#18: The education accelerant

I'm really excited about AI's impact on education. So this is going to be a fun conversation. Who are you?

Hey, my name is Ross and I'm the founder of Tech in Schools initiative. And we are trying to change education using AI.

All right, so let's back up to 30,000ft. AI can change a parent's point of view, it can change a student's point of view, and it can change a teacher's point of view and it can change an administrator's point of view. Right. It can really improve the whole system. And that's why I'm excited about AI's impact or coming impact on education. And it gets doubled when you add augmented reality to the mix. So we'll talk a little bit about all that, but. But what part do you guys focus on just so that we know where your tool really hones in on?

So our main focus is always the end result of the student, but we have to do a lot more than just students, as you just mentioned. So right now our main focus is administrators and teachers and we have cohorts of students in specific pilots because we don't want to just release it like crazy right now. And we found the teachers are, I mean, I never could have even expected the results and outcomes that they're achieving. They are recreating new lesson plans, they are building all of their content and they're doing it so much faster. And the flood of. Because they don't dm, they're not on Twitter or anything. The flood of phone calls I get from people is so incredible because hopping on a call with them, they don't even know what GPT is. So when they see this software, it's like their mind just goes. And they're just like, this is the craziest thing ever. But the most important thing is that the Department of Education or who's ever, you know, using this software, whether it's our partners at the UFT or whether it's locally in a school, it has to be able to be controlled, one monitored and created in a way where misuses not possible, especially where students are in the mix. Yeah. And what we found is one single AI isn't enough. And that's the interesting part. That's my favorite part of the reason why that I built. When you start to have grok Integrate with GPT4 and then use Claude when someone's requesting like English language learning, it's there's like this sort of magic that happens that's like not written about. You're like giving These educators, these new tools that they've never seen before. Similar in the way that all these people now are using GPT and Midjourney and all these things and Dall E and Leonardo, they don't understand that. But what they understand is when they use, for example, Pixio, our software, they can generate a horse with braces. Now I know this is silly, but why this is important. There's a dental school and they learn about this, but they have no way to show it until now.

Yeah.

And I think these little things are huge as we learn and grow. And I think moving with the growth is super important too, which is why we're educators forward slash developers. And that's important.

Yeah, you're hitting on something. I mean I live inside the bubble. I'm looking at the AI community all day long, right. I'm following 70,000 people on X.com who are AI researchers and inside the industry. So I'm really up to date. I understand what's going on, I understand the problems, I understand what it can do and I, I see a whole range of things that it's doing. Most of these teachers have never used any AI, right. So how.

That's the biggest problem.

They don't do a lot of education with the teacher. Right. You have to walk in and, and start from ground, from, from scratch. Right. And say, hey, this is what AI is. Well, tell me a little bit about what you do with a teacher when you're sitting down with them to get your program be used.

It's strange because we live in a world where we just read docs, try a new app and it works and that's it, or it doesn't work and we get support. Teachers, they don't operate on this level anyways. So when they do get software, it has to be totally different. They can't pay for it monthly anyways. They can't just buy it. They have to be onboarded with something called professional development. So we had to figure out if you had like let's say 100 teachers, how do you do this if they're all in different places? So our latest pilot, what we did, we came up with this master plan and it worked. And it's crazy because it's nothing actually insane. It's just giving the educators exactly what they would need and or want because I know what I needed. But what you need is we do five classes of PDS that around three and a half hours each and they are required to come, they get a certification. Once they get the certification of that they completed this, they actually can get the software for free. Sponsored by the United Federation of Teachers and that's this new pilot we're doing. So we found people that, well not just people, but educators specifically who just sign up. They don't even know what's going on. So they don't see, they don't have these like buzzwords like we do like transcriptions by GPT4 or, or speed by Grok. Like they don't know what that is. So without these onboardings where we first understand what all the models are, what they do, who's better for what and like what is stable diffusion and like if you need to make graphics for slideshows, how do you do that? What's a negative, what's realistic vision? It just becomes this whole weird new thing where it's like you're almost like a normal company with a product. However, because you're in education, it's so much more interesting and for me, for us, fulfilling because you get to meet all these people, spend hours with them and then you get to see the light bulb, the invisible light bulb turn on and they're just like whoa, no way. And that is what I live for, that, that like response when it finally clicks and like they get the reason why we work so hard on like hot swapping like so when you're chatting you can just switch models in the middle of chat and context is remain. This is important because if you need to switch to sonar to do some research, switch back to Claude and then GPT for turbofront analysis. We teach them how to do this and create these flows. Wow. And we do this manually like, like this.

Yeah, you know, so you're, you're aimed at the teacher, trying to help them with their lesson because teachers are under the gun. I mean they're putting in a lot of free time at night trying to come up with a new lesson plan. Right. For their kids grading papers. Right. I, I, my sister in law is a teacher. So I, I, I hear the, the nightmare of what it is to be a teacher. Right. How does AI really, let's say it's two years from now and a teacher is really using this. How is their life different then than it is today?

So it's interesting, it's a great question because we recently in the last few sessions identified some power teacher users. So you know how you have like power users and app I have like power teacher users and what's crazy is what they actually come up with. So like I saw one example, a teacher used GPT for vision. And we allow you to customize that API call so you can give it a system prompt, whatever you want, what the teacher.

You're using a lot of language that teachers don't understand, right? API call vision.

Yeah, yeah.

So let's back up. I know what you're talking about. I'm really excited about both of those things.

You know, I got you. So, so basically we explain all what the models do, right? And once they learn what each model does. So GPT vision will let you see things. So it gives it eyes, which is important for doing fun things like what can I eat for dinner in my refrigerator? But what's interesting is when you create a system prompt or a prompt that is like you grade art pieces by students. Here's the rubric. You will produce one grade and then you'll produce feedback directly for that student. And I will provide the student's name and a picture. You will know that this is for art class. And here is our syllabus. So you know who you're supposed to be. You are here to help me grade. And I would have never really thought about just throwing all that together. But because of the, the ability of no 1500 limit on your system, you could put it whatever you want and it's crazy to see it start. It started grading for her. She graded I think 200 pieces of art in less than 30 minutes. It would have been actually impossible. And that's why she called me on my cell phone and was like, this is wild. She goes, how am I the only person that knows how to do this? And there's more teachers in this school. And I'm like, you're just part of the pilot. In time it will grow like we're onboarding another hundred hopefully in the next month. It's just this unfortunate slow, little slow process because there's a four week classes that they have to take because it's so important that we give them the education plus the tools and then they get customer support. Like any customer, they can just book a time whenever throughout the entire year that they have it. And power users for me are so cool because when you do things like create a Persona of like a sick per a sick college student that has a few medical issues and then you have your nursing students diagnose it. I could have never put that together. Like when I'm writing my code in a million years, I could have never said this is what they're going to do. And then she showed me and she's like diagnosing this fake AI but it's like so good and so real and that's why the power to choose is really important. So platforms need to think about not putting just one AI because we had to switch to Metalama to actually get it to really like get it, get in that character.

Yeah. Tell me a little bit about your company and, and how, what's your business model? How do you, how are you planning to make money out of this? Because I, I, I get the utility, but the, you know, this has always been a problem. My Silicon Valley doesn't really invest a lot in education companies because it's, yeah, you already nailed one thing is there's a sales cycle to it. Right. You have to convince people who aren't technical to use it. Right. And that takes a little bit of education and handholding and all that. Tell me a little bit about your business model.

Yeah, so when we first started, the idea was of course not with AI because it didn't exist. The idea was to help students and change the way we learn technology. Because what we didn't learn when I was in middle school and high school was like, how to protect yourself, what things are bad and what social media truly is and how it all works. And like I learned how to type and typing's great, but still to this day, when I'm intensely coding, sometimes I definitely break out of home keys and just go fingers. And the thing is, it's not important enough to have one class every single semester, every year around typing. Like, we're at the point that we're using digital products all the time to create and then they could have grabberly to fix certain errors. And even now we continue still to learn typing and like how to write a letter when this is now Googleable, like Google's a thing now. It's like very prevalent in AI. So nothing was changing. And we've been, okay, we've been able to skate by. Honestly, Robert, but I know you have kids. Like we're at the point we can't skate by this one. Like, you can ignore a lot, but you can't ignore this one. This one's too good. Because not only can it help each child and each student, it could help the teachers and their overloaded work, which they always have just a huge overload of work they take home on the weekends, on nights, and giving them a way to like programmatically pump it out. And by programmatically, I don't mean code, I mean like scientifically. Exactly. It'll be perfect being able to figure out how to do that is, I think, one of the most valuable tools you can even give an educator and the ability to self learn. Just like these models do. Like these models, language learning model, they learn as you talk to them. We need to be more like language models and we need to get the understanding of how to learn. And sometimes the fear of failure or something too difficult is something we face as humans. And as little humans, it's more prevalent. So with AI, you can kind of have a secret little friend who no one knows about and you don't even have to raise your hand and you can get the help you need at the speed you need it in the way you need it. And I think that is absolute magic. Whatever science goes behind it, I'm still going to call it magic. Because what I'm focused on in my organization, we're focused on the actual people and what this education does to them. Not necessarily the lesson plans, but where they end up after and like how much they retain and what their future skills are. Like. We have the ability by partnering with students, Cisco, which we, we have been for years, to give middle schoolers a cyber security certificate that only normally adults get. But why not like they're on the iPad. And you know, that was our initial thing is to change education, bring tech into it, whether it's websites or anything. But then AI happened and I was like, wait, as soon as I tried it before it became like chat to petite, it was a whole big thing. I tried the original models and I started making lesson plans. And I was like, well, this is crazy because like I just made lesson plans and I was like, let's just have fun. I'm like, can it code? Then it coded. And I was like, whoa, this is a game changer. At least just for if it's only just for me right now. And then it started to like get traction. Then OpenAI reached out and gave us a grant and they were like, take your best shot, build. And I'm like, okay, you know, don't tell me twice. And. And I built for like six months straight. And what we've ended up with, like the goal was to bring cool AI tools to students and teachers to what actually happened, which happens all the time when you build things. It changes. We actually built almost like this hub of all the AIs in one place. Like where I think of it, like all these different single companies are like, you know, the Apples or the Samsungs or whatever single thing. And then there's like target where you can get like all of them or like best Buy. And that's like what I want to do is bring everything in one place because I mean, some people can, Silicon Valley people can, a lot of wealthy people can. But I know a lot of people that cannot afford 150amonth to mess with all the cool stuff. So like if you would have everything, like, well, not grant, but Mistral, OpenAI, Gemini, Claude and then like Leonardo and then Pika Labs. And it's just like a lot. And so like with Pixio you can just generate videos, images and you can chat with the AI tutor, but you're not succumbing to these weird tokenized limits. So we're doing something different on the back end which lets you not run into these problems. So like a teacher maybe in one session could send like 430 messages. They would have already given up at ChatGPT even while paying. Yeah, because of the 40 rolling limit, which isn't 40 sometimes. And it just like I have nothing bad to say about any of these people. Every one of these companies are amazing. We're partnered with all of them. I just for students, educators. And now I'm seeing more entrepreneurs. They need a solution that's not just like a static thing. And like with limitation, we need. Learning doesn't have limits. And because this is learning, if it has limits, we can't learn properly. It's like this like weird phenomenon. Like I, me personally, when I learn now, I find it so interesting to like have it with me there every step of the way where I can almost like freeze time and be like, okay, deeply help me understand this. On a super like high quality breakdown. And these like trigger words are very helpful, but then it actually does the whole entire thing, which is so important because I, when I used ChatGPT for the first time and I got really deep in the session, it switched me to 3.5 and it was just like all downhill from there.

Yeah.

And that's what I want to prevent.

What, what is, what is education? What should education be? Because now that companies have the same kinds of tools and soon we're going to have robots working next to us and factory lines. The idea of a career is radically changing in my mind. How is it changing in yours? And, and how do we prepare kids for this world?

So it's, it's a work in progress. This my thoughts right now because it's always changing. But I think now. So there's like a few things that are really important. One, AI is not taking your job. That's important to understand. But people with AI Some jobs, I.

Actually is taking their jobs. Like if you're in a call center.

Well, when it comes to like, yeah, yeah. When it comes to like things that obviously get changed with technology, but when there's people saying like, oh, my whole entire team is going to be automated, it's like maybe downsize, but at the very most it's people that have resources and know how to use tools. And that's really. We're going to be in this era of like learning, like a lot of learning. And we're able to do it now. Prior to AI, we cannot do this. Like I cannot learn a new language in one night. I think I was the first time I did that and it was so interesting to see myself not like open a book and study for hours. And I think when we think about jobs, I think every job, all jobs will be infused with AI. Every company will be somewhat of an AI company no matter what they do. And as far as preparing kids, I think exposure is important. Right now it's isolated. So in the school environment, things outside, anything that's new, it does not enter the school. I think if we are able to figure out a way to bring safe tools. For example, if the students in the classroom and it's like I want to cheat on this, this thing, this exam, this assignment, write the whole thing for me, right? The teacher would be able to set something on the back end in the system that would make it not available to do that. It would just simply say, I cannot help you do that. And I've also sent the transcript of this chat to your teacher and I think when you infuse it in ways like that, where a principal can easily log in and just see all the messages from staff and students live, searchable, it's very important. And that's why partnering for us, partnering with game changing companies is super important. And for example, that feature we built out very closely with Helicon and that team is amazing. And I think when we build out the proper tools that are geared for education, we might be able to change the tides and make an impact. But right now, like saying to a student, go to Microsoft Copilot, it's not the same as what we're giving the students and we're all using GPT4. But sometimes like Claude Opus is pretty interesting and so is Mistral Large. And a lot of times you don't even get to make this exploration. But we need to or we can't learn, we can't play with it. And I think if we can harness it A few things could happen. So you have students that'll get jobs and get better salaries or better opportunities because they're using AI. And then you have the other side, Robert. You have the students learning, development and coding. Do you know how powerful it is to sit with a company and be like, we can design a custom AI thing for you. Whatever you want, just describe it with words? Yeah. And so by, in a coding class, when we teach with AI, I think we're giving these students a huge leg up in the industry when they start applying for jobs in the tech industry with full knowledge of Python, machine learning, data science. And this is all happening at a college level and high school level, which to me, I mean, even if I stopped here, I feel like I've done so many cool things that I could never imagine, but I'm not stopping here. But the future is super bright for education. It's the first time that I'm actually comfortable saying that and confident because what I'm learning, I'm an adult, I'm able to learn like a sponge. Now, this never happened. This is because of AI for sure.

That's key. How do you get a human to have a love of learning? Right. Because that's what's going on. Let's take on the cheating thing. Because when I was in college, I had a chemistry teacher and her first day, she stood up and said, you're allowed to cheat on my exams. You're allowed to bring the book, you're allowed to write on your arm, you're allowed to bring a computer or a calculator, whatever you want, you can bring it to class to take my tests, but they're timed. And if you don't know your stuff, you don't know the equations, you're going to have to be looking them up on your computer, on your calculator, and you're not going to pass the class. And she was right. So there is a style of teaching that lets, lets people explore these tools, use these tools, but still you got to have the knowledge in your head. You have to train your brain how to think through things, otherwise you're not going to pass her, her kind of exams. How would you approach the fears of AI? You know, the, the hallucination, it generates bullshit once in a while and it does. Right. Enables people to cheat and write an essay in a second or two. You know, that looks pretty good, right? But how do you take all those fears on?

So we have a few things that we've already done and a few things we're working on so first we, we tell teachers in these, on, in these sessions, we have these four hour sessions, we explain to them that like school teaching, classroom has to change. So like if, even if you don't think they're going to cheat in school, they're going to go home and cheat with these tools. Like these tools are now at a point that like you can't really compete with them because they're just like otherworldly insane knowledge.

They know more than any single human.

So and plus, if the student gets good at prompt engineering, I mean then really it's even harder. And plus I've done a few tests and who, like this is interesting and this is not backed by like, I'm not a scientist, but this is from my actual playing with it. So like when you tell it to kind of switch up burstiness, that's where it starts to lose the ability to like almost sound human. That's how we talk with burstiness. Yeah, that's something AI doesn't talk with. So when you tell it to do that, you can pretty much get around a lot of things. But after testing a lot, we finally found a good partner that nothing gets past them. So we actually built it into the system where a teacher can actually run it through and can check two different things actually, because there's two problems now. It's not just did the AI write it, it's did the AI write it? That's one. But then is it on the web anywhere? And it's interesting because if you get the AI wrote it, but it's not on the web anywhere, that for me is kind of interesting because that means it's something the AI actually just came up with. So that's good to know. But then you can detect if it's even AI, but then you can detect if it's human, but also copy pasted just like from the Internet. And I think that's really important. And that's one thing we did build and ship and teachers are testing it right now. It's actually kind of cool to see them test it and use like their own bodies of text to like test it out before like students get a hold of it. But we think the bigger thing is, you know, if you think it's been plagiarized with at least the systems that you give the students. Now I'm a firm believer why would you want anything lesser than what you have? So if we give them the best tools in school, they're not going to use any other tools. And when they use our tools, the Teacher can like literally, literally search. They could go in and search like a sentence or like pull up an account and be like, what did you say today? Yesterday? And give me a whole month. And that's a huge thing for us is like we need a way like that's not AI that I can go in and see right now what this student said. And if it's exactly what he turned in, in the paper. And then the other thing we're doing is sending a transcript daily by student on an alert list. So like if you put them on the alert list, you would get transcripts of their chats. And then the other thing that we are working on is like turning off chat at night. So like let's say your class is done and you can now turn it off. Yes, they'll have access to other AIs, but it won't be the most powerful one that's going to actually do their homework. And that's important. And we need to make sure that these tools are moderated at the teacher level so the teacher can add students and remove them and ban them as she, she or he sees fit. Kind of like putting a student in timeout or I equate it to like, you know, taking your phone away or today you don't use a laptop, you use a pen and paper. Kind of what we already do when something goes wrong. And I think if we start thinking like that and just iterate, iterate on this central idea of safety and control and then personalization of the teacher, I think that it's, I don't know any other real way now because it's evolving. So I'm doing things that don't require AI or machine learning. I'm trying to create systems like as if AI didn't exist like the old way because that way we'll be able to actually control it now. The only important thing about what I all what I just said, when someone gets AI tutor or Pixio outside of the classroom, all of these tools don't exist in that version. So it's only for educators and students. And because we don't let you lift restriction for Google Gemini, for example, you could turn off safety. We don't let them do that. But publicly, I mean, why not everyone's an adult. But privately in the schools we have to maintain full quality control and it has to be really good and there has to be support. That's the other thing. Robert, I will tell you the big problem. Who do you call when there's an issue? They can't get Anyone on the phone. It took me so long to get in contact with OpenAI and they fixed my problem and we love them and thank you, Open AI for getting back to us and fixing it. But it needs to be the same hour, like 10, 15, 20 minutes time. So you get a phone call and that's very important. Or they can't really use the software or any tool at all. That's why a lot of things don't grow inside schools, is because how can a company have a representative available for every person in a school? Because one school is like thousands of people.

Yeah.

That could need help.

Yeah.

So we're trying to do it even on a smaller level, but do it right. And like, if I have to, I'd rather grow the team exponentially while doing it right than trying to scale super fast while not having like these onboardings and these four hour meetings twice a week. It's, I think that is so important that it makes us not just like an AI or a tech company, but at the forefront, education. That is what we stand for. And like, we do this even without any sort of traditional audience, even in Twitter spaces, we join and we like to show people what's going on, give people cool demos. I just spoke to an educator and this is the beautiful thing. I spoke to an educator in a whole different country in Kenya, and she was like, I can't afford your tools, but I'm an educator, I could prove it. And I said, send me your id and she got a free account. And I think that's so important that when access is requested and someone's taking that step that you have to grow, grow that person like, like a plant, like a little seed. And then they can then be. And this is what they told me. I'm not making this up. They said, I will be your cheerleader at my school. Just help me be the cheerleader, please. I will be the advocate. They love being advocates and they love helping their peers. And so that's the direction we're taking it. Through that sort of optics.

You touched on something. That is why one of the reasons I'm excited about AI and education, it's a democratizing force. It brings, you know, I met a surgeon at Stanford University who does lung cancer surgeries. And he said when he went to medical school, he went to Stanford. He said, first of all, he went to Stanford because they had a huge library, Right. And it's still there. You can go there. It's really amazing library. And he said, everything I learned in the 1960s is now obsolete. So that the, the knowledge of the craft of the science has changed completely in a few decades. Right. But two, now he can bring a little Android phone to somebody in a country who doesn't have the wealth to have a library. He says, I walk into some doctor's offices and they have one medical book. They don't have a library like Stanford has. Right. But now you bring in a little $400 phone or, or less. Some of these Android phones are down to 40 or $50. Right. It's crazy.

Yeah.

And they have access now to the world's information on that phone. So now they have the Stanford library in their phone. That's a very democratizing force. Is that, is that one of the things you're seeing happening with AI over the next decade, that it's going to really change education around the world for everybody?

I have two parts of two answers. I guess so yes, it will if it's done correctly. But at the what it's happening right now, it's almost becoming like how you could get a car and it could take you from point A to point B. But there's like a lot of cars, there's different makes and models, there's different versions. Then there's ones that have like higher class and better interiors. Some are even, you know, autonomous and drive themselves and light cars. I think AI is just becoming just that. I mean it's hard to in your brain realize, but if you go to hugging face and you hit models and you see like over 600,000, 500,000 miles, that number is very large. And that means that there's a lot of models coming or there already.

Yeah.

And we need to do two things and I'm starting, I already started it. I'm about a week in, I need another week to fully dualery But I'm defining 154 models of LLMs but based on use tagging them by what I, I think you could use them for, then filtering them by are they education friendly? Filtering them by are they online. And I, I think this, this interface needs to exist where you can search the LLMs and see what they could do or even say it'll be like a website, I want to. And then whatever you say, it'll start picking LLMs that could do those things for you and then routing you to like hugging face or AI tutor or wherever. And I think when you do that, you begin to help people. It's, it's like now, right now we have Google and you can go on Google, but when you go on Google, you get like a billion results.

Yeah.

And so AI can help fix that problem for Google, which it does. So I go, I ask a question to like aitutor and I'll say, find me five links, use sonar, whatever it does it. Now that fixes the Google problem. But now we have another problem. Google can't Google AI for some reason. So if you're like, give me a huge list of what every model means, but in like real English, like, you're a human, I'm a human, don't tell me tokens, tokenization. I Want to hear Ram. Nothing. 13B, 17B 17X. Who cares? Tell me what it does. And if you can't do that, we are going to have trouble figuring out where and when to use them. And so if platforms are built in a way where one, there's education around models, which I can't say we are yet, it will be in a week and it'll be public, free for everyone. So like you'll be able to click it and just share it with everyone. It's completely free. It's going to be like a wikipedia but for LLMs. And then having a way to have all these LLMs in one place. Because if it keeps going the way it's going right now, people are going to legit have like 20 subscriptions that are just AI. And that's. We're not even talking about streaming yet. That's a whole different situation. But it's almost like AI was like, hey, streaming, good idea, let's do that. And now everything is this like monthly thing. But it's not like streaming, because when you're streaming, you could watch a million movies or one movie or no movies, but with AI, you could talk to it zero and still gotta pay. But if you talk to it too much, you know, you can't continue. So it's this weird thing where we hit these like, limits. And for me, like, I don't know about, about you, but for me, learning I have like, I have trouble paying attention and like sitting straight and like, whatever when I was in school. And like, for me, when I'm stopped, like, I'll forget about it, not interested anymore. And that's really important. And that's what I found when I started using the API from OpenAI and all these other companies. And when I had grants from them, I got to like, really play and see like what I could do. And it didn't stop, Robert. It doesn't actually stop. No, like, that's not a real, like, limitation. It's like A fake limitation. And I get it. 10 million, 12 million people. I get it. But we, we don't have to build for 12 million people. We could build for whatever random number for educators. It's not going to be. Well, maybe it won't be. That'd be great. But I think there's a need for someone to build for people. Well, for people like, not for coders or not for entrepreneurs that understand, like, what a sass is and like, what Google AdWords are like. Or one that like, says, hey, do you need to take a step back and do we need to switch models? Am I not giving you what you want? Do they don't talk like that? But what if they did? Then you'd be like, yeah, you know, you kind of are really bad at this. Can you switch over to Claude? And can you make sure my personality stays consistent? We have the ability to now request things and have things happen in the background with just words. I think the most important thing, Robert, for me, that changed if I had to one thing, right. That game changer. We can talk to computers with words and it understands.

Yeah.

And it's fun to hear it talk back with like, what you request or like a document or a poem. It's even crazier to say, you know, write this software and then all the files get created locally on your computer, like in real life. And I, I think that's really gonna happen. And when it does, it's gonna be, I envision a, like a TV in a classroom and like, hey, Jen, instant avatar connected up to like a tutor and grok. And it's just like, you have a teacher, she's talking, and then they're like, oh, you know, that's a good question. Let's ask me. And I think that's a whole different thing. And no one's even thinking about that. And we need to. Yeah. Because if we can help change education, we can help our future selves and society and our communities because people are going to be more empowered and more educated. You have the ability to give a free tutor basically to students to take home and whenever they want, after dinner, before dinner, when they get home from practice, just ready? And I think we've never had that. And people are definitely sleeping on this idea. And I wish these bigger companies would just like, either focus on this idea or like, make friends with me and we'll do it with you. But it's so important because I'm not just sitting on the Internet. I'm actually in the schools. I'm sitting with them for, for a 12, 26 hours and certifying them through our partners with Cisco so that there's something tangible they can hold and be like, yes, I know this. I can lead a session in my school about this. And I just, I don't know why this is not a thing and not at the top of everyone's list. Because you almost have free teacher's assistance. Yeah. For real. A free teacher assistant for every teacher. It's crazy.

It's early days. Most people have no clue what AI is. Yet you're nailing it, right?

I know.

Wow. What's the role of a parent in this? Because I'll give you why I'm asking this question. Because my kid had some homework the other day and I just didn't understand the math and I took a picture of his screen with ChatGPT's vision and it helped me help him. It's like, oh, your kids trying to do this kind of problem, you know, here's how you can help him work through that problem. What's the role of the parent here? And how is your system going to integrate the parents into the teaching workflow?

So you'll be able to monitor usage as a parent on what's happening. You'll also be able to use it to help your student. It'll be like a parent helper, except it's going to have to be a bot, but it's going to have the context of today or yesterday or last week. So what's really important for us is that teachers can upload a whole curriculum, which could be 40 PDFs and use that data to then construct things. And then we also want to use that data to like have it available for like parents that they're like, what did my kid do today? What happened in school? And then we also are going to have a soft grader that we're building. So imagine it grades everything automatically as soon as you turn it in and offers feedback and help before the teacher. It's a middleman, not your end grade. It's called a soft grader because it would grade and then give you feedback, send it to your parent and then also let you resubmit that with the help of the AI support. And I'm just exploring all these ideas and I just started building like that last part last week and it's for me, I think these conversations need to happen all the time and I, I'm so lucky to be partnered with all of these companies, including like Digital Ocean for example, where all these students get actual cloud Servers to build stuff on. When they take AI classes as computer science in college and then in like the lower grades, we're mainly learning how to use it to help us learn because I find there are classrooms where the main language spoken at home is different from language used in the classroom. And our tool allows you to switch everything into whatever native language you want, which is so cool.

We're back in. You know, you're trying to talk English to your kid to get them, you know, into the school system and you're, you're struggling with English, right. So you might want to talk in Farsi or Spanish or whatever your native language is to the computer.

Right? Yeah. And one thing that's actually really interesting, I almost forgot to tell you is like teachers, they tell me they were never able to email in a different language before now. I never thought of this, but when you now think about it, if you have a student who speaks Spanish at home, then the parents probably speak Spanish better than English. And if you know this for a fact, that's good. You can actually translate whatever email you're about to send into Spanish. And this is simple, but to them, impactful. That's the word that the teacher used when I was on the phone with her. So it was very impactful to do four different languages because she had to email 10 students, but the language was switching.

According to the student, there's 60 languages.

And she said the emails weren't even the same.

Yeah, my kids here in Silicon valley and in one school there's 60 languages being spoken in one school.

Whoa. Yeah, that's crazy. And like how do you, how do you do that? Unless you have some cool system or some sophisticated system that can help you because it seems like you would have to have a translator that's a real translator that's not backed by 70 million billion parameters. GPT4 translation is mind bogglingly good. Even in I had a teacher, they like to push the limits when they start to play, unfortunately. So it's funny, they started going into crazy languages that almost didn't even exist, but they did, it still was able to do like ancient Egyptian, which was crazy. It did Spanglish, which was so interesting how it interprets what half English Spanish is. And I think when you explore these things, when you dive deep into the technology. So for example, Grok, the most interesting thing about Grok is the speed. So if I embed grok everywhere where LLMs are doing things in the background, it goes so, so fast. Like I tested it and it's faster.

You'Re talking about.

Grok with a Q. Yen. Yeah, with a K. With a Q.

K is X comms, AI. You got to keep them all separate.

Now I've been, I haven't tried that one yet. I do plan to deploy it. It's 316 billion parameters, which is crazy. But when I use Grok on the back end with a queue, the difference is three minutes wait time to seven seconds. That's so great. If we can move that fast and we can use GPT4 or Quad when things need to get analytical or super smart, we can begin to change the landscape of how school even happens. Because yeah, parents and teachers are awesome and students, but what about administrators who need to create all these forms? Oh man, the forms. I had one administrator upload seven of her forms and get new versions of them following her format and it's so interesting to see them use that. And like the email. The administrators use email a lot, so they love sending emails using AI. And they also like getting ideas for fundraisers. And this is another interesting thing that I thought of. Like when I spoke to this administrator, she would upload photos of the school and the, what they need and the budget and it would come up with like seven really, really good fundraising ideas that are actually doable. And when you do things like this, it's yes, kind of like a happy accident on her behalf. Like she was not intending for this to work. Like she said she was joking, like this is going to work. But then it was like delightfully surprised and astounded and intrigued. And that goes back to what I was saying before, when you can intrigue an adult. We don't actually care about learning anymore. We are excited and like we have an insatiable hunger for, for power and education. But we hate opening a textbook. That's why we love YouTube and we love Internet. AI is just the graduation of the superhuman ability that we now possess to be able to learn. So I don't think it's that we, we can't learn as adults. I think the way we learn is kind of like outdated. And if we, if learning caught up with the tools we had today, I think many, many more people would learn. And now it did. So because of AI, you can just learn anything at any moment at 2 in the morning and you could pretty much say with like 90ish percent confidence that it's accurate and wildly smart beyond any person that you could talk to right now on Google Meet or Skype, that's a professor.

You're not the only company trying to trying to change education. I have a list on x.com of about 100 companies going education from different points of view, of course. But tell me about the competitive landscape. You know, there's Khan Academy and there's a whole bunch of different companies going after this. How do you look at the competitive landscape and you know, what's good and what's bad? What should teachers pay attention to and you know, tell me a little bit about what, how you view the whole landscape.

I think teachers should explore many different tools. I do just. I just have certain things that I think you should look out for when diagnosing tools. Like anytime you see energy or something like that, it normally means GPT4 is going to run out of something at some point or you want to like for us, the competitiveness, it is visceral out there with AI companies. But one thing that is interesting is that I'm not on schools are doing or not schools a lot. AI companies is like work directly with schools and educators, they don't really like to do that because there's a lot going on there. The difference, we've been doing that for 15 years prior to this. So we're able to come at it totally from a different angle where it's like kind of from the inside out rather than outside in, because we've already been working with like hundreds of schools. But also, competitor doesn't necessarily stay competitor, I guess, because people would say, like, you know, OpenAI is like a competing platform, for example, or Claude. And we're partners of all of them. So I have no issue, you know, making friends with things that make sense with partners. And if Khan Academy wanted to have a conversation, I would, I would love to talk to them. But I think Khan Academy itself and other platforms are. They're doing one thing and doing it well. And it'd be kind of crazy for anyone to do what I do. I think. I don't even know if it's gonna work. I hope it does, but I just, I need. It needs to exist because, like, it's a product that I can't find. So if I can't find a place where I have all the AIs and I don't get capped and I could do whatever I want, that's great. That's a playground. That's what I would recommend you look for if you're bringing anything into education. And the other part of it is, you know, learning and YouTube and docs are totally different than a conversation like this. And that's why we hold live Classes, I, I think less about like I have to worry about competition this, in this industry because there is. But I think we're just in totally different industries kind of. Because like I'm trying to have these real life situations with every educator. I'm trying to certify them in the same way they get certified for other things. I'm trying to make this normalized by partnering with the people who make it normalized. But unfortunately I don't have, you know, the funding of any of these big companies. So obviously that's why we're not as big. But when you think about products, you.

Don'T have Nvidia cards in the data center.

I wish, but it's good. It's good. It's expensive. It's like a bunch of Teslas or Nvidia.

But it shows why, why you partner with these companies like OpenAI and Anthrax. Right. That have the 10,000 cards in a data center and have the billions of dollars of funding.

Right. And before I forget that brings me to what I wanted to tell you earlier, but I forgot. I think schools should have like an AI machine like in the main office where the model's running locally, the stable diffusion is running locally. And I think imagine you can facilitate that. Like, imagine you can just drop off a server and be like, this is yours. Our software is on it. Everything's local, it goes nowhere.

Well, you might be a real expert.

I think there's so much power because.

If you buy a modern Macintosh that has an M1, M2 or M3 processor, 21% of that chip is AI. And most people don't know that.

That's cool.

Yeah, I'm like one of the top AI influencers in the world. And that part of the chip is not running very much right now. Right. It's empty, it's, it's cold, it's not being used. And I bet that Apple soon is going to start putting stuff in that part of the chip that is going to be running all the time. We're seeing a new Siri that's coming in June. Right. There's a lot of change coming and.

That'S, you know, I can't wait for new series. New series. It's gonna be good.

Well, the new series coming because they're making deals with Google as of this morning. Right. You know, Bloomberg announced that last.

That's crazy. Yeah. And, and yeah, it's good to have an. That's, that's one person. But like, what if you need a whole school to run on an LLM, that's like some crazy cloud stuff. So what we've, what we're going to leverage is we already are partnered with DigitalOcean who has acquired a lot of cool awesome companies. One of them is Paper Space. And I think that we can throw all our software on a digital ocean droplet with an A100 or two A1 hundreds and we can have the software running locally but non physically at the school. But here's the best part. Even though it's not there, we're going to buy that laptop that you just said. Right. Put that in the main office and that's how you communicate with the server, manage everything. But imagine a world where like the AI was local at each school. That's a world I want to be a part of. That's a world I want to build. And slowly but surely we're getting there. But that is like, it needs to be just like freedom of speech, everything. You can say whatever you want, you can use whatever model you want. But it also has to be private like how our journal is. So it shouldn't be publicized. If you're doing internal notes about like something in your company, Robert, that shouldn't end up anywhere. Yeah. For any reason.

Let's talk about the, the bleeding edge. You know, I used an app called Nanome in VR. I have a new Apple Vision Pro VR headset and they took me into Nanome is at app for material scientists, chemists, you know, people who are doing, wanting to see chemical structures of things. And I got thrown into this room with a virus, a COVID virus that was blown up bigger than my house. And it showed the chemical structure of how the virus actually was built. Right. And along with me were three other scientists who were walking around the virus with me virtually in VR and we were sticking our head inside the virus, making it even bigger than my house. Right. Touching it, changing the molecular structure of it, stuff like that. This is a new way of learning. This is a dramatically different way of learning than I had when I was trying to learn chemistry 30 years ago in university.

Right.

Tell me about it. How do you think that is going to start changing? Even normal high school education, Robotics classes, chemistry classes, physics classes, all the STEM classes. We need kids to go into STEM to remain competitive in the world. Tell me a little bit about the bleeding edge and where you think your company might go over the next few years to react to these bleeding edge changes in. I call it real time education because you can learn things in real time real fast.

Right.

Where's the World going.

I like that. I like that. Real time education. So one thing we experimented with which I had a similar. Like what you experienced. I brought 20 Meta Quest headsets and we took a field trip to outer space. The whole class. That's insane to me that that's even possible. But I think, you know, Apple Vision Pro especially, I have been playing with it. It is so, so cool. I don't know. Have you tried that? The 3D model one? I forget the name of it. Like you have 3D models in the world.

I'll remember it. Sorry. There's a whole bunch of apps I've been playing. I've been in my kitchen going to outer space. You know, I've been doing all things like nanome is running in it. Right. So Nanome is one of the ones that really is exciting to me.

Jig. It's called Jig. Jigspace.

Jig Space is a great. Yes.

I think things like that are crazy because you can see things in the middle of the classroom. And what's interesting to me is you don't actually need 20 vision pros, believe it or not. All you need is screen mirror, one Vision Pro on teacher, showing and pointing at like the, the, the molecules or like the stem of the flower and then making it bigger and then having these like up close and personal sessions for students can get on with like try it too and maybe have like four of them, you know, in a like ready. Just like laptops or iPads. And this is something crazy. And when this was actually considered nuts, we were doing this, but we did it differently. So instead of schools having to buy it, which was crazy, schools did not want to buy these things because, I mean it goes out of date in a year. Yeah. So we actually purchase everything we have. We've got grants to get these things. And we then bring them to the school and so they get to use them for when they need them and then we take them back and then if there's new versions, we bring new versions. They're not responsible. And yeah, it's kind of crazy and not scalable, but I'm still experimenting with what works. And like they need a. I can. I always revert it to two things in my brain, like white glove treatment. So they don't gotta do nothing. It's like a service super easy, like getting your new refrigerator replaced or something like that. And it has to be useful enough. Right. And this is for every product that we ever put out in my organization. And this is because of a conversation I had with Sergey Brid, we had, like, this intense conversation at some party at Google IO after the event, and we were just talking about, like, what I wanted to do, and he was like, make sure you follow the toothbrush effect. And that's what Google purchases. And I didn't know what that was, obviously, so I'm like, what is that? And he's like, it's something that someone will use more than twice a day, and it makes their quality of life better. Those really, really stuck with me in every step of the way of building tsi, because I don't want a teacher to, like, get something then not use it, like everything else they have sitting in the. In the break room or in the storage. And I want them to feel empowered when they're using our tools, and I want them to feel limitless, like, it's magic and it's a tall order. I get it. But I think it's the only order. Like, there's no substitutions for this menu. I think it's so important that they get the same quality of tools that you get as a business when you want something. Like, there's so many awesome tools for businesses and for people. Like, you want Spotify, you get Spotify. All your music problems are now gone. They literally couldn't even play Spotify in the classroom because it's not, like, allowed. And. And we found this interesting. So, like, in. In a web class, we had students rebuild Spotify start to finish. That was our project, and we made a new name. And it's just so interesting when you unlock all the limits. And that's what I strive to do. And I know it's hard, and I know there's better ways to make money, probably easier ways than the red tape that. With education and government and schools, but it's. Someone has to do it, because if. If we miss this, if students, teachers, if we don't get involved, and this just goes over our heads like social media did. Because I spoke with a lot of teachers during this whole process, and all of them say the same thing. Believe it or not, we messed up with social media. Like, we dropped the ball. This should have been an education moment. And it was education ignorance. And I'm like, mind blown. Because now as an adult, I'm like, what? I would have. It would have been so great to understand what MySpace was or, like, what these things were and how things would stay there forever. And now you live in a whole different world. And, like, I think education needs to have social media class and digital influencer class. And these are Our classes, these are the classes we bring into schools. At tsi, we infuse tech into school. So we'll take over your computer typing program and we'll DO Digital Influencer 101. Become a YouTuber, become an influencer and learn the editing, which is important. Learn a little design and that's changing code to make the website.

Music is changing because of AI. You can get rid of Spotify and just use an AI generator now to generate some beats. Yeah, you want some beats in your classroom, you know, and have everybody grooving out while they're learning. You can do that now. Right? So we need to. Our kids can build a new kind of Spotify with just AI generated now is I, I love talking.

These are the things that have to happen. I, I love talking hours.

Because you're so passionate about education, you're so educated about what's coming.

Yeah, it's so important. It's the only thing I care about nowadays because I grew up in the system that was flawed. And how do you end up like Ross, how you are a CEO of a tech company actually trying to change something. It was very hard. I wouldn't know how to replicate myself to someone else and say here's how you can get here and be connected and have these partnerships like being partnered with Digital Ocean and Apple and Google. And it's so mind blowingly amazing that these companies and individuals care on such a deep level that every student in our program and thousands of students get droplets and servers and cPanel provides access for free and. And they also see the vision, but they also know they're not in the same position as me to be able to make this change and start now. Like they always tell you when you're a startup and you're building something new, you can move faster than anyone that's ten times your size. Yeah, that is a big advantage that you should take advantage of when you're building a startup. And I think that we can do more as people when we're building products to include education as a potential customer and then a route that, that to get to that customer. But not just here's a discount like figure out a way that you can go present to them or have some. I do it online. We meet all our hundreds of teachers online and it's super interesting. We do it on the weekends too because I know they're busy. And that's the other thing. You can't just have your thing at 2 o' clock on Monday and 7 and 7am on Wednesday. I Do it on Saturday and Sunday because that's when they can meet. If I don't do it on Saturday, they're not meeting. And like, that would be a problem. Like, I'm not going to not have a program because of Sunday. I won't work Sundays. Like that. It's easy. Yeah. And I would grow my team and. And I love talking to you too, man, because you are like. Even when, you know, we met in person and had that conversation, but like, seeing what you do and how you. You categorize everything in your list. But you're also. You have a unique perspective where you're digesting this information. Not many humans digest this information at the rate that you do.

Yeah.

So you have a whole different perspective and outlook. And I feel like when we speak, you understand all the things that I'm saying, whether it's the developer things, the education things, the things that you need to know from as a parent perspective or just AI in general. And then the future of it, the things you come up with. I've had these ideas and that's why these conversations are so great. Because the world you want is the same world I want. It's just something we, as you know, people, community, that care about it, have to build it. But it's not something that is going to get rich quick, so to speak. So companies aren't going to be running towards it at the speed of light because it's not going to get you that VC or that virality on, you know, Twitter or Facebook. But I will take 0 likes and no follows if I can see the smiles and the conversations with the real teachers from, like, all over the world.

Yeah.

That is the craziest thing that I've ever experienced in my whole life is to, like, see and hear these people in real life. How, like, I have changed everything. I. Someone even called me and said, you gave me time back with my kids. Your software did this. I'm like, how is that possible? Like, that's so cool. Yeah. That you build and you code and now someone gets more time with their real family. Hey, if you. I love.

Come up with a great new lesson plan in a few minutes instead of spending three or four hours on it. Right. That's. That's giving people back time. Right. So thanks for what you do.

And I think, yeah, no, thank you for getting it to the point where people can actually hear it. And, you know, I don't have. I don't spend a lot of time on Twitter. I'm very busy just building. And when you have these videos, people watch them and they. You make impact. You are an impact maker. So thank you for helping us further our goals for impact. And I think these conversations are so important around education. And I hope, like one day, you know, the VP of the DOE or something has like a space and like wants to talk, but it's just so rare and I'm just so lucky to be in that room when he's speaking. So I get to take these ideas and actually do something. And things like on the line, like this podcast is huge because it allows people to hear this perspective and sometimes for the first time. And that's important. And if anyone's watching this, that's an educator, well, now you're maybe seeing it a little bit differently and maybe be less fearful of the future and more excited, because I know I am.

Where do we learn more about you?

So you can learn about us@mytsi.org, my tsi. And if you want to learn about the AI tools, it's just my apps, myapps AI super easy. And you can learn about all the advancements that we're doing with AI. And I think, Robert, I'm in a unique position, by the way, because I'm a full stack engineer and so is everyone on our team and we're all educators for over 10 years. So I think we have a unique standpoint where we can take like a cool thing that happened in like hugging face and then turn it into educational value. And I think that is worth fighting for. I think so.

Very cool. I sure hope more and more people pay attention to what you're doing because, and use it. Because this is the future of education. It's, it, it's how we're going to fix this system and help kids get educated and, and continue to be educated. You know, I, I hope kids don't just go after a credential or a test or, you know, try to pass something. No, it's, you got to learn how to learn because the, the world that's coming in, it's. I mean, my parents, they had one job for a long time, right? That's not true anymore. You're going to have to be doing hundreds of different jobs in your career and you're going to have to learn how to learn and learn how to learn with a robot and learn how to learn with all these new AI tools that are coming and they're going to continue getting better and better and better and better, right? So, you know, we're going to have to change as human beings. And you're leading the front to that, that you're. You're leading the way to that.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Yeah, no, it's truly our pleasure.

I think I want to let you go back to work because I know you have a lot of work to do, and I do, too. I could talk to you all day long because it's just you're up to date on all these different things that are coming. I mean, we could probably do a whole hour just on models, you know, and riff into the different models. Like, what's the difference between anthropic cloud and GPT?

We should one day. That's a good one.

Yeah. But I wanted to get people an idea of what's happening to education because you have a really unique view on what's going on. So thank you.

Yeah. Well, thank you. Yeah, it's our pleasure. Honestly, this is our favorite thing to do, is tell our story. It's such a crazy story that it needs to be told, I think. I don't know anyone who's in this position so uniquely that they could actually attend a meeting and give talk to the UFT and the DOE and say, here's what's actually happening. And I did that like a few weeks ago. And it's so interesting when 500 people listen to you and they don't know who you are, but they're all super curious writing notes because they're. They know. They're less scared. They're more feel fearful of the children in the future, not themselves. Now, that's a misconception. They think that students are not going to end up with the right tools at the end. And that's what we're here to prevent.

Thank you.