Teachers and students across the United States are testing an AI-based tutor that could change the way education works.
Khanmigo, created by Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, was designed to help students learn and teachers teach. Khan, whose courses and educational software have been used for years by tens of millions of people, immediately saw the potential of AI for education.
“It was clear that this technology was going to transform society,” he said. “It was pretty exhilarating stuff.”
Launch of Khanmigo
Khan discovered creative ways to help children learn since 2005. After earning degrees in mathematics, computer science, and engineering from MIT and an MBA from Harvard, Khan was working for a hedge fund when he began recording math videos to help mentor his younger cousins.
Soon after, with the help of donors including Bill Gates, Khan left his job in finance and launched the Khan Academy, a nonprofit educational organization.
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OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman and Sam Altman, fans of Khan’s work, contacted Khan, hoping to evaluate their new AI model that powers ChatGPT today, using the question database and test content from Khan. They also gave Khan early access to the model in 2022. Teachers and engineers at Khan Academy used OpenAI’s technology to create the AI tutor “Khanmigo” – a pun on Khan’s name and the Spanish word “conmigo,” or “with me.”
Khanmigo is currently being tested in grades 3-12 in 266 school districts across the United States. Khan says his company will not sell the data collected through Khanmigo or give it to other technology companies, but that the data is used to improve Khanmigo’s memory and personalization. .
Khanmigo is free for all teachers in the United States, but school districts must pay $15 per student per year to cover computing costs.
How Khanmigo Helps Students
Students at Hobart High School in Hobart, Indiana, have Khanmigo on their laptops, ready to help them with their questions. In chemistry class, Abigail Rinas asked Khanmigo for examples of types of acids. Khanmigo gave examples, then asked the student if she could think of any household items that might contain acid.
“He wants to help you understand what he’s telling you and not just give you information,” Rinas said.
When Khanmigo first arrived at Hobart High School in 2023, Khan Academy employees asked students to try to “break” the AI tutor. Some children tried to trick Khanmigo into giving them the answers to their questions. Hobart Superintendent Peggy Buffington told 60 Minutes that some children were “even bullying the robot.”
“I think it was the elementary school kids who were doing it,” said Maddie Turpa, a student who uses Khanmingo in her business class.
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Students said Khanmigo helped them a lot when they felt uncomfortable asking questions in class. They described Khanmigo as “positive” and “reassuring”.
Sarah Robertson, a former English teacher who now works for Khan Academy, showed 60 Minutes how the AI tutor can help children improve their writing and think more critically.
It was tested using an essay that 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper wrote in sixth grade about his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt.
Less than two minutes after Cooper hit the “start revising” button, Khanmigo delivered a detailed assessment of his essay, applauding some of what Cooper wrote but also suggesting some revisions, including for his topic sentence . Cooper revised his college essay and asked Khanmigo what he thought.
“(It is said) “connecting the events of one’s childhood to one’s later life will make your essay more coherent and insightful. I mean, yes. That’s good advice,” Cooper said.
How AI Tool Helps Teachers
When she taught seventh grade English, Robertson limited herself to 10 minutes of review per essay.
“I had 100 students, so it took me 17 hours to give feedback on each student’s first draft,” she said.
In addition to helping provide feedback to students, Khanmigo can also help teachers detect cheating. Cooper asked ChatGPT to write about his mother and incorporated what the chatbot wrote into his essay about Khanmigo. Khanmigo immediately sent an alert to Robertson.
“It says you pasted 66 words while revising from an unknown source,” Robertson said. “So if I click on it now, it’s going to load your essay and it’s going to show me exactly what you just did.”
Khanmigo is also used at Hobart High to help teachers plan lessons. Chemistry teacher Melissa Higgason told AI Tutor that she wanted a four-day course in which her students would study the physical and chemical properties of matter. It took Khanmigo a few minutes to come up with a detailed plan. It would have taken Higgason a week.
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Teachers can also use Khanmigo to monitor their students’ understanding of subjects like never before because it shows the questions students ask.
“So that gives me a lot of insight as a teacher as to who I should spend that one-on-one time with,” Higgasson said.
Addressing Concerns About the Role of AI in Education
Some teachers may worry that AI will replace them in classrooms.
“I’m pretty confident that teaching, any job with a very human-centric element – provided it adapts reasonably well to this AI world – will be one of the safest jobs in the world. market,” Khan said. said.
Even as Khan develops Khanmigo, he says he wants teachers to be in classrooms, face-to-face with students.
“I mean, that’s what I’ll always want for my own kids and, frankly, for anyone’s kids,” Khan said. “And the hope here is that we can use artificial intelligence and other technologies to amplify what a teacher can do so that they can spend more time next to a student, understand them, have a person-to-person connection.”
After gaining early access to OpenAI’s advanced AI technology, it was clear to Khan that AI would transform society. However, he had some concerns.
“It was like, ‘Wow, people are going to be able to use this to do counterfeiting and fraud and cheating.’ But if used well with the right guardrails, it could also be used to support students, to give them more feedback,” Khan said. “To support teachers with all this lesson planning and progress reporting they put in hours a week.”
New uses of AI in education
OpenAI President Greg Brockman gave 60 Minutes a sneak peek at a new AI vision feature that will soon be available to paid ChatGPT subscribers. It can see what someone is doing through live video and interact in real time.
During a demonstration, the AI quizzed Anderson Cooper on his anatomy skills. As Cooper drew body parts on a blackboard, drawing the outlines of a human figure, the AI could understand what he was drawing.
“The location is perfect,” said the AI tutor. “The brain is there, in the head. As for the shape, that’s a good start. The brain is rather oval.”
This also seemed to reflect Cooper’s anxiety, telling him there was “no pressure, Anderson.”
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Khan hopes that the new vision technology can be integrated into Khanmigo and be available to students and teachers within the next 2 to 3 years. But he wants it to undergo more rigorous testing and follow strict data privacy and security guidelines.
During Brockman’s demonstration of the new vision technology, he also had the AI write a rhyming song about the formula for the area of a triangle, then sing it with a British accent.
“Absolutely. Let’s try,” the AI tutor said. “To find a triangular space, here’s what you do. Multiply the base by the height. That’s right. Then take that product and divide by two. Now you have the area, a formula to follow.”
Seeing it in action can “feel magical” at first, Brockman said.
“After a week, you start to realize how you can use it,” Brockman said. “That’s been one of the really important things in working with Sal and his team, to really understand what is the right way to convey this to parents and teachers and classrooms and to do it in a way… so that students are actually learning and not just, you know, asking for answers and parents can have oversight and teachers can be involved in that process.
Khan has his own vision for progress.
“It feels like a science fiction book,” he said.
Anderson Cooper
