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Khan Academy Kids: Learning!

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• PERSONALIZED LEARNING EXPERIENCE: Adaptive learning path allows each child to learn at their own pace.
• ROBUST CURRICULUM: Reading & literacy, language, math, executive function, and logic
• JOYFUL LEARNING: Five whimsical characters encourage children to think and learn through highly interactive games and activities
• EMOTIONAL AND PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT: Social-emotional, motor & physical development, and creative expression
• AWARD-WINNING CONTENT: 5 stars from Common Sense Media for Educational Value and Ease of Play
• CREATED BY A TEAM OF EXPERTS: Developed in collaboration with experts at the Stanford Graduate School of Education
• PARENT PARTICIPATION: View child's progress on activities and topics and read books with your child

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• Access information about networks
• Required to be able to access the camera device
• Open network sockets
• Read from external storage
• Record audio
• PowerManager WakeLocks to keep processor from sleeping or screen from dimming
• Write to external storage
• Allows installation of home screen shortcuts
• Allows an application to read device settings
• Allows an application to uninstall home screen shortcuts

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Customers like the graphics, age range, value, and ease of use of the mobile application. They mention that it looks interesting, has cute games, and is age appropriate for kids. Some appreciate that it's free with the option to donate. They also appreciate that the app is simple and easy to navigate.

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Customers find the lessons fun and interactive. They also say the app is a great tool for keeping their little ones learning. They appreciate the offline library, independent learning capabilities, and fun characters. Customers also mention that the app keeps kids entertained and provides learning opportunities in a wide variety of subjects.

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Customers find the Khan Academy kids app to be a great program. They say it's an excellent app for independent learning, and the content is well thought out. Customers also mention that the app keeps their interest and flows well with offline materials.

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Customers find the mobile application very user friendly, good for learning, and simple. They also mention that it's easy for toddlers to navigate through and doesn't have a bunch of extra buttons.

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Customers appreciate the value of the mobile application. They say it is free without ads and offers the option to donate. They also appreciate that the content is free and entertaining.

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Customers find the app age appropriate for kids. They say the content is tailored to their ages and is easy to use. Customers also say it covers all ages two years old through SAT prep. They mention that it's kid friendly and very easy to operate.

"...It is great for both my six year old and three year old and they can work at different levels.And no ads on the tablet." Read more

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Customers appreciate that the mobile application has no ads. They also say that it's a great educational app with no in-app purchases or crazy ads.

"...It's fun and educational, no pesky ads , has a solid offline mode, and did I mention it's free?..." Read more

"...There are no weird pop-ups, no in-app purchases , nothing to upgrade to...." Read more

"...And no ads on the tablet ." Read more

"...Best of all, it doesn't have any type of advertising , so your child will learn and not waste time...." Read more

Customers find the content of the mobile application amazing, with appropriate story telling and context uses. They appreciate the fiction and non-fiction books, which are interactive.

"...teaching them all sorts of things, plus there's a section with read-along books that my kiddo absolutely adores...." Read more

"Prepares them for kindergarten and first grader well. It will also read stories and do recordings of child speech." Read more

"This game is awesome. Wish I had found it sooner. There is so many games so it keep the kids learning and entertained for hours...." Read more

"...It truly is free and CHOCK FULL of amazing stuff . Highly recommend." Read more

Customers find the graphics interesting, cute, and interactive. They also say the games are charming and fun without being fast-paced and flashy. Customers also mention that the animation is adorable.

"absolutely love and will forever recommend this to any parent. It’s super cute and I love simple songs...." Read more

"...The colors are so bright and vivid and it's easy for a toddler to navigate through...." Read more

"...There's so much to do and the quality of the animation and content is stunning , especially when you consider that it's free!..." Read more

"...background music seems to be pretty much ALL acoustic instruments & CLASSY !..." Read more

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How to Use Khan Academy

Ready to get started.

With Official Digital SAT Prep on Khan Academy ® , you can sharpen your strengths and boost your challenge areas. The course content is developed in partnership with College Board, so you know you're getting official practice directly from the people who created the test. Best of all, it's free!

Here's a snapshot of what you'll find on Khan Academy:

• Practice test breakdowns: After you've taken an SAT practice test in Bluebook™, log in to My Practice to view your scores. From your scorecard or the Score Details page, click the Practice on Khan Academy button to access a special walk-through course that provides a detailed explanation of every question on that practice test. At the end of each explanation, there's a link to a lesson that covers the skills you need to answer questions correctly.
• Leveled practice: Khan Academy's Official Digital SAT Prep course covers every skill on the test at three levels: Foundations, Medium, and Advanced. Read our study tips below to learn how to make leveled practice work for you.
• Video examples: Each skill in the course features short video walk-throughs of example questions at different difficulty levels. Most videos are around 5 minutes long. Tip: Pause the video as you watch so you can follow along and try to answer the question yourself.
• Diagnostics, quizzes, and tests: Not sure where to start with Khan Academy? Click into the Digital SAT Reading and Writing course or the Digital SAT Math course and take a Course Challenge, a short test covering all the skills on that test to help you identify which areas to focus on. Once you've started the course, you can also take short skill-specific quizzes and unit tests to check your progress toward mastery.

Khan Academy Study Tips

• It may be tempting to spend all your time reviewing the skills where you need the most help, but try breaking up those intense study sessions with a short quiz on a skill that you've almost mastered. This exercise will keep you motivated, prevent your brain from getting fatigued, and boost your confidence.
• Got a few free minutes in your day? Pick a specific time to watch 2–3 of the example videos in the course—on the bus, in study hall, after you eat dinner, whatever works for you—then stick to that time every day. Most of the videos are less than 5 minutes, so it won't take too long, and you'll be surprised how much these micro-study sessions help you prepare for the test.
• If you have specific skills you really want to focus on, leveled practice will be your best friend. Start by working through the related lessons and videos for that skill in their Foundations unit. Once you feel confident with that content, move to the Medium unit, then the Advanced unit. By gradually increasing the difficulty, you're training your brain to master the skill and reinforcing the knowledge as you build it.
• An ideal study schedule includes time to review the lesson content and practice each skill covered in the course, at each level (foundations, medium, and advanced)—even if you didn't miss any questions in a given skill on your initial course challenge or practice test. This strategy will ensure that you're familiar with all the skills and how they're tested, and it will also provide the most effective preparation for challenging items across the board.

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What Khan Academy’s Founder Thinks About AI in Education

Salman Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. His lessons on YouTube have revolutionized learning, garnering billions of views globally. Recognized as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, Khan is also the founder of schoolhouse.world, Khan Lab School, and Khan World School, and the author of The One World Schoolhouse .

Below, Salman shares five key insights from his new book, Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing) . Listen to the audio version—read by Salman himself—in the Next Big Idea App.

1. Teachers matter.

If I had to pick between an amazing teacher with no technology and amazing technology with no teacher, I would pick the amazing teacher every time. This becomes even more pronounced in an AI world. AI is going to become an amazing teaching assistant. It’s going to help with grading papers, writing progress reports, communicating with others, personalizing their classrooms, and writing lesson plans. It’s going to give teachers insights into their classrooms that they never had before. But AI is never going to be able to replace the ability to form human connections with students.

That’s why teachers go into the profession. They don’t want to do the busy work of grading papers and writing lesson plans. They want to change student lives. Now, they’re going to be better supported. This support will be more important than ever given how key this profession is and how spread thin teachers are globally.

2. We are about to see a real revolution in world-class learning.

Khan Academy’s mission statement as a not-for-profit is free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. From the beginning, we always imagined that technology—including things like the internet, on-demand video, personalized software, and teacher tools—could be used to scale up the types of interactions that I used to have with my cousins.

The starting story of Khan Academy began when I worked in tech and as an analyst at a hedge fund. My cousin needed tutoring, so I started tutoring her. Word spread in my family that free tutoring was going on, and before I knew it, I was tutoring many cousins. The whole journey of Khan Academy until now has been to leverage technology and tools for educators to scale up the type of personalization and student-centered learning that I was originally able to do with my cousins.

We’ve gone very far with Khan Academy. What generative AI now allows us to do is get that much closer to world-class tutoring. It raises the ceiling of what’s possible.

I used to hand science fiction books to employees at Khan Academy, talking about AI tutors of the future. I remember thinking, “One day, Khan Academy will build this. It’s probably not in my lifetime, but fingers crossed, as long as we’re around for many decades, it is in our lifetime.” It is now in the coming years. People need to appreciate how powerful these tools are if you have children, if you care about children, or if you want to learn something yourself.

3. Writing will improve, not degrade.

That’s a bold statement because when ChatGPT came out, there was concern that AI would be used for cheating. The thought was that it would undermine writing as we know it.

Having talked to administrators at some of the top universities in the world, there is also concern about many students going to selective universities without knowing how to write. No one knows exactly why this is. It’s probably years of standardized tests that focus on multiple choice. There has been less of an opportunity to write and get feedback. Khan Academy is building tools to help with this. Not only can the teacher work with the AI to write a lesson plan, create an assignment, and create a rubric, but they can administer the assignment through the AI.

“AI can also give insights into an entire class that the teacher never had before.”

When the student works with a properly ethical AI, the AI won’t do the essay for them; rather, it will assist with coming up with a thesis statement. It will encourage outlining together. It will give feedback. It might suggest better sources or improve citations. Most students are not getting writing feedback unless they have the benefit of a writing coach or really involved parents.

When the student’s work is finished, AI can ask, “Are you ready to submit?” The student submits their writing to the teacher, who will give the final output. The teacher will be able to access the entire writing process. They will be able to talk to the AI like a writing coach who’s worked with every one of their students. It can report how long a student worked on the project, what they had trouble with, and what they did well.

Then, based on the teacher’s rubric, the AI can even grade the work. The teacher still remains in charge, but the AI can assist in the process. Hopefully, it will save time. The AI can also check to see if the work is consistent with the other work by the same student. It will be able to share a whole transcript about how the student worked with AI.

AI can also give insights into an entire class that the teacher never had before. It could let the teacher know that 15 of the students are having trouble with the thesis statement and generate a lesson plan to help those students.

This would be supporting students far more than they’ve ever been supported. It’s going to give more rapid feedback. It gives time back to the teacher. Imagine being a middle school teacher and having to grade a hundred papers on The Great Gatsby over a weekend. It’s not super fun, and you might not be able to do it all consistently. Now you finally have support while gaining insights into the process.

Cheating existed before chat GPT. Some folks on the internet will happily write your essay for five dollars a page. This could actually undermine all forms of cheating, including paying someone the internet or getting your older sister to write it for you. But the more important thing is that AI can ensure that students are getting more rapid-cycle support than they’ve ever gotten before, giving teachers more support and insights.

4. Kids still need to learn a lot.

Every time there’s new technology, folks will argue that kids don’t need to learn those skills anymore. For example, when the calculator comes out, kids no longer need to learn arithmetic. The internet allows kids just to look things up, so folks may argue they don’t need to know certain things anymore.

I’ve never believed that. If you know your arithmetic well, you’re going to use a calculator well. There will also be times when you don’t have a calculator around. Additionally, just knowing the arithmetic will allow you to draw connections.

“Generative AI can write code, but to create truly great applications, you need to know what great code looks like and be able to put the pieces together.”

If you have content knowledge or general knowledge about the world, you will be a more productive user of things like a search engine. The same thing is now true with generative AI. Having knowledge and skills makes you better at using them. If you are a student or if you have children, do you want to be outrun by the generative AI, or do you want to be in a position where you can put those pieces together?

Generative AI can write code, but to create truly great applications, you need to know what great code looks like and be able to put the pieces together. To do that, you must be comparable or at least able to hang with the AI. The same thing is true of writing, music composition, or editing. Those who have those skills and also have the skills to put the AI pieces together are those who are going to thrive in the job market in the future. Those who get passed up by the AI—who rely on the AI but don’t know how to put the things together to make great things—will be in trouble.

5. AI isn’t good or bad.

At every dinner party now, there are conversations about the philosophy of artificial intelligence. People discuss where it can be harmful, such as misinformation, deep fakes, and fraud.

But where could it be positive? Maybe it will do well in healthcare or education. I always point out that it isn’t a flip of a coin. This is a technology that amplifies human intent. Like technologies before it, this just feels a little bit special because it’s hitting something that we always thought was special about humans: our intelligence.

But since it amplifies human intent, what matters is our intent. We know there are bad actors with negative intent, and they will put a lot of energy behind that negative intent. It’s critical that all of us put as much energy as possible into the positive intent.

Just because bad people are doing bad things with AI is not a reason to run away. It’s not a reason to slow down on the positive intent. The bad actors aren’t going to slow down. We must all learn as much as we can about it, expose ourselves to it, and use it intelligently to empower other people. There’s an opportunity to use artificial intelligence to improve human intelligence, human potential, and human meaning.

To listen to the audio version read by author Salman Khan, download the Next Big Idea App today:

Download the Next Big Idea App

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Khan Academy Blog

Sparking Joy in Math Learning with Khanmigo

posted on June 24, 2024

As math educators, we’ve all seen the glazed-over looks during a complex lesson or the slump of defeat when a student can’t connect with the material. But what if we could turn those moments around? What if math could be as captivating as a good story, where each problem solved takes students on an adventure, deepening their understanding and joy in learning? Enter Khanmigo , Khan Academy’s innovative AI tool designed to bring creativity into math education at a time when engagement is crucial.

The current state of math learning

Recent assessments reveal a concerning dip in math proficiency, with statistics indicating a drop to the lowest rates in 15 years​ ( USAFacts )​. This isn’t just about numbers; it’s about our students’ futures, their ability to face future challenges, and the urgent need to rekindle their interest and competence in math. That’s where Khanmigo comes in to help teachers, offering a fresh, time-saving approach to creating math lessons tailored to your class.

How Khanmigo makes math magical

Khanmigo uses AI to generate math word problems that aren’t just tailored to curriculum standards but can also be customized, personalized, and woven into narratives and real-life scenarios that students care about.

Here’s how Khanmigo helps teachers and students:

Personalized learning journeys.

Khanmigo assesses each student’s performance and preferences to create problems that meet them at their level—then challenges them to grow. This adaptive approach ensures that every student finds a learning pathway that’s not only comprehensible but also compelling.

Real-world relevance

From calculating the costs of planning a school event to figuring out the science behind a basketball’s trajectory, Khanmigo’s problems are grounded in everyday life. This method shows students the tangible applications of math, making abstract concepts concrete—and more interesting.

A narrative approach

Imagine a classroom where math lessons are adventures, where solving a series of problems helps unravel mysteries or overcome challenges in a story. Khanmigo can craft such narrative-driven problem sets, making each math session an engaging story that students are eager to solve.

Supporting educators every step of the way

“When I asked Khanmigo to provide extension activities for my 7th-grade classroom, I found the activities to be both realistic and helpful. This feature of Khanmigo is one of the best, providing engaging classroom activities that I can put into practice.” — 7th-grade teacher 

Khanmigo isn’t just for students. It’s a powerful ally for teachers too:

• Saves time: It automatically generates diverse problem sets, allowing teachers more time to engage with students instead of juggling content creation.
• Customizable content: Easy adjustments for difficulty and context mean lessons can be closely aligned with broader educational goals or specific teaching styles.
• Completely free: In line with Khan Academy’s mission, Khanmigo is completely free to use, ensuring every teacher and student can access top-notch educational resources without barriers.

Transforming math education together

At Khan Academy, we believe in the power of education to transform lives. With Khanmigo, we’re taking a significant step towards a future where math isn’t just a subject to get through but a fascinating, integral part of our students’ lives. By incorporating AI-driven creativity and personalization into math education, we’re not just tackling the math crisis. We’re helping to shape a generation of problem solvers who see math as a tool for discovery and innovation.

Explore the possibilities of math education with Khanmigo, and watch as your classrooms come alive with the joy of learning.

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The best way to learn and teach with AI is here. Ace the school year with our AI-powered guide, Khanmigo. 

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Khan Academy’s founder on how AI can supercharge “mastery learning”

• Khan’s 2024 book Brave New Worlds discusses the potential of AI-powered education.
• Despite the threat large language models pose to his tutoring business, Khan cannot help but be optimistic about the future.
• Khan makes the case for how AI can make education more effective, entertaining, and immersive.

On New Year’s Day of 2023, Sal Kahn and his 11-year-old daughter Diya sat down to write a short story with ChatGPT. Diya came up with the premise and the protagonist: an influencer, named Samantha, stranded on a remote island. ChatGPT, assuming the role of Samantha, started telling Diya a little bit about herself. Then, the duo took turns building the story sentence by sentence.

Had this story been part of some school assignment, Diya’s teacher would probably have been upset with her — and for good reason. All around the world, educators are expressing concern over the increasing sophistication of large language models and the way that students are taking advantage of them.

Khan, the founder of the popular online learning platform Khan Academy, isn’t nearly as concerned. Sure, he thinks the aforementioned problems are serious and need to be addressed, but by and large he believes the long-term impact generative AI has on education will be positive rather than negative. Instead of worrying whether these homework-making, essay-writing, test-taking computer programs will make his internet tutoring service obsolete, he’s daydreaming of all the possible ways they can be used to make learning more exciting, immersive, and personable.

Khan’s thoughts on the future of ChatGPT — along with the fate of Samantha — are mapped out in his new book Brave New Words, published on May 14, 2024, by Random House. In the following interview, Khan explains what generative AI has in common with online learning, how he has incorporated ChatGPT into Khan Academy, and why companies like OpenAI perhaps shouldn’t be too open moving forward.

The birth of Khan Academy

The origin of Khan Academy goes back to when Sal agreed to help one of his cousins with their math homework. Living in a different time zone and working at a hedge fund, he would spend his off-hours putting together lesson plans, making short videos, and answering questions via text messages. The experiment proved a huge success, and once other family members began asking for private tutoring, Sal immediately started thinking bigger. His decision to put some of his lessons on YouTube wasn’t inspired by other online content creators (the year was 2006, and the video-sharing website was still in its infancy). Rather, he was inspired by MIT, which, on the principle that education should be free, had begun sharing videos of its lectures on its website as early as 2001.

“MIT really legitimized the idea of free, online learning,” he says over Zoom, taking a walk around his sunny California neighborhood. “I mean, the marginal cost of delivery is so low. Why would you withhold something like that from people in the first place?”

What started as a side project put together with a $20 microphone and an outdated version of Microsoft Paint quickly grew into a multinational operation. By 2009, he writes in Brave New Words , his channel was attracting over 50,000 learners a month, several hundreds of whom shared words of gratitude and encouragement in the comments. Today, Khan Academy is a registered nonprofit with more than 250 employees and 150 million learners distributed across 50 languages.

“I wasn’t the first YouTube educator,” he reflects. “However, I was one of the first education channels to reach 100 and even 1000 videos by the end of 2007. I also showed that even though those videos were all quite short — YouTube had a 10-minute limit at the time — they could be chained into something pretty comprehensive.”

Meet Khanmigo

Considering Khan has relied on new technology to shake up education once before, it’s maybe no wonder he is more excited about the possibilities of ChatGPT than he is afraid of them — an excitement he hopes to spread through his evocatively titled new book. Brave New Words is an obvious play on Brave New World , the 1931 dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley, though its outlook on mankind’s future couldn’t be more different.

“Most think we’re heading into a dystopian era because of AI, which may happen,” he says. “However, I make the argument that it’s not the flip of a coin, that the world could be dystopian or utopian depending on how we use AI. The word ‘bravery’ came up a lot during conversations with colleagues and publishers: we can stick our head in the sand, or we can get involved, implement guardrails. We should be informed and educated about the risks of AI, but we can’t be afraid.”

While evaluations have demonstrated Khan Academy’s efficacy as a learning tool — Khan says that students who rigorously watch their educational videos “gain one and a half to three years of learning in math per year” — the platform had its limitations. Online learners could not ask follow-up questions, for example, and assessments were limited to numeric entry or multiple choice, “even though certain topics could really benefit from more open-ended responses.”

Khan Academy’s newly launched AI-powered teaching assistant, Khanmigo (from the Spanish phrase “conmigo” or “with me”) aims to overcome these sorts of shortcomings. Available since March 2023 and built on ChatGPT’s code, Khanmigo can put together lesson plans, adjust its diction and tone of voice to suit individual preferences, teach various subjects at varying levels of difficulty, and nudge students in the right direction without giving them the answer to a question or problem.

Much of Khanmigo’s pedagogical approach — described in detail in the book — takes after Khan’s own tutoring style. If students going over math homework show a lack of interest, Khanmigo can apply that homework to things they are interested in, like sports. “Let’s say you are a soccer coach, and you want to model the number of goals your team scores based on the number of hours they practice each week,” one example reads. “You come up with the following polynomial: 3×2 – 5×2 + 2. Can you identify the degree of this polynomial and the leading coefficient?”

Or, if the subject in question is history or civics:

“Imagine a soccer league. Let’s think about different ways to govern it. Does the team govern itself any way it wants to by doing its own thing? Or does a central authority govern the team? Federalism is a system of government where power is divided between a central authority and smaller political units, like states or provinces.”

Brave New Words also muses at length about the potential of AI’s ability to impersonate people — not living people whose careers and reputations can be ruined for deepfakes — but long-dead literary and historical figures who, to make these subjects more interesting to students, could be temporarily resurrected to make lessons more immersive.

Khan offers the example of Saanvi, a ninth-grader in India attending Khan World School, a full-time online school Khan Academy founded with Arizona State University in 2022, who was assigned to read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Stuck on the meaning of the book’s central metaphor and unable to find an answer online, she “turned to Khanmigo…and asked to talk to Jay Gatsby” himself:

“Ah, the green light,” Khanmigo responded, impersonating the fictional character. “It is a symbol of my dreams and desires. You see, it is 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.”

The pros and cons of AI education

While Kahn acknowledges the dangers posed by generative AI — that it could prevent students from developing their own research and writing skills and take away jobs, among other things — he does not believe they are inevitable.

“The biggest fear that educators had with ChatGPT was cheating, which is a legitimate fear,” he says. “Now, it’s not the first way students can cheat, but it is one of the easiest and cheapest ways of doing so. The fears around hallucinations and math errors are legitimate also. However, ChatGPT has improved a lot since it first came out. Recently, I was putting together a course on what to do when your AI hallucinates, and I spent about an hour trying to get the program to do so – but it just wouldn’t. It’s become a relatively low risk.”

He also points out that many of the criticisms levied against ChatGPT also apply to human tutors.

“If I told you 100 facts off the top of my head without double-checking them, I would almost certainly get some of them wrong. Still, you can audit an AI on much more rigorous scale than you can audit an individual. It’s a matter of searching the code for errors and rectifying them.”

Cheating can be prevented or at the very least discouraged by implementing guardrails. “As I mention in my book, if a student uses ChatGPT and then copy-pastes their answers into Khanmigo, Khanmigo should be able to notify their human teacher or tutor.” He also does not believe that using generative AI necessarily limits a student’s critical thinking or creativity — the writing exercise he did with his daughter, in which ChatGPT was relegated to the role of collaborator, demonstrated as much.

Mastery learning

Khanmigo’s greatest asset, though, lies in its facilitation of mastery learning. A pedagogical school of thought first put forward by psychologist Benjamin Bloom in 1984, mastery learning suggests that students learn better when they can fully master a specific skill or concept before moving on to the next. This pace is easy to follow in one-on-one teaching, but not in classrooms, where teachers are forced to move through material at the pace of the average student, disadvantaging both above-average and below-average students, who would benefit from quicker and slower paces, respectively.

“Even in my first book, One World Schoolhouse , I write about the efficacy of mastery learning, and I am still convinced it’s the best approach,” notes Khan. “It’s not a particularly avant-garde idea, either. It’s the way human beings have learned throughout history, all the way down to the days of Aristotle and Alexander the Great. It’s the way people become elite athletes and musicians, and the only reason it’s not mainstream is that it’s historically been expensive to deliver.”

Open or closed

Whether ChatGPT will develop along the lines that Khan describes in his book, with same the guardrails as those installed on Khanmigo, is to be seen. As OpenAI’s leadership remains divided over the question of whether the organization should be open or closed, nonprofit or for-profit, one could easily imagine a future in which generative AI will be monetized and manipulated to the same extent as social media platforms, and contribute to an equal number of social woes as a result.

While many think that OpenAI should remain exclusively nonprofit and mission-driven, treating their software as a common good instead of a commercial product, Khan opts to play devil’s advocate. “I actually don’t want them to open-source the model,” he declares. “Because then people who have nothing to lose can freely copy ChatGPT’s code and remove the guardrails. Think of a neo-Nazi group taking the model and educating it on fascist literature. And we are already hearing stories about kids making deepfakes of their classmates doing horrible or illegal things. They’re not using ChatGPT – OpenAI wouldn’t let them. They’re using open-source models.”

On top of that, he adds, the capital required to develop large language models far exceeds the finances available to even the biggest non-profits, making capital a necessary evil, if an evil at all.

And while Khan suggests that large language models like ChatGPT and Khanmigo can be used to lower the cost of mastery learning in classrooms, he does not believe AI should become a substitute for person-to-person interaction. His ideal future is not one where computer programs replace human instructors, but help them deliver personalized tutoring to large bodies of students.

“The better the human to human ratios, the better,” he says. “An ideal education isn’t just one on one. If it was only Alexander and Aristotle the whole time, Alexander probably would not have become a well-adjusted guy. For most of us, and certainly for children, being able to interact and collaborate and socialize is important, arguably more important than mastering math and science.”

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