Introduction: Let’s Write a New Story Together

It would never be the same again—not for us, and not for anyone else on the planet.
Real-life researchers have been working for more than sixty years to make this AI vision a reality.
It was against this backdrop in the summer of 2022 that I received an email from Greg Brockman and Sam Altman.
Technology that we had until recently thought of as something straight out of Star Trek was suddenly very real.
It was able to take on personas with humanlike characteristics.
By the end of that weekend, I wondered what might happen if I gathered dozens of the brightest minds in technology and education to play around with the platform alongside me.
It was clear that even though we were among the first people on the planet to incorporate this technology, as soon as the world got wind of it, everything was going to change dramatically—and not over the span of generations but within months.
So, alongside OpenAI, we created a rapid prototyping team that began to build an AI-infused education platform we would come to call Khanmigo.

Part I: Rise of the AI Tutor

The last thing I wanted was for a new technology to come and strip our students of agency, creativity, socialization skills, and collaborative learning opportunities.
Students who learn to use AI ethically and productively may learn not only at an exponentially higher rate than others but also in a way that allows them to remain competitive throughout their careers.
Those who can steer AI to partner with them, and know what great writing entails, will be those who get the best output from the technology.
Rather than pushing our kids to avoid AI, Brockman says, we can help them learn smarter.

What we needed to do was invert the interaction so that it was asking questions of us, like a good tutor.
For example, we tried to prompt GPT-3.5 to act like a tutor. But no matter how much we told it to not give answers, it often did, and not always correct ones.