Guest: Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy

AI is poised to change nearly every business, but few are changing as quickly as education. And Sal Khan, who has spend more than a decade manually creating more than 7,000 educational videos, says that’s a good thing. He’s encouraged Khan Academy to focus on “disrupt[ing] ourselves ... more than almost any other organization that I know of.”

The reason is backed up by the data: Personalized tutors — designed to help students achieve mastery in a subject, but previously thought to be unscalable — could shift the educational bell curve “significantly to the right,” Sal says.

Chapters:

(00:52) - John and Ann Doerr
(05:20) - Khan Academy’s origins
(07:42) - What it is now
(12:43) - Emotional fortitude
(15:25) - Generating revenue
(19:36) - The two-sigma “problem”
(21:31) - OpenAI and Sam Altman
(24:47) - What AI can do
(27:56) - Cheating and other fears
(30:06) - Video production
(34:08) - Standardized tests
(38:36) - AI tutors’ tone
(40:22) - Not leaving the closet
(43:20) - Who Khan Academy is hiring
(45:58) - What “grit” means to Sal

Mentioned in this episode: Nasdaq, Dan Wohl, Vedic and Buddhist literature, Microsoft, Benjamin Bloom, ChatGPT, the Turing Test, Greg Brockman, Donald Trump, Bing Chat and Sydney, Khanmigo, the SAT and ACT, Schoolhouse.world, Craig Silverstein and Google, John Resig and jQuery, and Angela Duckworth.

Links:

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#216 Founder Khan Academy, Sal Khan: Dangerously Curious

Grit