AI can make one-on-one tutoring widely accessible

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 18:43

   And again, this kind of goes to your original question, which is education. And there's two completely different ways to talk about and think about education. The way it's usually thought about and talked about is kind of at the level of like a nation, right? So, you know, it's like a national level issue or maybe a state level issue in the U.S., which is basically like how do you educate all the kids?

2. 19:03

   And of course, that's incredibly important. And of course, you're going to need like some level of large scale system like the national K through 12 school system or something like that, you know, in order to do that. But then there's this other question, which is like at N equals one, for an individual kid, like what can you do with an individual kid? And so I'll just give you kind of the ultimate, you know, kind of the ultimate answer to that question, which is it's been known for centuries that the ideal way to teach a kid at the unit of N equals one, by far the ideal way to do it is with one-on-one tutoring.

3. 19:36

   Like if you just have an individual kid and the goal is to maximize an individual kid, by far you get the best results with one-on-one tutoring. And this is something that like every royal family knew in history. It's something that every aristocratic class knew in history. There's all these amazing examples. Alexander the Great was tutored by Aristotle. He took over the world, right? Like, you know, many of the great kings and queens, you know, royal families and aristocrats and so forth, you know, over the course of centuries, you know, kind of always had this approach.

4. 20:04

   There's actually also statistical evidence, analytical evidence that this is correct. There's this, you know, massive question in the field of education, which is how do you improve educational outcomes? And basically, it turns out it's just it's very hard to improve educational outcomes, except there's one method that always does it, which is called the it's called the Bloom two sigma effect, which is there's one method of education that routinely raises student outcomes by two standards of deviation.

5. 20:25

   And we'll take a kid from the 50th percentile to the 99th percentile. And that's one on one tutoring. Right. So, again, if you go back to like it equals one, you have a kid and a tutor and they're in this like, you know, very tight loop with each other, you know, where the kid is able to constantly kind of be on the leading edge of what they're capable of doing. and they can move incredibly fast and they get kind of correction in real time. You get these better outcomes. But to your question, it's never been economically feasible for anybody other than the richest people in society to be able to provide one-on-one tutoring for kids. AI provides the very real prospect of being able to do that, right? Because obviously now, right? If you have a kid that's super interested in something and they can talk

6. 21:01

   to an LLM about it and they can ask an infinite number of questions and they can get instantaneous feedback. And in fact, you can even tell an LLM, it's like, teach me how to do the following. you can say, you know, wow, that's like, I don't quite understand what you're saying. Like, dumb it down for me a little bit. Okay, now quiz me, you know, do I actually understand this? Like, people can just do this today, right? And so I think there's this like massive opportunity for parents, you know, in many walks of life to be, you know, with a little bit of time and focus to be able to say, okay, you know, my kid's probably still going to go through a traditional education system, but I'm going to augment this with AI tutoring. And of course, you know, and of course, there's going to be tons of startups, right? And there already are that

7. 21:39

   that are going to try to build on all the products and services for this. Khan Academy, you know, on the nonprofit side has a big push to do this. And so, you know, I think the broad answer might be a hybrid approach with schools plus one-to-one tutoring through AI. There's also this great, you may have heard, there's this great private school system called Alpha, in which everything I just described is kind of the basis of their philosophy, which is, you know, it's a combination of in-person schools and teachers, but it's also, you know, heavily based on AI and AI tutoring. And so I think there is a magic formula in here that I think is going to apply much more broadly. And really, for parents interested in this, now would be a great time to really start to think hard about that and to look at the options. It's interesting because there's