Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

gatesnotes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 418 posts

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#211

Post by insane_dreamer »

aeyes wrote: post #125
raisedbyninjas wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe no school board buys and puts it into every class. Parents will still buy it and it can supplement learning gaps when doing homework. $20/month is a rounding error compared to pre-school, clothes, extra-curricular activies, private school, private tutors, etc.

The kids of people who can afford all you mentioned usually don't have problems with education. It's those who don't have $20. My parents spent almost nothing on my education, just a couple of $ per year to buy a notebook or two. I used the same pens for almost ten years. I participated in zero sports, had zero tutors... I did ok but I had peers with even less resources and not all of them did good.

Given that Sal has never turned Khan Academy into a commercial product -- despite its resounding success and popularity, and the large amount of $$$ he could have made -- has proven he's not in this for the money. So I expect the AI version to also be free or at least have a free version for parents (and schools who can't afford it).

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#212

Post by danielmarkbruce »

Pulcinella wrote: post #70

Background: I taught high school science for half a decade and now I am in tech. This will never take off. One, there is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. What little money there is goes to the obvious stuff like student records databases. Anything that requires an ongoing subscription fee is dead in the water. The only reason those stupid smartboards took off is because…

There is a small fortune spent on private education. After school classes, tutoring etc etc. The money is spent by the upper middle class and above. If this solution works better for some subset of those people, it will take off in that market.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#213

Post by insane_dreamer »

Jtsummers wrote: post #132
nextworddev wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Khanmigo is free for teachers I believe

Who are not the learner which is the context of this particular writeup. Gates is talking about using LLMs to assist students as tutors, and that is not offered for free ($4/month, $44/year).

The idea is that teachers can use it with students.

For parents who want to use it with their children, $4/month (for your entire family!) is very small compared to anything out there that you want to use to supplement your kids education (other than Khan Academy itself, which is free). Is it affordable to poor families in Bangladesh? No, but the barrier to sponsorship is low: "for $50K a year you could sponsor it for 1000 families in Bangladesh" is not a difficult sell.

Also, I expect Sal to raise funding to give it for free to those who can't afford it (just as he did with Khan Academy). At least it's not some VC-backed venture that we know is going to be look for a 10~100x return, so we can be thankful for that.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#214

Post by kiba »

diddypiddy wrote: post #105
doctoboggan wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Impressive! You should give yourself more credit as it takes more than just internet and patience to teach yourself enough to get into college. I am also excited for society. However I am worried as well. While an AI tutor who is able to understand the child's current knowledge and gear the lessons toward what will make the most sense will be very powerful, it could also be used for brainwashing, propaganda, misinfor…

We live in a world where wealth is increasingly being concentrated at the top, social mobility for the average person is trending downwards, suicide rates in the US are at all-time highs, drug abuse rising, general deaths of despair rising, mental illness rising, climate and ecological catastrophes mounting by unchecked greed and all of this AI crap is mostly in the hands of the powerful who will use it to solidify t…

A lot of that is just land use policies. When you look at the average American household budget, it makes sense. The #1 and #2 are housing and transportation followed by taxes. Climate change and ecological catastrophes, mental illness are really land use policies in disguise or at least can be explained partly.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#215

Post by danielmarkbruce »

aeyes wrote: post #125
raisedbyninjas wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe no school board buys and puts it into every class. Parents will still buy it and it can supplement learning gaps when doing homework. $20/month is a rounding error compared to pre-school, clothes, extra-curricular activies, private school, private tutors, etc.

The kids of people who can afford all you mentioned usually don't have problems with education. It's those who don't have $20. My parents spent almost nothing on my education, just a couple of $ per year to buy a notebook or two. I used the same pens for almost ten years. I participated in zero sports, had zero tutors... I did ok but I had peers with even less resources and not all of them did good.

The very people you are talking about that "don't have problems" are spending money and effort to get their kids to do even better, get into better schools etc. It's not some binary fine/not fine thing. They view it extremely differently to how you appear to be viewing it.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#216

Post by pritambarhate »

Jtsummers wrote: post #115
tripdout wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet Khan Academy is free.

But Khanmigo isn't, it's $4/month.

I think over the time GPUs will become cheap or some other break through will make running LLMs cheaper. Then this fee won't be required.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#217

Post by kiba »

balls187 wrote: post #199
megaman821 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe also experienced a pandemic, has even worse inflation and worse unemployment. It could just be cultural attitudes make European cities a more pleasant place to live.

> It could just be cultural attitudes make European cities a more pleasant place to live. Cultural attitudes certainly, particularly around work vs leisure. Also mass transit systems, and social supports for people working in the service industry. The criticisms for europe are that it takes a lot of tax revenue to support those things, bureaucracy, strikes, etc. Im not saying one system is better than the other--just…

Mass transits and more pleasant places to live are probably correlated with more tax efficient policies.

It's just that the USA has accumulated a number of unfair advantages.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#218

Post by lolinder »

red_admiral wrote: post #56
wisty wrote: post #37

> 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 prohi…

This. The people for whom personalized learning works well, can do it with any technology, even books. I recently learnt a new programming language from an O'Reilly book just fine, then did some exercises in a (non-AI) online REPL/tutorial tool, then went off to code a project of my own.

On the flip side, I've absolutely never been able to pick up a new programming language from a book.

Most of the languages I've learned I started with YouTube video tutorials, but most recently when I wanted to learn Rust do you know what worked really well for me? GitHub Copilot. I started a new project, and when I didn't know what syntax to use I made a comment and examined the output. By the time the project was done I'd learned how Rust worked and could write code without help.

Before making sweeping pronouncements about what does or doesn't work for learning, it would be worth considering that people vary widely in which learning strategies work well for them. You might just be projecting your own preferred learning style out on the world.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#219

Post by danielmarkbruce »

wisty wrote: post #37

> 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 prohi…

This is absolutely not true for kids in the range of maybe 9-13 or something. I have kids. I learn via text books. They just can't do it yet, and they are a good way ahead of most of the kids in their grade.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#220

Post by idontpost »

babl-yc wrote: post #84
Pulcinella wrote: post #70

Background: I taught high school science for half a decade and now I am in tech. This will never take off. One, there is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. What little money there is goes to the obvious stuff like student records databases. Anything that requires an ongoing subscription fee is dead in the water. The only reason those stupid smartboards took off is because…

There may be "no money in EdTech" but that doesn't mean there can't be impactful products for it. Students don't want to pay for Google but every student still uses it. Some students will want to waste time if given access to more tools like AI agents, but the motivated ones will use it to their advantage. Even if it's wrong sometimes, it's right a lot, perfect for rubber ducking, and almost always gives answers that…

[dead]
Post reply on HN