned how to program probably similar to you, I spent 90% of my CS education learning how to write code and write algorithms. And then maybe 10% of my time learning how to read other people's code and review it. And then now of course, at Anthropic, when I program with all the coding agents and clot code and all of that, I spend, you know, maybe 10% of my time writing the code, but 90% of my time reading the code. And so it has made me wonder, you know, we usually learn how to read before we write just as kids. But then with coding, we often spend a lot more of a time writing and then reading. And so it is starting to make me wonder like, do we have to revisit some of those fundamentals and like maybe a core part of an intro is CS students education should be to think about reading and being able to discern good code from bad code and all of these things. So I do want us to bring us back to what is Anthropic doing here. I think it's important and we all know of course that we have a responsibility here. We are building this technology that's having this impact, you know, on the education system, even though we didn't intend it that way initially. And so we have a responsibility as a company, as a public benefit corporation, but particularly as individuals working in this company, former educators. And so I think it'd be helpful to sort of talk through what are the things we're doing? What are we wrestling with? I don't know if, you know, Zoe or Maggie, you want to talk about some of the work we've been doing with AI fluency. Yeah, yeah, happy to start. So I work on education content. So that's one of the main ways that I can make a difference in this space. So one of the things I'm really excited about is our AI fluency courses. We partnered with two professors, Joe Feller and Rick Daken, who built this really great framework about how to think about using AI. And what's cool about this is we're taking a step back from the products that are available today and the prompting and kind of like all these hacks that you see out there's a lot of them. And there is a lot of them, right? It's like it's pretty overwhelming. And they get outdated so fast. And they seek it out. And so the idea here is we want to give people a tool that they can use to understand the interactions that they're having with AI and work towards interactions that are efficient, effective, ethical and safe. That's the AI fluency definition. So we have this core course that I think is pretty great. And then we've also created spin-off courses for educators and for students as well as a longer course for educators who are interested in teaching AI fluency. And so the idea is that anyone who goes through one of these courses is kind of better equipped to assess their own AI interactions. I talked about like learning with your students earlier and the power of reflecting on your AI interactions. And it's core. That's really what this course is about. It's just reminding everyone, teachers, students, parents that they have autonomy in their AI interactions. So that's one thing I'm excited about. Yeah, I think the interesting thing about our AI fluency work is the fact that we're taking a step back to the fundamentals. When we started this AI fluency work way back when I don't know if you remember it, Drew, the question that we were trying to answer was in all of these profanationary tips and so on, they are developed by other humans, right? And so not as if we at a Throbic have greater superpowers than everyone else externally. We just have a different way of thinking about approaching models. And it's like, how do you teach that mindset to somebody? Because it's always point. It's like in all of us. That sounds so cheesy, but like we have that capability to be critical thinkers that engage with this. And I think sometimes the fear of needing to get it right, kind of supersedes our ability to just experiment. And what I love about AI fluency is we're opening the door to experimentation and saying, you can try these things. They may not work for you. And it's just as important to learn when they don't work for you. And when you shouldn't use AI, as it is to learn when you can use it. And there's something that we say an edge-hage team every now and then, which I think resonates a lot, which is like we would much rather teach a million people to not use AI than watch a billion people to become dependent on the technology. Right? And in practice, that can be quite hard. But I think it's a very solid start. I still remember when I first heard you say that. I was so happy. I knew I'd been, come to the right company because here I wasn't an AI lab. And I was saying, yeah, I don't think we should use AI in this case, sir. Let's teach people how not to use AI. It's like given them the tools to make their decision on their right. That's the atmosphere. Back to critical thinking every time. But I think so, of course, part of it is an education and a training and awareness part. But we are also building products and models that are used out there in the wild. And so I think the work that Ephraim you and your team have been doing on learning mode is a really important part of it. So we'd love for you to share more about how did they even come about. So learning mode is a set of features that positions Claude as a tutor to students. Students could come in, for example, and upload their assignments. And rather than answer the questions explicitly, it would help the students through the material that is covered in their classroom. It would guide them through how to answer the question. It will tutor them. It will also help them prepare for exams, for example, by showing them flashcards based on the content that they've uploaded. It's actually very much of a grassroots effect. So a lot of people, the company that are really passionate about education and wanting to add education tools to the main product line. So what's learning mode, what we've did is added, it's really like small features here and there, but then tailor Claude app to be really good at helping students with learning. Along the line, we've also added a few more features like in expanding how much content you get into projects, so that more and more content can go in there, connecting to classroom management systems, so that content could flow in and out very easily. So that's just the starting point and of like get out what I think this could be in the future. I think what's interesting is some of that early research that led into learning mode is we were interviewing university students and we sort of knew that the educators wanted some form of learning mode. They kept saying, where's your learning mode? And so I found it's like, okay, now we have to go ahead and build it. But it was really the student who I think really drove the point home for us because they of course used a different word, which is brain rot, but we heard them talking about brain rot and they realized that in the short term, it could, they can use AI chat bots to help them just finish an assignment. But when it comes to actually studying for their midterm and understanding and termizing the concepts, they wanted a version of Claude where they didn't have to prompt it in all these different ways. Exactly. They didn't want to just give it an assignment, it just pops the answer. And they said even assignment, it guides you through the answers. If they're studying for a final, you can just show them flashcards that helps them memorize and learn the content. So that is what learning mode is. It's that just completely changing the interface in Claude so it focused on learning. And how long did this first version take to build? So the initial version took very short period of time. This is a number of people that was extremely passionate about adding this capability. It took us about two weeks from start to finish and it was amazing. Incredible. Yeah. The other aspect of this of course is we can work on these training programs, we can improve our products and our model. But then of course, it's how do we partner with outside world? We're just, we're a tech company. We're a small part of this much broader ecosystem. And so you've been doing a lot of the work we've done partnering with institutions like the Teachers Union, AFT, love to hear more about what goes into those partnerships and why are we so focused on them? Yeah, I mean, you and me both. But yeah, I think again, something we're excited about is just like we have our classroom experience mine is relatively outdated. I was in the classroom before COVID. Like I know it's a very different from their free app. Free app. Free app. Free app. Free app. Free app. Free app. Free app. It's like they spend doesn't even matter anymore. But we get to partner with these organizations to learn from teachers who are actually in the classroom and professors who are in universities to understand the real problems that they're having in their schools and the real benefits like things that are going really well and lean into both of those whether it's with education materials to train teachers up or you know product solutions that give them more autonomy and tools. And so yeah. The hard of this is like this is a collective issue, right? Like a humanity-wide collective issue. And we are far from knowing every single thing that we need to help resolve this. I think like the through line for all of our work is to bring more people into the conversation. Like you can give enough people take A.F.L.N.C. courses our hope is that then they bring that knowledge to their institutions and start these conversations. And to what Zoe was saying before students are really smart and they're also really engaged in the desire to not have brain rot. Like some of the best feedback that we get comes from our student users who I think sometimes we don't give the credit for that we think well they're going to definitely want to cheat with this. They're going to but it's an institutional problem not necessarily a human I guess motivation problem I think. I think that our our best feedback like from all of our product users indicates that they don't want this reliance on these models. They want to feel like their own human capabilities are augmented and improved by this collaboration with AI. So I'm like very proud of us in general in our products for not optimizing for kind of the standard engagement metrics where we're not trying to optimize for retention or you know how much time you spend on the products or dependency on the product. And we make active product decisions you know now and into the future that sometimes actually encourage that greater augmented thinking or encourage again times what you don't use AI or as the kids call touch grass. Right? So I'm excited for us to keep going down that pathway. Yeah and I actually that was one of the most surprising things to me joining Anthropic was that it's it's not a growth optimized company. Right like most SaaS companies want to optimize for users retention all these things. And don't like has a much broader perspective on what success looks like in our products which I think is really interesting. In our product development that's not just through forward education initiatives that we had but for everything else we build. Yeah isn't about keeping users engaged in the product. This really is about having AI be beneficial deployed and impact society. I think we touched on is that like every decision to use AI somewhere or not is a deliberate choice and I'll think that we are kind of on a creating path towards AI and like being every single place and hopefully the work that we do as a company and the things we make the choices we make to build our product in certain ways can lead by example and also invite people in to start realizing that everything is a deliberate choice and it is just as good and sometimes better to just choose not to sometimes right like I would hate to see a future where teachers outsource to AI the parts that I think really make good education which is the connection pieces when you really understand your students and can spend time with them and AI can be used in so many ways that a lot teachers have more time to do that kind of work and I'm excited for us to kind of over time talk with institutions and discuss with them ways where we can amplify that knowledge they already have right the expert to partner with have generally a decently clear opinion on when AI is actively harming the education outcomes and it's just our job to listen and to try to implement that either in our products or in our educational program so we've talked a lot about yeah well when our personal views are on AI education what we're doing as it as a company but we definitely haven't solved it so what are the things we're still uncertain about I mean I'd be curious to get your takes on this you know where the things we're still trying to figure out I hear a couple things both pretty different but one thing we touched on earlier is AI is changing like what it is that you need to teach you brought up coding we are pretty sure that coding curriculums will look very different in five years I'm interested to see how things start to shift and if there's any like frameworks or really anything that we can develop to help academics along in these areas to understand what kinds of skills may be more augmented in the future in which kinds of skills are going to need additional human support like reviews or management I think we're starting to understand that in areas like computer science but it's very very early and we know this is going to affect a lot more fields so especially in higher education that's something I'm interested in I hear a lot of concerns in k12 about the different tools and trying to understand what happens to the data when you put it in those tools and I think right now there's just like massive proliferation of AI tools and classrooms and teachers and administrators are really overwhelmed for very good reasons like there's a lot of concepts that are really new to everyone there are elements of the data privacy that is new and hard to understand and so I'm really interested to see how that landscape evolves whether we need to really ramp up our education around data privacy so people can better assess the landscape or whether we start to like you know see clear winners in this space I'll just be really interested to see what happens there I think in addition to that I mean the technology is really changing made it up lately so one of the concerns and most sure how it will play out over time is how will institutions adapt they are generally slow moving and intentionally built that way and the technology pace of change has been very rapid it's harder to predict like what what happened six months from now or you from now so I think that pace of change to institutions generally adapt to new technology is one area that I'm sort of thinking about I was thinking that like just everywhere every institution feels it immense on a pressure to just do something with AI instead of doing nothing and you know I have no idea how to kind of balance or help organizations balance the fact that pressure is really real but also when it comes to education especially moving fast and breaking things is not an option right and that's just so challenging for both the individual teacher but also the entire institution at large make I kind of call that's unbundling of education one is just the knowledge itself which this AI is really good at providing personalized education but institutions provide more than just knowledge imparting knowledge into students the other is really like I have two children in college it's not just learning they're getting theirs but but also that's where they're growing that's where they're maturing learning responsibility and so forth so what AI solves you know very like really well is knowledge imparting knowledge and learning I think what we would have to do as a society moving forward is how do we leverage AI in the knowledge transfer part but also retain the institutions to for all of the other great folks that they play in society right to separate out some of the pieces exactly like the success metric of a good educator is not to do every single part of this thing but I think what you're saying is like correct do more one thing and then let AI handle things that are like maybe knowledge like acquisition oriented but not like I don't know a relationship with the student right correct right I mean one of the feedback for example we've received when we were visiting universities is that while AI assignments are very compelling that's something they would like to do but AI assignments mean students with AI they force large assignments sets that might take say six months but they could end up taking like two weeks how do you grade them right right so there is a lot of AI involvement means there's a lot of learning that could happen much much quickly as you leverage AI to do the learning aspect of it what about everything else that just those teachers institutions are providing the students I think that is where that's unbundling and you know just leveraging all the right pieces from both the technology but what the institutions do and I mean I think the best case scenario of this is reducing burnout at scale which is like the number one issue facing most of the teachers and if you unbutted only where you can maybe right right where every educator is really really talented at some things and those things bring them a lot of energy and they're exceptional at it and what if AI could you know support them in the things that don't bring them energy and I think that just creates a much more well-rounded system for their personal lives and then also for the students that they're supporting this conversation is also reminding me of like a part of the AI resiliency curriculum we have for educators that I found super compelling which is to have AI be so integrated like into the assignments the experience is so on and to instead start grading AI use and not grade the outcomes as much right going back to like how do you think about these long-term projects or how things differ in this AI world having that kind of engagement is very different and AI forward in a way that I'm excited for more institutions to adopt I think you've right on like you know in our sort of conversation one of the things have come up is when you grade you're not necessarily just grading the final result but you've created how did students arrive to that result how did they use the technology what is the back-in-force that also becomes part of the what learning is one of of our chief marketing folks here one one time sat down with me and just said you know I think the true power of AI is the process yes I think that that's really the core of what we're getting at right yeah I'm also curious from like a model training perspective what we can do to reconcile how like I think I was hiding I had a really great conversation with someone who's the philosophy of epistemics right like how do you know something is true and they made a great point about how AI more easily than any other kind of intelligence that humans have encountered can be really confident right or can can say things that sounds so realistic and it usually in a human being it takes a lot of charisma and practice to get to be someone who can say that and not say true things but with AI you're kind of encountering all the time and our human ability to discern what is true and what isn't is based on how we discern in other humans which may not be successful when you're applying to AI right that's a whole different thing to unravel and figure out how you can do you match the AI personality more to that area or do you start teaching people of a new way of discerning truth and I mean my hot take is I think that like the latter one is a little more powerful because it's also a good inoculation against all forms of like persuasive writing persuasive thinking regardless of whether or not it's an AI or a human being but that critical thinking going back to the fact that AI is just forcing us to reconcile things that already exist I think that teaching that critical thinking is really hard yeah and this goes back to like child psychology right like we had this whole generation of digital natives now who can very clearly identify a spam text when that's like really difficult for some folks and like what is the AI native generation what does that look like and what impacts does it have on on kids development like there's just things we don't know yet well to close this out because I think we could go on forever I would love to hear from all of you as we think about five years out what does success look like for teaching and learning five years is a crazy kind of time to predict the AI world I guess I'll give you my hope right I don't know if I know what success looks like but I do know what I hope for which is that in educational institutions we have like teachers have so much more time to engage individually in the relationships and the fostering portion of it you know going back to Eference Point like maybe it's not the knowledge acquisition part of things that teachers participate in as much versus like synthesizing that knowledge into the greater ecosystem of your life and the world and understanding how any given individual can best be helped to learn because we're still all unique individuals in this future and celebrating and emphasizing that uniqueness is something that I hope we can get to with education right I think five years is a very long time but I think it is success to me by then to look like every person on the planet has a person I is tutor I'm ready for them at any time and then also if we've made that transition successfully our institutions both survived and are playing the vital role they already play in our society yeah for me I think it's going back to that critical thinking piece I want every person really every student every teacher to have a shared vocabulary and cultural understanding around what it means to use AI and learning I think just a lot more discernment and reflection on and just being intentional about using AI I know I feel like I go back to this like a broken record but wouldn't it be great if like every single student could articulate when they want to use AI and when they don't want to and why like that kind of knowledge about your own habits and how you think and how you learn best that personalization of knowledge is so exciting and I'm like that's a shorthand heuristic I guess for what success could look like or maybe on the other hand like they don't have to make that decision because technology is the product is the product itself is all about to be both of those yeah together definitely the product and experience and the educational I'll have to go ahead and hand I think the thing I keep going back to which to me brings optimism because some days in this work there's a lot of pessimism jobs are changing and we have no idea what by you know our jobs are a lot of personal responsibility that would feel over any you know the things that happen but at the same time I do see in a world where you know intelligence is becoming abundant and it's always commoditized I think that will you know no longer be our defining trait as humans and that can be scary at some point but I also think that's liberating because for the last few hundred years I almost feel like we've lost some of our humanity as we know you have been just a revolution and we're able to do all these things but we're also like going into offices and doing tasks and defining ourselves by the work that we do and that may not be the thing that we can do best you know five years from now but there are so many things that a teacher does that a doctor does that are truly human that are not intelligence you know and so I I almost am excited for the things to sort of strip away and so for us and I think our education systems at the core of it to really focus on what makes this human there's an Oxford professor that said this is a great quote I think about all the time which is he says I think the age of AI will be the age of asking good questions and like that's something that doesn't necessarily come from knowing a lot right it's just about being curious and then also being a little discerning as skeptical about things you get returned which then yield better questions and I think with AI in our pocket it's a personal tutors like the world of the question space has opened up immensely and way beyond anything else we've ever had in human history and we just kind of have to steward people towards the mindset that allows them to ask the good questions there's never been a better time to have a problem there's never been never time to have a problem yep I think that's a perfect way to end well thank you all thanks for taking that time

What does AI mean for education?

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