Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That's a Good Thing)

by Salman Khan

By analyzing and processing this vast amount of text, the language model learns the patterns, the language, and the context of how words, sentences, and paragraphs fit together. If you were to ask a large language model like GPT-4 a question, it would know what to reply based on its training from all those books, web pages, video transcripts, and social media posts. What it lacks in real-world sensory experiences of the human brain, it compensates for by having exposure to more language than any human might hope to read, watch, or listen to in multiple lifetimes.

AI might hasten learning globally and even get us closer to realizing a world in which every person on earth had access to affordable world-class learning. This technology had the potential to revolutionize how we communicate, create, and consume information the same way that, twenty years earlier, we marveled at the educational possibilities of the internet, and twenty years before that, the personal computer, and twenty years before that, the calculator.

We are at a turning point in education, one with far-reaching implications that is changing, and will continue to change, everything about learning, work, and human purpose.

The most successful students will be those who use AI to help make conceptual connections for developing ideas. 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. They will have a deeper understanding of the given subject matter, because they will know how to get their questions answered. Rather than atrophying, their curiosity muscle will be strengthened.

Clearly, when you “sleep on a problem,” some part of your brain continues to work even though “you” aren’t aware of it. Neurons activate, which then activate other neurons depending on the strength of the synapses between them. This happens trillions of times overnight, a process mechanically analogous to what happens in a large language model. When a plausible solution presents itself, the subconscious then surfaces it to the conscious as a flash of insight.

Humans are experts at inferring brute correlations, so much so that they often manifest themselves as problematic biases and false narratives about how the world works. This has led to humanity constructing prejudices and complex mythologies. The entire scientific revolution, in fact, has been our best attempt to stop “infer[ring] brute correlations,” which our brains seem to do so naturally, and most of us are still having trouble giving up the habit.

every generation has better and better creative tools. At no point have these suppressed human creativity. Rather, they have magnified it.

Mozart, Einstein, and da Vinci weren’t just innately gifted. They had access to opportunities and resources that the bulk of humanity didn’t have access to. Technology has generally lowered the cost of access to world-class tools and learning.