Microsoft, Khan Academy Partner to Make Khanmigo Teaching Tool Free

Well I'm a teacher and I completely disagree. This if anything just levels the playing field by now giving poor kids tutors that rich families were paying for the whole time.

Having a new teaching tool is no substitution for teachers. Teachers are there to classroom manage, manage/coach students to learn, and baby sit.

[flagged]

Microsoft: Sorry Kids, Free LLM AI is for Teachers!

https://slashdot.org/submission/17320965/microsoft-sorry-kid...

"Today, we announced a new partnership with Khan Academy to help turn the promise of AI in education into reality and increase access to innovation," began Microsoft's Tuesday post explaining it would make Khanmigo for Teachers (an AI-powered assistant) free to all educators in the US. But while Microsoft’s donation of Azure OpenAI Services may enable Khan Academy to offer their teacher tools to all teachers at no cost (Khanmigo previously cost teachers $4/month), Microsoft suggested it's still too cost prohibitive for even the world's most valuable company ($3.2T market cap) to pick up the monthly $4-a-head large language model (LLM) bill (public pricing, school pricing available by request) for the nation's 50+ million K-12 students.

To help schools fund AI efforts, Khan Academy has in the past provided 1:1 coaching to Indiana educators on how to snag $50K AI grants to pay for Khanmigo from their state. Teachers and students from Indiana's AI grant-winning Hobart High School, a Khanmigo pilot participant, were featured in Microsoft's AI in education media releases as well as Khan Academy co-founder Sal Khan's just-released book on AI in the classroom, which earned a thumbs-up from personal AI tutor evangelist Bill Gates.

Microsoft apparently hopes to solve the AI student tutor cost problem at scale with AI portion control for schoolchildren, explaining: "The companies [Microsoft and Khan Academy] will also explore how small language models (SLMs) such as Microsoft’s new Phi-3 family of models, which can perform well for simpler AI tasks and are more cost effective and easier to use than larger models, might help improve and scale AI tutoring tools. To that end, Khan Academy is collaborating with Microsoft to explore the development of new, open-source small language models based on Phi-3. The goal of the exploratory work is to enable state-of-the-art math tutoring capabilities in an affordable and scalable manner." Which aligns nicely with the goals of BillG and the Gates Foundation, which gave Khan Academy another $4.5M late last year "to continue the development and scale Khan Academy Districts to become the leading Math supplemental curriculum solution in the US."

Let me tell you as a parent I want no part of this AI garbage in the classroom. Its just an excuse to burn money the district does not have on software they dont need and that does not work.

Id way rather our school district bought an Xtramath account and taught the kids math facts in a simple way than waste money on AI that does not work or feeds misinformation.

Is not what is it. It is all you can take in. There is a ton of science around dedicated to cognitive development. If you want to check out. I am sure in the near future, a lot of it will be excluded from the corporate datasets.

I really don't get this. Here, I assume the median intelligence of a reader is enough to connect the dots already. But sadly, critical thinking is met with the usual jerk knee reaction algorithm.