Recently, Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, an educational institution, shared the workings behind his AI-powered tool called Khanmigo in a TED talk, explaining how GPT-4 can accelerate modern education through practical examples.
Previously, OpenAI introduced GPT-4 and announced six application cases, two of which were educational products, including Khan Academy.
Khan Academy is a nonprofit educational organization that provides free video lessons. It offers content on subjects such as mathematics, history, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and more, with over 2,000 teaching videos available.
With the integration of GPT-4, Khan Academy launched the AI-powered tool Khanmigo, which can act as a one-on-one tutor for students and a helpful assistant for teachers.
For students, Khanmigo can guide their thinking and promote independent learning. For teachers, it can assist with lesson preparation, content collection, and enhance teaching efficiency.
During the TED talk, Sal Khan presented several examples, including math problems, video clips, and literary scenarios. It can be seen that Khanmigo is multimodal and can handle various forms and questions with ease.
It is worth noting that when answering students’ questions, such as math problems, Khanmigo does not directly provide the answer but guides students to solve them on their own. If a student makes a mistake, Khanmigo helps analyze the error, enabling students to truly learn.
When addressing literary questions, Khanmigo doesn’t provide a ready-made essay but guides students step by step, inspiring them to create their own works.
According to Sal Khan, artificial intelligence is incredibly powerful and can enable Socratic-style dialogues and debate-based learning.
Many people claim that large language models are incapable of solving math problems. However, Sal Khan believes that saying ChatGPT cannot solve problems is merely a failure to fully explore its true capabilities.
Why can Khanmigo answer math problems? Sal Khan explains that it is because Khan Academy spent six to seven months integrating GPT-4 and making significant adjustments. For instance, they utilized a dot notation method to provide AI with hints, making it more aligned with human learning methods instead of disrupting the existing education system.
Since the incorporation of GPT-4, thousands of people have joined the Khanmigo experience. Sal Khan believes that currently, Khanmigo is in its early stages but is at a turning point, and it will accelerate the transformation of education in the future.
According to Sal Khan, AI will undoubtedly continue to advance, but it requires human guidance in the right direction. Once properly guided, humans can enhance their intelligence with the help of AI.
