New A.I. tools could enable a Silicon Valley dream: bots that customize learning for pupils. Prior attempts have not lived up to the hype.
Sal Khan, the chief executive of Khan Academy, gave a rousing TED Talk last spring in which he predicted that A.I. chatbots would soon revolutionize education.
“We’re at the cusp of using A.I. for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen,” Mr. Khan, whose nonprofit education group has provided online lessons for millions of students, declared. “And the way we’re going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.”
Videos of Mr. Khan’s tutoring bot talk amassed millions of views. Soon, prominent tech executives, including Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, began issuing similar education predictions.
“I think over time we can give every child in the world and every person in the world — regardless of where they are and where they come from — access to the most powerful A.I. tutor,” Mr. Pichai said on a Harvard Business Review podcast a few weeks after Mr. Khan’s talk. (Google introduced an A.I. chatbot called Bard last year. It has also donated more than $10 million to Khan Academy.)
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