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Microsoft, Khan Academy Partner to Make Khanmigo Teaching Tool Free
- westurner 2y ago> The free Khanmigo access takes effect on May 21 for K-12 educators based in the United States.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- globalnode 2y agofree until they have enough training data
- hackernewds 2y agofine by me
- lucubratory 2y agoThey are not using user data for training. It wouldn't be very useful data anyway, as it's all explicitly from people who are learning and highly structured/not freeform due to the input constraints.
- pjm331 2y agoI believe it says they are right in TFA > In another layer of the partnership, Khan Academy will help Microsoft train an open source version of the latter's new small language model (SLM), Phi-3, with the goal of creating an AI math tutor for students
- lucubratory 2y agoThree paragraphs later, in TFA. >To that end, Khan Academy will give Microsoft access to its math-related data, including math problems with step-by-step solutions. Data from Khan Academy users will not be part of the training data, the companies said.
- endisneigh 2y agoI’m curious what teachers unions in the United States will think of this. Presumably any successful outcomes with this will result in a culling, starting with aides and specialists. Add declining enrollment and you have strong incentive.
- ukuina 2y agoHow is this different in effect from teacher resources like Classroom.com? Many websites provide teacher packs; this offering is a hyper-customized, always up-to-date version of the same.
- endisneigh 2y agoIt’s completely different for the reasons you already mentioned. It’s like saying an abacus and a (digital) calculator are the same.
- lucubratory 2y agoAn abacus and a calculator are the same.
- skhunted 2y agoThey are not the same. One is far more capable than the other. Can an abacus numerically solve a differential equation in a few seconds?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- changoplatanero 2y agoteachers unions don't have a monopoly on learning. they have a monopoly on the government provided childcare market
- vundercind 2y agoWhat does this do that’s so incredibly time-saving that you could cut specialists and aides? One may hope it’d just help teachers be a ton more effective, or at least less over-worked. We’d need about twice as many to deliver really good education, but instead the pool of teachers is shrinking, so we’re gonna need tech just to tread water on education quality.
- intellectualrat 2y agoThat's really nice
- GolfPopper 2y agoKhan - an English loanword from Middle Mongolian meaning "ruler". Migo - in the works of H.P. Lovecraft, a fundamentally alien race that has mastered neuroscience. Seems a little too much on the noise?
- Apocryphon 2y agoThe Great Khans of Fallout, as portrayed by the band Migos
- csours 2y agoor Conmigo - with me
- tdeck 2y agoYeah, I thought this was pretty obvious but I've got to remember not everyone took Spanish in school.
- vritant 2y agoI think it’s a little over-analysis as well. Khan Academy makes Khan-migo, named after the founder Sal Khan. Khan is a very common last name.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- shakabrah 2y agoonly you are reading that much into it i’m afraid
- yalogin 2y agoYou are thinking too much. Khan is just a name and a very very common one at that. I don’t see any reason to make this attempt at a blending of amigo into khan the founder, who has a good reputation, into something it’s not. If you say the blending just is not good nor is the idea to begin with, I am with you :)
- throwaway69123 2y ago
- 7thpower 2y agoThis is the future, I can’t wait. I’m going to encourage my daughters school to take advantage of this in addition to helping my daughter use it.
- capybara_2020 2y agoAny idea why Khanmigo is country locked? It seems to be available only in the US. Even the paid version.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoCynical take: probably some gdpr things to sort out. Optimistic take: slow roll out.
- dataking 2y agoI agree with both of these takes but want to add that the tool might not have been tested on all the languages spoken outside of the US. Can't be too careful with kids in the target audience.
- aspanu 2y agoSal Khan did an interview at the Commonwealth Club this past week where he stated that the reason for region locking is one of availability and cost. It seems like MSFT is only footing the bill for US use, rather than for the world, so there's still the matter of figuring out how to further reduce costs to make it cheap enough to give away everywhere. I'm not sure why that implies that the paid plan is not available outside of the US.
- nbzso 2y ago[flagged]
- tithe 2y agoAI is a hammer, so corporate is swinging it at everything they can. I agree that messing with child development is a dangerous game, and adding LLMs into the mix raises my eyebrows a bit (especially when kids may not have the common sense to not eat rocks or put glue on a pizza [0]). But in this case, the teacher is still in the loop (for now). Assuming Microsoft keeps its word and does not transfer learning material back to their servers, can we be reasonably certain that this isn't another CAPTCHA reverse-training exercise? I'd be interested to see how teachers can use this as a high-speed curation tool. If I were a teacher though, I'd be cautious that in delegating some of the work to a machine, the imaginative/synthesizing part of my brain is now going to go soft (and personally, I'd protect that aspect of my thinking at all costs). [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd11gzejgz4o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd11gzejgz4o
- anytime5704 2y agoShould probably throw our calculators away and go back to pen and paper too right? /s This is a tool for teachers that is now free. Maybe I’m an idiot, but that sounds good to me. Give teachers all the things because we sure as shit aren’t paying them enough. I’m totally on board making students do things by hand when they’re learning, but that isn’t what this is.
- nbzso 2y agoIs not what is it. It is all you can take in. There is a ton of science around dedicated to cognitive development. If you want to check out. I am sure in the near future, a lot of it will be excluded from the corporate datasets. I really don't get this. Here, I assume the median intelligence of a reader is enough to connect the dots already. But sadly, critical thinking is met with the usual jerk knee reaction algorithm.
- anytime5704 2y ago
- theodpHN 2y agoMicrosoft: Sorry Kids, Free LLM AI is for Teachers! https://slashdot.org/submission/17320965/microsoft-sorry-kids-free-llm-ai-is-for-teachers https://slashdot.org/submission/17320965/microsoft-sorry-kid... "Today, we announced a new partnership with Khan Academy to help turn the promise of AI in education into reality and increase access to innovation," began Microsoft's Tuesday post explaining it would make Khanmigo for Teachers (an AI-powered assistant) free to all educators in the US. But while Microsoft’s donation of Azure OpenAI Services may enable Khan Academy to offer their teacher tools to all teachers at no cost (Khanmigo previously cost teachers $4/month), Microsoft suggested it's still too cost prohibitive for even the world's most valuable company ($3.2T market cap) to pick up the monthly $4-a-head large language model (LLM) bill (public pricing, school pricing available by request) for the nation's 50+ million K-12 students. To help schools fund AI efforts, Khan Academy has in the past provided 1:1 coaching to Indiana educators on how to snag $50K AI grants to pay for Khanmigo from their state. Teachers and students from Indiana's AI grant-winning Hobart High School, a Khanmigo pilot participant, were featured in Microsoft's AI in education media releases as well as Khan Academy co-founder Sal Khan's just-released book on AI in the classroom, which earned a thumbs-up from personal AI tutor evangelist Bill Gates. Microsoft apparently hopes to solve the AI student tutor cost problem at scale with AI portion control for schoolchildren, explaining: "The companies [Microsoft and Khan Academy] will also explore how small language models (SLMs) such as Microsoft’s new Phi-3 family of models, which can perform well for simpler AI tasks and are more cost effective and easier to use than larger models, might help improve and scale AI tutoring tools. To that end, Khan Academy is collaborating with Microsoft to explore the development of new, open-source small language models based on Phi-3. The goal of the exploratory work is to enable state-of-the-art math tutoring capabilities in an affordable and scalable manner." Which aligns nicely with the goals of BillG and the Gates Foundation, which gave Khan Academy another $4.5M late last year "to continue the development and scale Khan Academy Districts to become the leading Math supplemental curriculum solution in the US."
- EGreg 2y agoSorry can someone explain to me why the teachers are needed at all in these subjects given the Khan Academy? A few years ago I saw Salman Khan give a talk about AI solving the Two Sigma problem, obviating the need for teachers: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hJP5GqnTrNo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hJP5GqnTrNo
- johnnyanmac 2y agoPeople these days have seem to forgotten the human element in, well, everything these days. I think it's easier to ask the collorary: do you trust your kid(s) to self learn K-12 material on their own time instead of going to school? Why or why not?
- EGreg 2y agoYes, living in NYC with a my mother working as a schoool teacher for decades, I have come to realize that much of public school is just a glorified daycare center to keep children occupied while their parents work: pg likens it to a prison: https://paulgraham.com/nerds.html https://paulgraham.com/nerds.html Some schools are awful: https://nypost.com/2014/01/12/no-space-no-books-no-leader-no-clue-at-citys-worst-elementary/ https://nypost.com/2014/01/12/no-space-no-books-no-leader-no... Newark: Zuck's $100,000,000 barely made a dent in math https://www.chalkbeat.org/2017/10/16/21103581/the-100-million-question-did-newark-s-school-reforms-work-new-study-finds-big-declines-then-progress/ https://www.chalkbeat.org/2017/10/16/21103581/the-100-millio... On the other hand, I knew since 2011 that this was possible instead: https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/a-better-way-to-teach-math/ https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20... I have proposed specific ways to reform education 10 years ago: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158
- blackoil 2y agoDoes anyone here actually used Khanmigo and can share experience with it? It is still not available in my country. The whole thread is cesspool of AI bad, M$ bad, we are doomed.
- ern 2y agoI’ve generally gotten that vibe from most of these threads. No I haven’t used it, but I can say that ChatGPT 4.0 has been a huge helping me tutoring one of my children in math. We previously had college students tutoring him, and it turned out they were not very good. I have a fairly solid, although dated background, so it helps me refresh concepts and to find mistakes. I don’t let him use the AI directly though.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoOn the contrary I got the opposite vibe here of "wow this is great the future is here" vibes and am a bit confused. Do people really want to replace their human teacher for school children? No I haven't used it. I don't like how it's being marketed though. I very much do not trust GPT 4 on the level where I am ready to have it educate the young.
- eganist 2y agoHonestly, if there ever exists a web-focused LLM that's hyper-competent in media literacy, I'd be happy to delegate to it the job of teaching my kids. We don't expect the most of our teachers, nor do we effectively compensate them for such an important role, so I'm more inclined to trust an LLM that can capably sift through all the data online and teach from what it understands to be true. Which essentially means the hallucination problem needs to be solved, which is a ways off.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago>We don't expect the most of our teachers, nor do we effectively compensate them for such an important role, If the government spent a fraction of the money tech is using to hype up LLMs on compensating teachers, we wouldnt have this mindset. We shouldn't have such thoughts of "we don't expect the most of our techaers" to begin with. Paying teachers more is a lot easier than solving hallucinations (as you probably saw, even Google is needing To manually edit gemini responses. The kings of automation). The (sad) state of things in the world right now mean teacher will be seeing your kid almost as much as you will. Maybe even more. So we should be more particular in who that person is, and what lessons they bestow on students. You wouldn't let any ol stranger baby sit your kid, so why the same for teachers?
- shortsunblack 2y agoSal Khan in the past has made his position clear that he supports austerity and private schools in the United States. This, if anything, is continuation of the con he always propelled. Edtech will replace teachers has been a talking point for a decade now. Too bad, there's no reliable evidence it improves learning outcomes. There is not any evidence for the latest "Microsoft figured out how to mine the essence of your child"-migo, either.
- Viliam1234 2y ago> Too bad, there's no reliable evidence it improves learning outcomes. There is no reliable evidence that schools improve learning outcomes either. Maybe it's all just some kids being born with higher intelligence and curiosity. If they attend a school, the school takes the credit for their achievements. If they use Khan Academy (or whatever other website) instead, the website takes the credit.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago>There is no reliable evidence that schools improve learning outcomes either. There's decades of evidence, just compare school results (even the lowest quartile) to homeschooling. I'm sure there's tons of literature in that field. Despite our repeated attempts to do so, teaching a full k-12 curriculum is in fact not something then vast majority of parents are ready to do. Even this tool isn't vying to replace teachers. If anything it wants to replace the teaching aides (aka tomorrow's teachers who are learning how to manage a classroom). It may be worse in that regard since its eyes are on the future without considering the human element of the future.