AI and Education

ChatGPT Is the World’s Largest Learning Platform

Leah Belsky, the head of education at OpenAI, talked on this recent podcast about some of the challenges and opportunities involved in AI being used in the education space.

As I wrote recently, I don’t think anyone really knows precisely what the education space is going to look like a few years from now, when kids all have a superintelligent assistant in their pocket. The only thing we can confidently predict is that it probably isn’t going to look like it does today. So teachers, parents, school administrators and government education departments all need to be thinking hard about how they are going to adapt.

OpenAI also just released “ChatGPT Study Mode” which “helps you work through problems step-by-step instead of just getting an answer.” It’s just the beginning of a range of new tools that will help kids learn and push back on teachers. I’m looking forward to seeing kids saying “hold on a second, that’s not what ChatGPT says” to their teachers. I know kids have had access to Google and Wikipedia for decades, so having access to information isn’t a new thing. But AI takes it from having access to information to expert knowledge with a tool that will be able to argue the point if it disagrees with a teacher’s facts or interpretations of the facts. 

Meanwhile:

At Austins Alpha School, students spend just two hours a day on academics, led by artificial intelligence tools. New Alpha schools are set to open in about a dozen cities this fall. (New York Times, 2025-07-27)