Watching ChatGPT effortlessly spin out answers to any question I throw at it is a magical experience. But I’ve been to enough magic shows to mind the gap between appearance and reality. Salman Khan, apparently, hasn’t.
As the founder of the widely acclaimed Khan Academy, which originated as an online tutoring service, Khan has been an early adopter of digital tools in his efforts to improve access to education. When OpenAI offered him an early version of ChatGPT-4, he found the technology “absolutely mind-blowing” and agreed with OpenAI President Greg Brockman that large language models will provide “the biggest benefit to education we’ve had in history.” Within months, his team rolled out an AI assistant dubbed Khanmigo—a play on the Spanish word conmigo, meaning “with me”—to provide tutoring and coaching for students in all subjects.
Not only does he apparently believe all the AI hype, Khan also breathlessly amplifies it in his book Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing). That might not be much of a problem if Khan and the many influencers endorsing his book and ideas—Bill Gates, Sam Altman, Laurene Powell Jobs, Satya Nadella, Arne Duncan, and others—didn’t have so much social and financial capital, which they’ve invested in the success of AI. Since AI has been unleashed on all of us, we need to grapple with how to use it well, a monumental project that begins with asking the right questions about how to educate students.