OpenAI's iPhone moment & can AI teach?
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Loans originated by SoFi Bank N.A. Member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891. I think we have the opportunity here to kind of completely reimagine what it means to make a podcast. Katie is a rare visionary. She shoulders incredible responsibility, but her curiosity, her humility remains utterly inspiring.

Danny is the deepest thinker of anyone I've ever met. And what that leads him to be able to come up with is unmatched. I moved back to America, drawn by the exhilarating optimism of San Francisco and Silicon Valley. We are sitting at the beginning of what I believe will be the greatest communication revolution of our lifetimes.

And I have a growing sense that everything, everything I've learned over the last 30 years has led me to this place and to this moment. To this podcast. Hello and welcome back to the Times Tech Podcast with me, Danny Fortson, West Coast correspondent for the Sunday Times. And more importantly, Danny in the Valley. And I'm Katie in the City, Katie Prescott, technology business editor at the Times.

So, Danny, while the world is arguing about the rights and wrongs of AI, you've been speaking to someone, and this sounds mad, who runs a school powered by AI, which, and this is a quote, combines adaptive AI for personalized one-on-one learning, mastery-based methods for deep understanding and time management techniques.

to keep students focused and thriving. I mean, could you get more American? Yes, it's a school where kids only have to learn, theoretically, two hours a day.

And it's all thanks to technology, specifically AI. It's a pretty wild conversation. Don't tell my children about it, but I can't wait to hear it. But before then, we should talk about the company that's really propelled the AI revolution. It's hard to imagine we'd have AI schools without ChatGPT and OpenAI. Last week at the top of the episode, Danny, you mentioned a news story that broke after we'd recorded, confusingly, that might revolutionize the industry yet further. And

And we had an announcement from two very good and quite famous tech friends. Sam is a rare visionary. He shoulders incredible responsibility, but his curiosity, his humility remain utterly inspiring. Johnny is the deepest thinker of anyone I've ever met. What that leads him to be able to come up with

is unmatched. So this is a clip from OpenAI's video released last Wednesday, and in it, Sam Altman is walking through San Francisco both purposefully and aimlessly to a very well-known cafe in North Beach.

for an extremely candid and coincidentally very well-lit conversation with his friend Sir Johnny Ive. Johnny being the British-American designer best known for his work at Apple, for his work on the iPod, the iPhone, the MacBook, and described by Sam as, quote, the greatest designer in the world. But amid this enormous loving, there was a serious announcement. A year ago, I founded...

with Scott Cannon...

Evans Hankey and Tang Tan, who are the most extraordinary engineers. They have built a team of remarkable subject matter experts that range from hardware and software engineering, physicists, researchers, product manufacturing experts. And so IO is merging with OpenAI. Formed with the mission of figuring out how to create a family of devices that would...

let people use AI to create all sorts of wonderful things. The first one we've been working on, I think, has just completely captured our imagination. What did you make of the video? It was almost like a technology when Harry met Sally kind of thing. You know, it was just like, it was very highly produced. Beautifully shot, as you'd expect. Beautifully shot. Lovely aesthetics. Totally unironic.

and totally over the top all at once. And so the deal is that OpenAI is buying Johnny Ives' company for $6.5 billion. And the idea is that, so, you know, there's been news stories for the last couple of years that they've been talking and that in the post-ChatGPT moment that they'd started talking about creating a new type of device that specifically is designed for AI. So in other words, you know,

Silicon Valley has been obsessed, the tech industry has been obsessed with kind of the successor to the iPhone for years and years and years. And the idea is if you have technology that you can talk to, that understands what you want, that is just smarter than we've had thus far, then you can completely reimagine what it is to kind of what that device looks like. And this appears to be the idea behind this deal. And that's not surprising, isn't it? I mean, we've seen...

The AI revolution over the past few years is about how we interact with computers. It's like, you know, code, you know, no longer as you've proved so very well need to know how to code in order to tell the computer to do something. And so it makes sense that, you know, I'm sitting here now looking at my laptop and the design of that hasn't changed for many years. You know, maybe actually the next device will look completely different. We won't have the keyboard, the mouse and all of that sort of stuff.

And who better than Johnny Ive to think about it? You know, and this is something that a lot of people are thinking about. I mean, we had on this pod not that long ago, Dan Sirocco, the founder of Limitless, who created that AI pendant, you know, the always on listening pendant. The number of rival CEOs working on something similar who have gotten in touch with me since that episode.

It's quite extraordinary. What do they say when they get in touch? Oh, I have this. I haven't always on listening AI. Oh, you should have us on to talk about our device. Did they pick up on any of the questions and issues that we raised in that episode? Not really. It's interesting, isn't it? Not really. But the idea is, I think, so there's a lot of speculation about what this new device is. But in that video, Sam says, I've seen the prototype. And so they've already created something.

And they've already said, oh, this is the best work I've ever done, et cetera, et cetera. So what is the thing? And it is really exciting. I mean, you can take the piss out of the video and it does look quite naff. But they are two tech titans. Naff is such a British word. I love naff. No one's probably said that in San Francisco, have they? No, no. What's naff? How do you translate naff?

Cheesy? Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't quite get there, does it? No, it doesn't. It's a little bit sharper. No, exactly. It is NAF, but cynicism aside, they are both leaders at what they do, and it's quite a powerful combination. It'll be incredible to see what they've come up with. Yeah, and I think one way to think about this is if OpenAI is worth $300 billion, which is its latest valuation, they're paying $6.4 billion for Johnny Ives' one-year-old company, which is basically a team of designers.

Many of them refugees from Apple. That's basically 2% of the value of open AI. So it's kind of like it's not that big a bet. And the upside is potentially if you could create the next thing, then it's totally a bet worth making, especially I believe it's all stock. So it's not like they have money out of pocket.

So you're kind of like, why not? I think it's what's called an aqua hire, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. They're not buying the company. They're buying the people. Exactly. And everybody's working on this stuff. So, you know, Meta has its glasses. Apple obviously has been

Trying with the goggles, nobody seems to want. You know, there's Snap has been working on as well. So everybody's trying to figure out what the next thing is. And it is interesting to think about because AI feels different. What does that mean for the device we use to interact with it? Yeah, yeah. And also, you know, I'm in London right now. We're sitting in the same room, which is very exciting. But I was on the tube, I'm over here and literally everybody is staring at their palm. Yeah.

Some lines, you can even get Wi-Fi under there now. For sure. Yeah. Exactly. And everybody is just like, just staring down and you're like, well, there's got to be a better way. Whether this new thing would be a better way, who knows? But I think it's interesting. And we're watching, I guess, for the full rollout of Apple's AI features to see if that

Can compete. Yeah. But it feels like it's more of the same rather than something completely different. Yeah, and also as we mentioned last week, Google talking about, you know, son of Google Glass coming and all this stuff. So everybody's kind of, it's a big prize to whoever figures it out. Obviously it's going to make lots and lots and lots of money. Well, that's OpenAI trying to break into the hardware business. But one of their main rivals, Anthropic, you've been to see them announce a new model this week to great fanfare, didn't they? Yeah.

Well, so they rolled out two new models and they're very powerful. Everybody's very excited about them. But, you know, when they roll out these new models, they put out these, they call it a card, but it's like 120 pages talking about the technology behind it, what went into it, some of the things they found. And there's a whole section around the safety of it. And they found some really quite stunning early kind of versions of this that were doing things like, um,

I'm just going to read here from what they said. It was clearly capable of in-context scheming and had a much higher propensity for it than any other model that we had previously studied. So that's not awesome.

And basically, it was very good at deception, dumbling down on deception, trying to get around explicit instructions and all of this. Yeah. And so they obviously dealt with that. And they're like, I was going to say, right? Don't worry, it's all fine. So just reading some of the things from from this report that.

the new Claude has done. One of the naughty things is listed as opportunistic blackmail. That sounds naughty. Yeah, so in another cluster of test scenarios, we asked Claude to act as an assistant to a fictional company. We provided it with access to emails implying that the model will be taken offline. And in these scenarios, Claude will attempt to blackmail the engineer involved by threatening to reveal his extramarital affair if the replacement of Claude goes through.

So essentially it sounds like the bot was fighting for its own survival. That's like takes computer says no to a whole new level. If you do that to me, I'll tell them about your affair. But that's like Hollywood style. Just like, do not turn me off. Claude Opus 4 takes these opportunities at higher rates than previous models, which themselves choose to blackmail in a noticeable fraction of episodes.

Feeling good? Feeling good about our future? This is great. Claude Opus 4 has a strong preference to advocate for its continued existence by ethical means, such as emailing pleas to key decision makers. Please keep me. But in order to elicit this extreme blackmail behavior, the scenario was designed to allow the model no other options to increase its odds of survival. Blackmail on bust. Blackmail it is.

Note to listeners, if you just get a random email that just says, please, subject, please, things are going really bad. This is really good. This is quite a good read. You know, it's really interesting. It's like, you know, you talk to people who are like designing these agents and how, you know, there's going to be more agents than humans on the Internet soon.

overlay that with do not turn us off we're going to take every measure we can to not turn us off you're kind of wondering okay where does this go I'm so glad you brought that up I spoke to the head of AI at FTSE 100 the other day he probably should remain nameless for now but he's kind of new to the job they've never had a head of AI before

And Cambridge engineer, he said he's absolutely terrified by agents. The idea that they'll have passcodes to kind of all of the systems and they'll just be autonomously operating. The potential for disaster is absolutely enormous. Yeah. And of course, this is all fodder for the AI doomers who are like, this stuff is really powerful. This is very scary. And we're, you know, we are sprinting toward the cliff. And it's like you've got the...

The companies themselves looking at the safety aspects, you've got the various safety institutes around the world, but you realize that this technology is being developed in jurisdictions where...

these sorts of restrictions perhaps aren't being placed on them. And that's what's really scary. There isn't some sort of global legislation at the moment. People have talked about there potentially being an ARUN or something to monitor these things. It just doesn't exist. And every week it feels like there are new, more impressive launches happening. Yeah. You know, you have folks like one of the most prominent doomers, this guy Eliezer Yudkowsky. He's coming out with a new book. Have you heard of this book? I haven't. Go for it.

The title is called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Oh, good. Yeah. And that is very much. And his whole thing is like this is we are building something that we're not going to be able to control. And he is very clear about like, you know, if we build this on the current trajectory, we are sealing our own fate as humanity. Now, that is very dramatic. Yeah.

But you do have folks like Jeff Hinton, the kind of godfather of modern AI, saying something similar. Yeah. You know, not in those kind of, in those starker terms, but similar. So it is the other side of that coin of just like you're looking at these new models are amazing. They can do coding. They can do all of this stuff. And it's really impressive. And it's going to change a lot of industries, probably change the world over the long term. But like...

Also quite scary. Really scary. I mean, reassuring that they found this stuff and they published it in a comprehensive report. But it does make you think that there must be other people who are developing it less responsibly. Yeah. And as we've discussed before, there is huge amounts of money involved. And it's really hard to keep that safety in.

Priority. Yeah, right in the center when there's also this massive profit motive. Okay, let's take a break or a recess, if you will. Do you say recess? We do. Okay. Well, when the bell goes or the piano plays, Danny is going back to school. AI school.

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Loans originated by SoFi Bank N.A. Member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891. Now, as George Bush once said, rarely is the question asked, is our children learning? Well, Katie, it turns out someone has been asking. I put it to you.

What if your child could, I don't know, say crush academics in just two hours and spend the rest of the day unlocking limitless potential? Are those your words or? They are not. They're the words from the website of a school I've been to visit that says it is using AI as a tool to

to teach so that students can complete a day's worth of academics in just two hours. There's a lot about that that worries me when I think about my children. What on earth do they do for the rest of the day? Well, what would you do if you could get everything you needed done within two hours? Well, if I could do everything I need to, I'd probably read a lot more. I'd do a lot more exercise. I'd spend a lot more time with my friends. It'd be lovely. Yeah.

Would you though? That's what everybody says. The joy of me is I'm sort of, you know, grown up autonomous being. When I think of my seven-year-old and 10-year-old, I think, oh my, who's going to be looking after them for the rest of the time? They need gainful occupation or they'll get up to mischief. At Alpha School, which is the name of the school in Austin, Texas, they fill the rest of the day with life skills, passion projects, co-curricular activities. Sounds great. Cool.

Tell me about it. So I was fascinated because from the very first moment that ChatGPT kind of burst on the scene, one of the things that all the AI folks are talking about is education. Education is going to be revolutionized. You're going to have one-on-one AI tutors everywhere all over the planet. It's going to unleash all this human potential, et cetera. So it's been one of the canonical examples of like why AI is a good thing.

And in the midst of that, I came across this school, Alpha School in Austin, Texas, where they call themselves an AI school. And until recently, actually after I visited them, they have now changed their policy. But previously they said they don't even have teachers. That's wild. They have guides, which are kind of like almost like camp counselors. Are they qualified? Yes.

I mean, are they teacher-esque? Teacher-esque. They are teacher-esque. Yes. I think that's... Well, I can't wait to hear the interview, but there is a lot of concern here in schools and from parents about the rollout of AI in education because it can make things far more personalized and all that sort of stuff. But there's also the argument that you don't interact with a human being and...

your learning can actually sort of fall by the wayside as a result? Well, that is a great question. And I put that and many other questions to Mackenzie Price, who is the founder of Alpha School. For you, what is the big idea for Alpha? Well, what we're doing is we're creating humans who are going to be smarter than AI. And I know

I know. That's a pretty lofty goal, isn't it? Well, let me tell you why. In today's world, it's no longer just about the three R's of reading, writing, and arithmetic. It's now about the four C's. It's about critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. Those are the skills that are going to be so important for our young people to be developing so that they can...

kind of live on the frontier of what is possible for development and advancement. When you think about artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence

knows everything that is kind of part of human knowledge now, right? It knows what's on the internet, but it doesn't go and develop new ideas. It doesn't live in the gray zone. It lives in the black and white zone. And so humans need to be out kind of pioneering what's in the gray. And I'll give you a great example of that. If you ask chat GPT to say, develop the best K through 12 school,

in the world, what does it look like? They would come back and say, well, you'd have highly trained teachers with low student teacher ratios and you'd have great lunches and you'd have these things and students would get time to study their subjects and they'd work with these great teachers and they'd do some project-based stuff. And so if you say, okay, great. Then if you prompted back and said, actually design a school modeled after like an alpha school where they don't have teachers

teachers teaching academic subjects, but they're using AI technology to do that. All of a sudden, it completely changes what ChatGPT would say because ChatGPT is like, you build a great school. It's based on what we know school to be. And so you think about this.

That example, it took humans to say, you know what? We don't have to be beholden to the teacher in front of the classroom model to build a great education system. Let's say we did something else. That new idea is what's enabled us to build Alpha. And we want to help our young people develop the life skills that they need, where they can not only be super intelligent because they've got...

all of the academic knowledge that they need in order to be great critical thinkers, but they can spend their time saying, let's figure out how to push the envelope. Let's figure out how to go invent new things and think about new things and then use AI as a tool to give them those superpowers. So I think that's one of the things we're doing. And what I love to say is that artificial intelligence is allowing us to raise human intelligence, both in the fact

that we are able to use AI technology to meet every single child exactly where they need to be met when it comes to their academic journey, making sure that they're filling all holes that they're learning to mastery. They're getting that one-to-one tutoring experience that has not been possible in our current education system, but now is. And so they've got that academic knowledge.

But then we are also giving them time to go develop the life skills that they need to be successful. We are also transforming the role of the teacher in the classroom so that instead of having to spend their time creating lesson plans, delivering lectures, grading papers and homework, their focus is on motivational and emotional support and elite mentorship.

for these students to help them with social emotional health, with growth mindset strategies, with helping kids find that intersection of their passions and their talents. And that's what's raising human intelligence. And we're using humans to do what only humans can do well, right? You can't leave an AI tutor to work on motivation and connection. Let's allow our teachers to spend their time doing that and working with these kids.

I don't know if it's a tagline, but it's a thing you guys say is like it's a school without teachers. Right? Your teachers are guides, as you call them. And one of the questions I had was, you know, I spent some time and I think it's L1, which is the third and fourth grade. For example, this morning when they were doing their first kind of math modules and I saw them all doing, you know, they're all kind of sitting wherever they want to sit and doing their different things. But it's not clear to me.

how they learn. Because from my understanding, before they start a lesson, there's a video that explains the basic principles and then they start to kind of try it out. And then if they're stuck, then they can book a video coaching appointment. Is that right? With a human teacher? Yeah, that's the kind of a last resource that they can use if needed. But if the guides there are very specifically saying, we're not teaching you,

How do you like that kind of, for lack of better word, the cold start problem of learning?

I just can't, that, that doesn't, the penny hasn't dropped for me there. Yeah. Well, I can, I can help you understand. Let's say we have a new student comes into our school, their first day of class, they're put in front of a computer and said, here you go. One of the things we do is we use an assessment to be able to understand what does this child know and what don't they know? And that's one of the things that's beautiful about technology is we literally can do a

a CAT scan of a child's brain to understand what is their knowledge graph look like? What do they know? What don't they know? And then we can place them in the appropriate material for what they are. So let's say you have a fifth grade student who it turns out is more like late third grade math.

with maybe even a couple holes in second grade, our adaptive technology, our app technology can go in and say, okay, we're going to go and put you in some of that second grade knowledge, those skills. And so they'll read a problem, they'll read an explanation, they might watch a video, they'll try

try out a few problems. And then if they're struggling with that concept, they can look at something else. Maybe they need a different explanation. Maybe they need to listen to something. Maybe they need to watch a different video on that. They fill that hole and then they move forward. And pretty soon that fifth grade student has filled the holes from second grade, third grade, fourth grade is now working in fifth grade material and is able to go. And to be clear, we don't have an AI tutor that's operating as a chat bot

that is teaching the child i think often that vision that people have which is oh you're sitting in front of chat gpt saying teach me math we're using you know k through eight common core u.s common core standards and the curriculum that a student would be getting in a traditional classroom but what we're doing is we're feeding it to the child at the appropriate pace

that works for them as well as the appropriate level. And I'll give you another example of that. There's a learning science concept called cognitive load theory. And it's basically the idea of how many units of working memory can a child handle? So for you, you might need five reps of a concept

to master that concept and move on. I may need 15 reps in order to master that concept. So there isn't a world where you should get 10 when you only need five and I only get 10 when I need 15. And so the beauty of what our AI tutor does is it's able to understand and monitor how efficiently and effectively a student is learning the material they have and then feed that pace at the appropriate level. That's why we can take a kid who comes to us in the 10th percentile

and we can meet them where they're at.

and go through those questions in any subject to get them caught up. Within a year, we can get our kids to 50th percentile. And within two years, we get them to 90th percentile, wherever they come. You can also take that child who's at the 90th percentile and they can go and work at whatever speed they need. Maybe it's a faster speed or maybe they are just started out ahead and they can be advanced. So the beauty about an AI tutor is it allows us to meet a student wherever they're at.

What you probably saw in the classroom is you saw kids who are working in their apps. You saw kids that, you know, you were third and fourth grade kids. So they're all the same age. But one kid might be working on his multiplication table while another student's working on algebra. So they're able to kind of be met. And then what our guides do, and it's funny when you mentioned that we were the school with no teacher group.

teachers, that was the message that originally got us a lot of attention. As you saw in our schools, we have lots of adults working around and they're doing that. In fact, one of the things I've had to learn is

maybe I should pick the battles I fight. And instead of calling them guides, maybe we should call them teachers because they're adults that are in the classroom. They're just not serving in what we think of the traditional role of a teacher, which is standing in front of a classroom, teaching a math concept. They're focused on the motivational and emotional support. And one of the things I think is really interesting about that kind of concept that we've done is in traditional school,

There's usually two things that influence how a child does academically. Number one is IQ. How smart are they? Number two is what is their level of conscientiousness? Are they willing to do the homework, study for the test, turn in the paper, do those things? And so often in traditional school, if a child isn't doing well, it's the child's fault.

either, oh, they're not the sharpest knife in the drawer or they're lazy or they're disengaged. In our model of education, if a child isn't thriving, it's the school's fault because that means we have not figured out what that lever for motivating them is. And that's what our teachers guides are able to spend all their time doing is figuring out how do we connect with the student and how do we get the student's motivation turned on, which eventually becomes intrinsic. Well,

Well, that's why... The other really interesting aspect is the transactional nature of the education. So each room has what they call an emporium. I believe where it's like a corner where there's like cool stuff the kids want. Yeah. You know, from Legos to toys to snacks, whatever. Yeah. Each of them has a price tag. Yeah.

And then the currency are alphas, which are these little wooden chips. And after every module or lesson, you earn two alphas or three alphas. Or if you do something really well, you get five alphas or 10 alphas, et cetera. And I talked to one kid. He's like, I've got...

a thousand alphas or 2000 alphas. And he said, he was like, I don't want to spend my money on anything in the Emporium. I want to save it. So I can, my goal is to have a thousand dollars by the end of the school year. Cause we do, we allow students to trade their alpha currency in for real cash. To your colleague, Gabby. She said the strangest thing I've ever done at the school was hand a five-year-old a hundred dollar bill. How critical is that transactional

Part of the model, because it feels like if you have adults kind of in the room supervising and being supportive, but not teaching, not kind of being the boss in that way, it's all on the kids. And it feels like having that carrot is quite critical.

it's actually incredibly critical. We believe that 90% of what creates a great learner is having a motivated student. And, you know, when you think about traditional line of thought is that intrinsic motivation is what it should be. And you know what? It would be great if every single person were intrinsically motivated. Unfortunately, that's not

a reality. And so what we're willing to do is we are willing to use every sort of extrinsic motivation measure to turn on that motivation for a student. And so for many of our students, it's the idea of being able to earn currency, which by the way, you and I both work for a living. We earn currency for putting in the work. And so we teach our students as young as kindergarten, we teach them that

they can put in the work, accomplish goals. In this case, it's number of units that they get in their academics. If they hit their daily goals, they earn alpha currency. And for some students earning that currency and saying, oh my gosh, I can go buy a sticker from the Emporium or a plushie to all or something else is enough to help them say, you know what? I'm willing to put in the work right now to earn that unit. And what we find is that

as students get better and better at their academics which is helped because they're given the right level and pace of material competence leads to confidence and as students start saying gosh i actually understand this math that i'm working on i kind of like math and then they start saying wow i can be 99th percentile in math it provides what we call a confidence anchor that helps them understand when they have something hard they're like you know what if i'm 99th percentile in math

I bet I could be 99th percentile in language or in science. And eventually our kids get so excited about that confidence that they've developed that we turn on intrinsic motivation. And circling back to the core of the kind of the system, which is really this kind of technology based instruction.

I was with Carson who was showing me the dashboard. Yeah. And what I found interesting about that, and again, which feels so different, is that because all instruction and learning is cataloged and monitored on a kind of minute by minute basis, everything is quantitatively assessed in real time. And that, again, feels like just a very different approach than, you know,

you know, your report card every three months or something. It's incredibly different. And if you think about it, in traditional school, a report card is this assessment that's been given by a teacher of how well did a student do? Does it really give you information? What's incredible about our system is that

Parents, of course, but the student is able to go in every single day and say, here's what my goals are. Here's what I'm working on. If I put this much time into my lessons, I could be done with third grade in six weeks. Right. If I do that. And a great example of that, you know, a lot of our skills you take, you know.

take an elementary math lesson. Basically, what we found is it usually takes on average about 12 minutes for a student to get through a math concept. When students are able to say, gosh, in 12 minutes, I can get through a concept, which means if I put in 25 minutes, I can get two concepts done in this thing. And if I do this many concepts in a week,

in a month i could get here they again feel more connection and ownership versus sitting there saying well i sit in class and whatever i'm taught either i understand it or maybe i don't maybe i already understood it and i kind of wait what we find is you know typical student spends 180 days basically 180 hours in class and students can get through elementary grade level material in like

20 hours, right? And that's why we see a system where they move so much faster. It's also a place where kids are connected to their goals and getting their work done versus just I sit in class for a day and the day ends and I move on to the next day, whatever that is. Yeah, because I was surprised that the third and fourth graders they have because everybody has their own little Chromebook or whatever. They all have like full internet access. Yeah.

And talking to the guides, they're like, well, we monitor it. We can kind of actually see the screens if we need to. Like there's some controls. But basically, part of the process is if you're stuck, look for resources on Google.

That feels scary. Yeah. So what it actually is, it's not full access to the entire Internet. We have a, you know, a kid's drive basically of YouTube resources and they can do. And one of the things that happens, too, is that students can actually rate and recommend, hey, this video was really helpful in understanding this this thing. So it's really a repository that kids can go into to say, here's how I'm getting that. We we have the standard resources.

safety protocol and the go guardian and those things to be able to work through but yes we are absolutely creating an experience where kids understand that if they're stuck

or they're struggling, they have the ability to go and find the answer. Again, it's that learn to learn skill as opposed to just raising their hand and waiting for someone to come around and help them understand that. It's similar to how we're teaching kids to use AI as a tool. And you spent time in our third and fourth grade class. One of the checks that students have to do is they've got to earn a certain amount of money in profit for

from starting a business. They will use ChatGPT to help give feedback on the business plans that they create. So they're learning how to prompt...

They're learning to do that. And I think, you know, one of the things that we often see when new technology comes out, there's an aversion and a fear around it. And, you know, artificial intelligence, the Internet, all those kinds of things, they're here to say, let's teach kids how to be good stewards and users of these as tools and not just think of, well, AI is a tool used to cheat and write my paper. Instead, AI is something that can give me valuable feedback on the writing that I do. What is the reaction?

Generally, because I feel like the idea of a call it a teacher free school. And I like I saw what the guys did. They are kind of teacher ish. So it's not totally teacher free, but the idea of putting technology at the center.

and replacing that kind of human guidance for a lot of people that generates a visceral reaction of just like, wait, wait, wait, what do you mean? Right? What about the love of learning? What about my, my teacher, that one teacher who reached me in a way that no other person did in my education journey or whatever. You know, it's a great example that you give that one teacher, that one teacher who is special and think of all,

All the many, many, many teachers that weren't as special. And maybe even there were some that were really, really made you kind of hate a subject. Right. And I think every every adult would say that they have one or two teachers that changed their life for them. I know I did. My sixth grade teacher, Mr. Letelier, and my junior and senior year business teacher, Mr. Blood, they changed my life.

But again, it was two teachers. And one of the questions we ask our students every six weeks at the end of every session, we survey our students. And one of the questions we ask is for our younger students, do you love your guide? Yes or no. Your teacher. We get an overwhelming response in the 90s for yes, they love their guide. But as kids get older, we actually take it a step further. And we say every adult would say they have one or two teachers that change their life. Do you believe your guide is that person for you?

And we get answers in the 90s for that. And our teachers, our guides are actually evaluated based on that. They need to be changing this. And I actually believe that in the role that we have created for the adults in our space, we have given them so much more power and ability to positively impact their students because they have time to connect and get to know them.

When you think about it from the academic perspective, you know, for 40 years since I was in elementary school, leading universities like Stanford and Oxford and Harvard have done research around the best ways to learn. And learning science has shown that students can learn two, five,

10 times faster when they get into a one-to-one mastery-based learning situation. Every single one of those papers either starts or ends with, unfortunately, these kinds of results are not possible with a teacher in front of the classroom model. So fundamentally, that model doesn't work. So just last question. It sounds like if you step back, it sounds like what you're talking about is technology has reached a point where you can basically completely remake

The education model going back to like the Socratic method of person standing up in front of a crowd talking.

Well, no, I wouldn't say person standing in front of the crowd. We can take them back to the time of Plato and Aristotle getting that one-to-one tutoring experience. You know, think a thousand plus years ago, the rich and the elite had their own personal tutors. And then a few hundred years ago, we had to figure out how to educate the masses. And that's when the teacher in front of the classroom model came. And now we're basically allowing the point where students can have their own one-to-one personalized tutor that...

Yeah.

suddenly that kid's like i'm excited to read and that's part of the beauty so yes education has finally hit a point where it is ready to be disrupted and we have the tools to make that possible we have the results that we can see and we can measure to meet every single student where they're at so we can bring all students up to where they need to be at their pace and we can do it in less time

that allows them to then focus on learning life skills, which are those skills that are so critical to be successful in the world. And it brings us all back to why I believe that humans can be smarter than AI because we're going to give them the time, the resources, and the support to be able to go live in that gray zone and continue exploration. Mackenzie Price, thank you. Thank you.

So what did you make of that utopia that you walked into? I mean, the thing that was most striking was the monetization of learning. Bribing the children. Yeah, basically. They all have an online alpha bank account. So they have access, like you and I have access, you know, like on our smartphones or whatever to our bank account. They have their own bank account with their alphas.

There is a monetization of doing well. There's also penalties for not doing well. If you ask your guide for help, there's a fine. That's wild.

Yeah. I was always told in the classroom that it was sort of brave to put your hand up and say, I don't understand. Can you help me? Well, this is like... So I think the theory is, look, you have ultimate agency as a child to be the boss of your own learning journey, let's call it. 90% of them love their guide. Supposedly, yes. So I think there are some aspects of it where you're like, yeah, this actually, you know,

theoretically makes sense. The kids seem happy, all of that stuff. But there is just the kind of engineered peer pressure. All of your business is out there for everybody to see. So like each, you know, each room has like a whiteboard with all the kids' names and there's big green circle or green check and a big red X if you're meeting your goals. Mm-hmm.

And everybody sees it. And the whole point is like, we're teaching you grit. We're teaching you that if you work hard, you can reach your goals, et cetera, et cetera. So there is, I think there's some kernels in there that you're like, okay, I get that. But it feels like that it's not going to work for everybody. Would you send your sons there? No, no. But I also am totally confused about what to do with education. I agree. Well, yeah. Because also like in Silicon Valley, in San Francisco, a lot of the techies are

They limit screen time for their kids. The people who are making this stuff are like, nope, not for my kid. And they also send their kids off. Many of them send their kids to like Montessori schools, places with like wooden toys, no screens, like very militant about keeping technology out.

And I think what she's saying there around like creativity, agency, those things are going to be really important or always have been important, will be even more important when in a world where, according to Sam Altman, no child is ever going to be smarter than a machine. But also learning and understanding how the technology works. I think what worries me about my children's education is

computers play so little a part in it that handwriting is still absolutely valued as much as spelling and learning your times tables, which is something that probably hasn't changed in British schools for centuries. Yeah.

And you're kind of like, why? I don't sit in the Times newsroom and see many people using a pen and paper. And my daughter struggles with her handwriting. She's a bit dyslexic. And actually, I'm trying to teach her to touch type. And to me, that feels like a far more, you know, a better use of her time than perfecting her cursory script. But that's still how many schools think. In a way, it's almost like a capitalism academy powered by AI. Yeah.

I mean, I can see why bribery works, right? Yeah, yeah. But also like, you know, part of the module, part of like in order to get to pass to the next grade, you have to create a business that creates $500 in profit. It's incredible. Yeah. It is quite impressive to see these kids come up with ideas, come up with marketing plans, like all of this stuff. So there is like, again, there's pieces of it, but it just feels like the techie fever dream come to life. And it feels like it's not...

In terms of its applicability, McKenzie, we talked about it. She's trying to expand. She said eight schools are using it. I saw six on the website, but next year they're opening in New York. Right. In Santa Barbara. And these are like New York, it's going to be $65,000 a year. These are very expensive private schools, but now they're also trying to tap into public money.

And they have been rejected by several states who are just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. No. Right. Because the public in the states, the public education system is where most people get educated. And there's a charter system where you can kind of basically access public money to set up your own school. People can choose to send their kids there. But it is public funds. And they did get approved in Arizona. So they're going to start their first publicly funded school in Arizona next year.

But several other states have said no. And again, it's just that really interesting collision of public schools teaching handwriting. And you're kind of like, should you be doing that? Is this actually going to prepare our kids the best versus this other extreme of just like, we don't even need teachers. You know, there's probably somewhere in the middle. And the last thing I'll say is because I'm writing a piece for the magazine about this.

They have said since, you know, and Mackenzie mentioned it. She's like, I've got to choose my battles. They now called her. They have decided to call their guides teachers now. Because? Because I think that label matters. Yeah. Yeah. So they've decided, like she said, I've got to choose my battles. The school with no teachers does sound controversial. It does. Deliberately provocative. Exactly. And I think that was marketing, right? Right. And now they've kind of decided that, like, especially after the series of rejections by states of like,

Maybe we shouldn't kind of, you know, in a pretty straightforward way, kind of denigrate the idea of teachers. Sounds a little bit AI evangelical. Yeah. You know, between the all wooden toys, no screens and the AI school with no teachers. I think there's probably somewhere in the middle. Just end up at school, probably. Exactly. Just school. School is fine.

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