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Sal Khan is the CEO and visionary founder of the Khan Academy. He revolutionized education in 2006 by starting his online video classes that have now reached over 150 Million people worldwide. This got the attention of the founders of OpenAI. Before they released ChatGPT3.5 in late 2022, they selected Salman Khan to test the education potential of generative AI and gave him the latest stuff. The results have been astounding. Sal Khan’ has written a book on the total transformation of education made possible by generative AI. Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing) (Viking 5/14/24). Sal’s book shows that it is possible to change the world by, as I like to say, putting a genius tutor in everyone’s pocket.

Once they were give OpenAI’s latest technology, Salman and the Khan Academy quickly realized that generative AI would enable them to revolutionize education. Fast forward to today, mid 2024, and Sal Khan has done it, his Khan Academy has created the greatest general educational tool available, Khanmigo. It is powered by ChatGPT to help both teachers and students in basic and advanced subjects. Sal Khan’s book explains his experience and AI education insights. Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing). Anyone interested in learning should read it.

Videos On Sal Kahn’s Book

I am not the only one enamored by Sal Khan and his work as an educator. Bill Gates has become friendly with Sal and calls his new book – A timely masterclass for anyone interested in the future of learning in the AI era. For once, I totally agree with Bill Gates. Bill is close to generative AI potentials and knows a rising star like Sal Khan when he sees one. See: Bill Gates on the Next ‘Big Frontier’ of Generative AI: Programming Metacognition Strategies into ChatGPT (July 26, 2024). Bill Gates sat down for a YouTube interview by Sal Khan to discuss Khan’s book and AI, which I suggest you take a few minutes to watch.

Sal Khan’s new book, Brave New Words, is a reliable, proven guidebook for navigating the new world of generative AI education. Sal has not only interviewed Bill Gates to help get the word out about his book, but he has interviewed other thought leaders in AI as well. One of my favorites is Ethan Mollick, a Professor of Management at Wharton who specializes in entrepreneurship and innovation. He wrote CO-INTELLIGENCE: Living and Working with AI (Penguin 2024). The YouTube video interview of Ethan Mollick, who is also an expert in educational games and simulation, can be found here. Watch the video and read the book. I am.

If you are into education you need to subscribe to the Khan Academy YouTube channel. For another great interview see the YouTube of Sal Khan talking to Greg Brockman in 2023. Brockman was still with OpenAI at the time. Below is a screen shot of the video followed by a transcript of one particularly interesting excerpt. You will see how it has always been a part of OpenAI’s motivation to create an AI capable of serving as a personal tutor to everyone, everywhere, at an affordable price. This dream is already starting to come true. Educators like Mollick and Khan are helping to make it happen.

Here is a transcript of a excerpt from the Khan Brockman video. 13:50 to 15:61

SAL: And I, I guess one question I have is, you know, why did you reach out to us back then?

GREG: Yeah, well, for me personally, I’ve always felt like one of the motivations for building AI systems, or trying to build AGIs, to get everyone a personal tutor, like I personally, I think many people have a story of that one teacher who really understood them, who helped them achieve and get excited about a subject. And you just imagine what would happen if everyone had access to such a tutor 24/7, who can really understand them and motivate them.

I feel like that is so aligned with what Khan Academy is building. And I, you know, that the potential that you want to unlock at every student. And so it was just like when we realized maybe we can actually make a dent in education, maybe this could be applied there. It was so clear that that Khan Academy was the first port of call.

SAL: And since then, you know, I guess as we’ve worked together, and obviously now the GPT-4 is out there, what are you hoping this becomes? Like how do you, how do you hope the education world leverages this? Famously when ChatGPT came out, it caused a lot of stress in the education world. People were like, oh, kids are gonna use this to cheat on their essays or do their homework. How should educators be thinking about this right now?

GREG: Yeah, I think that I would say that there’s a sort of, you know, education specific version of what I’ve been saying generally, right? That there’s opportunities, there’s risks. And I think figuring out how to navigate that is really important. And you have to lean into that tension, right? So that, I think it is important that people learn to think for themselves, but I think it’s also really important that students can be, you know, sort of get the best out of technology and that we’re making this technology very accessible and available to people who may not be able to get great educational tools otherwise.

And so I think that there’s, you know, my hope is that we serve as a platform that teachers, educators are able to shape to their liking and to help sort of work with their students and to fill gaps that they can’t. And so, you know, I think that kind of applications.

I’d actually be kind of curious, Sal, what you’ve been seeing as the ones, that you’re most excited about.

SAL: Well, you know, obviously, we’ve been putting a lot into this and we’re very excited, you know, we’ve even demoed, you know, what we’re calling Khanmigo, which is essentially the incarnation of the AI on Khan Academy with some large school districts, some of whom have famously banned ChatGPT. And there’s, you know, they’re giving us the feedback, this is what we wanted.

We wanted to harness the powers of this technology, but put some guardrails around it, so that it’s being used productively for students so that it, you know, teachers can kind of see what they’re doing, that it’s pedagogically sound now.

Now it is interesting that it has created a really big debate where people are like, well this is great if they’re within the sandbox, but then what’s to stop them from going someplace else? And someone else is gonna create an application that uses the API to do something, you know, here or there. So there, I think there are some real questions there.

Highlights from Sal’s Book According to Bill Gates

Bill Gates wrote a book review of Sal Khans’s Brave New Words that I suggest you read. Here are a few excerpts from Bill’s review:

Brave New Words is a masterclass. Chapter by chapter, Sal takes readers through his predictions—some have already come true since the book was written—for AI’s many applications in education. His main argument: AI will radically improve both student outcomes and teacher experiences, and help usher in a future where everyone has access to a world-class education.

But drawing on his experience creating Khanmigo, an AI-powered tutor, Sal makes a compelling case that AI-powered technologies will be different. That’s because we finally have a way to give every student the kind of personalized learning, support, and guidance that’s historically been out of reach for most kids in most classrooms. As Sal puts it, “Getting every student a dedicated on-call human tutor is cost prohibitive.” AI tutors, on the other hand, aren’t.

Conclusion

Khan’s book, Brave New Words, shows how one of the top creative companies in the world, the Khan Academy, is successfully implementing generative AI in public education. Their initial results are very encouraging. Khan’s work, especially through tools like Khanmigo, demonstrates that AI can be harnessed to provide equitable educational opportunities to students of all backgrounds. We are entering an era of human-AI instruction where human teachers coach, inspire, supervise and verify that the human students are truly learning and growing from the AI tutors who have unlimited time and attention.

Brave New Words is a kind of roadmap for the future of education. This future will challenge everyone, especially teachers and school administrators, to rethink traditional paradigms, embrace the possibilities of AI, and new human-AI hybrid work flows.

Sal Khan is leading the way for educators in all fields, even advanced fields such as law and legal technology. Khan’s vision offers valuable lessons on how AI can be integrated into both basic and advanced education. CLEs and traditional legal training methods should evolve with the improving AI systems. The future of education is bright, but only if we approach it with the wisdom, caution, and ethical commitment that leaders like Sal Khan exemplify.

Ralph Losey Copyright 2024 (not including videos and quotes, of course)

This entry was posted on Friday, August 9th, 2024 at 2:32 pm and is filed under AI Ethics, AI Instruction, Book, ChatGPT, informaton, Lawyers Duties, Technology, wisdom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.