AI Investor Forum: Gus Tai on AI in Education (Part 1)

Gus Tai, Investor, Board Member and Retired General Partner at Trinity Ventures, discusses ideas and opportunities in Education with an AI-augmented framework.

Sramana Mitra: Today, we have the pleasure of welcoming back my friend Gus Tai, who has been here many times before. In the last session that Gus was here for earlier in the fall, we started a discussion that I decided to double click down on. So today and the next week, we are going to double click down on startup ideas that are driven by AI.

So, I’ve invited Gus back to brainstorm. Gus and I have a long history of brainstorming, and we just want to bring some of that private brainstorming to you so that you can participate in it, ask questions, and share in that brainstorming. Gus, welcome. What great fun to have you back.

Gus Tai: Oh, so delightful to see you Sramana, and I’m looking forward to the discussion.

Sramana Mitra: So, Gus, I don’t know if you saw the 60 Minutes episode that aired this past Sunday where Khan Academy’s Salman Khan and Open AI were featured. It was a combination episode of Open AI displaying what their new technology in online tutoring and teaching is and what Khan Academy is doing in their pilot setting. They have about 260 pilots going on in American schools right now. 

AI aided teaching slash tutoring use cases are developing very well, and the OpenAI technology is lending itself very well to that particular use case. So, a teacher who was featured in this episode was saying that earlier, she could provide personalized writing coaching to maybe a handful of students, but in a class of 100 students, she couldn’t really provide that level of personalized guidance. But with this technology, every student is getting this deeply personalized guidance about how to write about chemistry problems and all the different aspects of teaching.

So, the question that I want to put on the table for us to discuss is Khan Academy is a non-profit, heavily funded by Bill Gates and the who’s who of the philanthropic world. Their product is also very modestly priced at a per student basis that school districts are paying. This is happening mostly in public schools. What is the private opportunity in this kind of human-centric AI enabled teaching and tutoring at scale around the world?

So, I want to continue our global theme. There is the issue of languages. There’s the issue of penetration availability. All of that is on the table. What can we expect to see? What encouragement can we provide to entrepreneurs to go in this direction?

Gus Tai: Oh, for sure, Sramana. I think education is a wonderful area that will benefit and thrive because of AI. In our last conversation, we talked about some of the liabilities of Generative AI.  One would be that it produces hallucinations. Another is that it could create results that are atypical and may wind up violating norms that the conditions are sensitive to. In the context of education and generating information, it’s about learning and you can have a teacher that is fatigue less, that is constantly generating information. The process of education is to discern what is helpful, what is not helpful, what is true, what is false. Actually, the hallucinations can be helpful as part of the educational process if the student and organization understands that there can be hallucinations. So, it’s a great application.

With respect to your question on private activity, there is already private activity. I believe that there’s a YC company called Speak.

Sramana Mitra: Yes. Actually, Speak is on my list of things to discuss today. Speak is a very interesting company. Let’s get to Speak. I can summarize what Speak is doing in language learning. I don’t know how many of you in the audience are users of Duolingo. I am an avid user of Duolingo. I have become fluent in French by doing Duolingo daily. Since the beginning of Covid. I decided to just make this part of my meditation practice, and I have succeeded in becoming fluent in French using Duolingo.

Speak is coming at language learning from a speech point of view. So, their thesis is that children learn a new language through speech. They don’t learn through grammar or writing or reading. They learn through speaking. That’s the pedagogy that they are basing their language learning methodology on, which is very different from Duolingo.

But yes, that’s an interesting one.

Gus Tai: The reason I like that one is that’s what AI is highlighting. Duolingo has a wonderful AI strategy as well. However, they’re an incumbent that was designed before the rise of AI. So you could view Speak as a native AI education language program. They’ve been able to discern how do we take advantage of this infinite generation type of capability. They could add personalization, and then they could build the same similar types of technologies of what Duolingo has, which is a similar type of a platform that has methodologies that can be repurposed for languages.

So, they do it first for English as a second language because there’s a more proven market for that economically, and then move to other categories and serve niche categories very efficiently. So when you were asking about what are the trends for privatization of these areas, especially in education startups, I just think of what is the value chain involved with delivering product market monetization fit? What are the steps that now can be assumed to be infinitely cheap or free and infinitely scalable? Can AI be applied there? Then secondly, if there’s enough opportunity, can the whole process chain be redesigned?

This is an example. So, Duolingo has introduced Lily as the speaker – one of the characters you have these short AI conversations with. It’s a beautiful application. That’s an incremental application.

And then Speak – I don’t know the company that well, but the way I interpret it from reading about it, it has a completely different approach. It approaches learning languages in the way that children learn from – a model free reinforcement way of building a language model – speaking. That wouldn’t have been a possible without the multimodal capability of Generative AI. It wasn’t possible, but now it is.

This segment is part 1 in the series : AI Investor Forum: Gus Tai on AI in Education
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