One year in, Khan Academy’s AI has 65,000 students, and is still learning new skills

Welcome to?Fast?Company?Daily, our daily newsletter on?LinkedIn, featuring a free article selected each day by our editors as well as a roundup of great advice on careers, hiring, innovation, and technology.

Visit fastcompany.com for our top stories and breaking news.?First time seeing this? Please subscribe.

Most Innovative Companies: Y Combinator and Oishii

Current Y Combinator president and CEO Garry Tan—who also happens to be a YC alum—took over last January and promised to reclaim YC’s roots and focus on serving early-stage founders. Fast Company's senior writer Ainsley Harris joins the MIC podcast this week to fill us in on the behind-the-scenes action.

And Oishii cofounder and CEO Hiroki Koga, whose luxury strawberries can be purchased at Whole Foods for $15, talks about the challenges of vertical farming and explains why he recently raised $134 million to expand his operation.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

Apple Podcasts:

Spotify:

• Catan’s new board game lets you pit fossil fuels against green energy, challenging players to think about the realities of climate change.
• AT&T announced that sensitive details about millions of its current and former customers may have been leaked on the dark web. Here’s what you need to know.
• Harper Collins made a tiny tweak to its book design—and has saved thousands of trees as a result.

One year in, Khan Academy’s AI has 65,000 students, and is still learning new skills

By Steven Melendez

Roughly a year ago, the online learning nonprofit Khan Academy launched Khanmigo —an experimental AI tutor designed to give students one-on-one guidance without doing their homework for them.

In that time, the limited access pilot has expanded to roughly 65,000 students across more than 53 school districts, with plans to expand to anywhere from 500,000 to one million students and teachers by the fall. Khanmigo can help students do things like practice math problems, brainstorm project ideas, and analyze literature, like an infinitely patient tutor who’s available on demand. A feature announced in November can even help students revise their academic essays before they turn them in.

A year in, Khanmigo has been embraced by teachers and school districts who see the software as a way to deliver more individualized aid to students and a better alternative to general purpose chatbots, which have their own standards about appropriate content and can be too eager to simply do students’ work rather than educate. Still, as with many academic enrichment products, Khanmigo is perhaps best at reaching students who are already curious and engaged with their schoolwork, and one of the next challenges Khan Academy is tackling is integrating AI into existing study materials, helping to reach those not inclined to seek out help.

“What we’ve realized is that the AI can’t just sit there and wait for the students to come to them and ask the right question,” says Khan Academy founder and CEO Sal Khan.

And like other conversational AI tools, Khanmigo’s responses aren’t always correct. The program still sometimes makes math mistakes when reviewing student answers, though Khan says the organization is continuously working internally and talking to the major AI model vendors to improve its accuracy.

“We’re working on the model itself to get better and better—we have a whole battery of what we call the hardest test cases,” he says. “And out of those hard test cases, it’s getting dramatically better just even over the past couple of weeks.”?

To read the full version of this article, subscribe to Fast?Company?Premium.

Follow us on?LinkedIn ,?X ,?Instagram , Threads ,?Facebook ,?WhatsApp ,?TikTok .