OpenAI seems intent on expanding the use of its technology in education with the announcement of the GPT-4 AI chatbot and API. Two out of the six partners featured on its website, who had early access to GPT-4, are online learning companies.

These two well-known names in online learning, Duolingo and Khan Academy, announced their own versions of conversational, personalized AI tutors, powered by ChatGPT and with a similar, minimalist interface.

I’m sure we’ll see more online learning companies jump on the bandwagon and announce their own initiatives in the coming weeks and months. (I pity the person who has to come up with a unique name for their company’s AI-powered bots/experiences.)

Duolingo announced Duolingo Max, while Khan Academy announced Khanmigo (Khan + Amigo), an AI-powered guide (still in pilot phase). While ChatGPT offers a freeform experience, where you can ask pretty much any question, these companies provide guided experiences with more guardrails.

In my understanding, this can be achieved via Prompt Engineering. In the GPT-4 Developer Livestream, the President and Co-Founder of OpenAI showed us an example of this in action.

As you can see in the screenshot above:

• On the left, Brockman sets the chatbot personality so to speak: he tells GPT what role to play and how to respond, calling it TaxGPT.
• On the right, he provides background information and formulates a question: he inputs the tax code and then asks about tax deduction.

Similarities

As I reviewed the announcements, I noticed several similarities between the Duolingo and Khan Academy “AI tutors”.

Firstly, both organizations acknowledged the risks of generative AI technologies and emphasized their human expertise in creating these experiences. Each of them underscored the presence of feedback mechanisms and extensive testing in place. They also mentioned fine-tuning their models and providing feedback to OpenAI to enhance overall accuracy.

In Khan Academy’s case, they plan to launch a course called “AI for Education” to educate individuals about large language models, their strengths/limitations, and important questions to ask. Khan Academy will also limit the amount of interaction individuals have with AI, because extended interactions can lead to poor AI behavior.

Secondly, both companies highlighted their tool as a learning aid instead of an answer tool. While ChatGPT tries to answer questions straight up, Khanmigo provides hints in the form of questions (Socratic method) to guide the learner in the right direction. Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, believes that “AI should be a tool for genuine learning and not cheating.”

Duolingo’s “Explain My Answer” feature does something similar:

Moreover, both companies offer guided experiences. Duolingo calls their feature Roleplay, enabling learners to practice conversation skills with virtual characters — for instance, ordering coffee in Paris or discussing vacation plans.

Khanmigo Activities offer customized journeys for both educators and students. As seen in the screenshot from Sal Khan’s presentation, activities are divided into categories for Teachers and Learners.

For Teachers, activities include creating lesson hooks and humanities lesson plans.

For Learners, there are several activities that enable them to practice various topics based on their current level. Another example on Khan Academy’s website mentions that Khanmigo can also act as a writing coach, “by giving prompts and suggestions to move students forward as they write, debate, and collaborate in exciting new ways.”

Finally, both of these experiences are premium features. Duolingo Max, the most expensive subscription tier, costs $30 per month or $168 per year.

As for Khan Academy, there’s a waitlist. However, once accepted, users are required to donate at least $20 per month to access Khanmigo. You also have to be at least 18. Once registered, if adults have children associated with their Khan Academy accounts, they can grant access to their children.

In some ways, individuals should be able to recreate many of these features with appropriate prompt engineering using the ChatGPT (which is free and currently based on GPT-3.5), or ChatGPT Plus (which costs $20 per month and also gives limited access to GPT-4).

AI in learning is here. Time will tell if these companies are able to build compelling experiences that go above and beyond what ChatGPT offers.