AI-powered tutor tested as a way to help educators and students | 60 Minutes

We are about to show you a technological innovation that could, one day, change the way every child in every school in America is taught. It’s an online tutor powered by artificial intelligence designed to help teachers be more efficient .. and students learn more effectively. It’s called Khanmigo- conmigo means “with me,” in Spanish. And Khan..is its creator…Sal Khan, the well-known founder of Khan Academy – whose lectures and educational software have been used for years by tens of millions of students and teachers in the U.S. and around the world. Khanmigo was built with the help of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. Its potential is staggering, but it’s still very much a work in progress. It’s being piloted in 266 school districts in the U.S. in grades three-12. We went to Hobart High School in Indiana to see how it works. 

Melissa Higgason: Good morning, just a normal day in chem, right? 

At eight in the morning Melissa Higgason knows it’s not always easy to get 30 high schoolers excited about chemistry. 

Melissa Higgason: Are you ready? Are you ready? 

Students: Yeah. 

Melissa Higgason: Alright, that’s what I want to hear. 

But these days … she has help.

Melissa Higgason: This is acidic acid. The pipettes not going to fill all the way.

That lesson Higgason has displayed behind her and is explaining to her ninth and tenth graders, was created with the assistance of Khanmigo..she told the AI tutor she wanted a four-day course in which her students would investigate the physical and chemical properties of matter. 

Melissa Higgason This next section is your research section…

It took Khanmigo minutes to come up with a detailed lesson plan …that would have taken Higgason a week to create. 

Melissa Higgason: Pull that computer back out. You’re going to go back to Khanmigo research…

And the students have Khanmigo on their laptops too…. ready to help them with their questions.

Abigail: We have a couple of questions that we need to ask Khanmigo. So, for example, I asked it, what are three examples of acids? And if I want to know more 

Anderson Anderson Cooper: So it gave you three examples of acids… like hydrochloric acid… citric… and sulfuric. 

Abigail: “Can you give me more examples?”

Abigail: And if I wanted to know even more I could ask it like what specifically some of the acids do?

Anderson Anderson Cooper: So it’s giving you acids and then it’s asking you a question,“can you think of any other household items that might contain acid?” 

Abigail: Yeah, so like it wants to help you understand like what it’s telling you and not just like give you the information.

Finding creative ways to help kids learn is something Sal khan has been doing since 2005. He’d gotten degrees in math, computer science and engineering from MIT and an MBA from Harvard, and was working as a hedge fund analyst when he started recording math tutorial videos in his closet for his young cousins. 

Khan recording a lesson: So if I were to multiply this equation…

Not long after, with the help of donors including Bill Gates, he quit his career in finance and started the nonprofit Khan Academy. 

Sal Khan: From the beginning of Khan Academy, the true north was how do you give more students at least approximations of the type of personalization they would get if they had a personal tutor. 

Anderson Cooper: A wealthy family can afford a tutor for their child. If every kid could have a private tutor, that would level the playing field.

Sal Khan: Yeah, that’s the dream. 

Co-founders of OpenAI, Greg Brockman and Sam Altman, were fans of Khan Academy, and hoped to evaluate their AI using Khan’s database of test questions and content, so they gave Sal Khan early access to an advanced AI technology that today underpins ChatGPT. 

Anderson Cooper: What did you immediately think?

Sal Khan: It was pretty obvious this technology was gonna transform society, so it– it was pretty heady stuff. But on the education side, it was like, “Wow, people are gonna be able to use this for doing deep fakes and fraud and cheat.” But if used well with the right guardrails, et cetera, could also be used to support students, to give them more feedback, to support teachers for all this lesson planning and progress report writing that they spend hours a week doing.

Khan team member: Item level analysis… 

Educators and engineers at Khan Academy used OpenAI’s technology to build Khanmigo…

Hobart teacher: We’re going to be using Khanmigo for this…

 …and for the last year and a half the teachers and kids at Hobart High School and others have been testing it out. 

Austin: I’ll ask it a question… 

We sat down with two students from that morning chemistry class, Austin and Abigail, as well as Laden and Maddie, who use Khanmigo in business class. And Lu and Lily who use it in English and for SAT preparation. 

Anderson Cooper: I heard people at Khan Academy came and asked students to break it.

Voices: Yeah. Yes. 

Laden: That was the fun part. 

Anderson Cooper:That was the fun part–

Voices: That was. 

Austin: Some students would try and trick it into just giving you the answer. 

Anderson Cooper: The superintendent I talked to said that some students were bullying Khanmigo for the answer.

Male voice: Yeah. 

Maddie: I think that was the elementary school kids that were doing it–

Anderson Cooper: Oh yeah, okay. Blame it on the elementary school kids. 

Lily: It’s very helpful for those students who maybe don’t feel comfortable asking questions within class.

Anderson Cooper: Does it have a personality?

Austin: It’s very much there for you. Like, it’s very positive, it’s very reassuring. 

Laden: It’s getting me thinking. And it’s not just giving me an answer.

Anderson Cooper: Do you ever just wanna be like, “Can you just gimme the answer?”

Lily: Yeah. That was the hardest part for I know, like me and a lot of other students. Like “Why isn’t it giving me answers? At the end of the day, that’s where your better answer is gonna be. It’s not gonna be whatever the AI gives you; it’s gonna be whatever you create. 

Higgason: So your hypothesis going into the last test is… 

Teachers at Hobart High don’t just use Khanmigo to help plan lessons and save dozens of hours a week, they also monitor their students’ understanding of subjects in ways they never could before. 

Anderson Cooper: You can track how a student is actually using Khanmigo?

Melissa Higgason: Yeah. I’m going to click “usage” And then if I wanted to pick a specific student, I could come down here and really dive into what that student’s been looking at Khanmigo. And this is real time because you saw Abigail this morning looking at acids and bases… 

Anderson Cooper: So wait a minute. These are the footprints of Abigail’s work?

Melissa Higgason: These are the footprints of Abigail’s work.

Anderson Cooper: At 8 a.m. she was asking about acids and chemical reactions?

Anderson Cooper: So even though you may not be hovering over the student at any given moment, you’re somewhere else in the classroom–

Melissa Higgason: Right.

Anderson Cooper: You can later check, “Oh, this is what Abigail was looking– I understand her thought process on why she got–these answers.

Melissa Higgason: Absolutely. So It gives me a lot of insight as a teacher in terms of who I need to spend that one-on-one time with. 

Khan meeting with team: Maybe Khanmigo throws in a master challenge…. 

Sal Khan says they won’t sell the data they collect through Khanmigo or give it to other tech companies. They do use it however to improve Khanmigo’s memory and personalization.

Sarah Robertson: It will guide them to sort of what to do first…

Sarah Robertson, a former English teacher who is now a Khanmigo product manager, showed us a new feature they’ve developed to help kids write better and think more critically. 

Anderson Cooper: I found this essay that I wrote. 

To test it, I gave Khanmigo a paper I wrote in sixth grade about my mom Gloria Vanderbilt. 

Sarah Robertson: So go ahead and click “next start revising.” 

After just 90 seconds, Khanmigo delivered a very detailed evaluation of my essay…

It liked some of what I wrote…

Anderson Cooper: The use of a quote to start the essay is effective and sets the tone for the rest of the biography.

But suggested I should revise several paragraphs and my topic sentence.

Anderson Cooper: So I’m gonna rewrite my sixth grade paper.

After a few minutes of tweaking.. 

Sarah Robertson: Ask it what it thinks.

Anderson Cooper: So what do you think?

Anderson Cooper: It says “connecting…childhood events to her later life will make your essay more cohesive and insightful.” I mean, yeah. It’s good advice.

Sarah Robertson: I can tell you as a former seventh grade English teacher when I assigned an essay, I would limit myself to ten minutes per essay. I had 100 students. So it would take me 17 hours to give feedback on every single student’s first draft. The burden that we place on teachers to give that specific, timely, actionable feedback is just so great that it– it’s not possible.

Anderson Cooper: So I’ve now plugged in… 

To see if Khanmigo could catch me cheating, I asked ChatGPT to write a paragraph about my mom and pasted it into my essay. 

Sarah Robertson: I now see that there’s a critical flag. 

Khanmigo immediately sent an alert to Sarah Robertson. 

Sarah Robertson: And it says that you pasted 66 words while revising from an unknown source. So if I click on that now it’s going to load your essay and its gonna show me exactly what you just did.

Anderson Cooper: I’m so busted.

Sarah Robertson: You’re busted. 

Teacher: Do you wanna work with a 3-digit or 4-digit number? 

Khanmigo is free for all teachers in the U.S., but school districts have to pay up – $15 per student per year to cover computation costs. And it’s still being improved. 

Greg Brockman: Any other ideas that can show… 

We got a hint of how Khanmigo might evolve when Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, stopped by Sal Khan’s office to show us their new vision technology that’ll be available to ChatGPT paid subscribers soon. 

Greg Brockman Demo: We’re preparing a demo for 60 Minutes to show people what ChatGPT can do with voice mode with vision. 

It can actually see what someone is doing through live video and interact with them in real time. Brockman was talking with it on his phone.

AI tutor: Got it. How about an anatomy lesson? 

Greg Brockman: You’re gonna quiz him and ask him to draw whatever body part you wanna– you wanna quiz him on and have him label it. How does that sound?

AI tutor: That sounds like a fantastic plan. 

When Brockman pointed his phone’s camera at the blackboard the AI started to quiz me. 

Let’s start with the heart. Anderson, can you draw and label where the heart is in the body? 

It understood what i was doing..even though my drawing was pretty crude. 

AI tutor: The location is spot on. The brain is right there in the head. As for the shape, it’s a good start. The brain is more of an oval–

Anderson Cooper: Don’t patronize me–

It also seemed to pick up on my anxiety. 

AI tutor: Anderson, how about the liver? Give it a shot and show us where you think it’s located in the body… 

Anderson Cooper: God, this is a little tough.

Sal Khan: This is how we learn.

AI tutor: Absolutely. No pressure, Anderson.

I put the liver on the wrong side of the body, ChatGPT corrected me.. politely.

AI tutor: Anderson’s placement is close but it’s primarily on the right side, just below the diaphragm.

Greg Brockman Demo: So can you critique this diagram overall?

AI tutor: Anderson’s diagram is a solid effort, especially for an impromptu drawing.

The AI caught my mistake, but it’s not foolproof.

Phone: The formula is simple: one half times the base times the height… 

Watch what happened when Khan asked it to calculate the area of a triangle and intentionally misidentified the height. 

Sal Khan: Is this the height over here, this four? Is that right?

The AI said he was right. 

Phone: Yes, that’s correct. 

It didn’t catch the error…however, this technology improves quickly and it is fun to interact with. Greg Brockman asked it to write a song about the formula for the area of a triangle.. to make it rhyme.. and sing it using a British accent. 

AI Tutor: Absolutely. Let’s give it a try. To find a triangle space here’s what you do. Multiply the base by the height. It’s true. Then take that product and divide by two. Now you’ve got the area, a formula to pursue. How was that?

Greg Brockman: That was really fantastic. 

Anderson Cooper: That’s…uh…it’s incredible.

Sal Khan: It is. It feels like we’re in a science fiction book–

Anderson Cooper: Yeah–

Sal Khan: Really.

Anderson Cooper: I mean, it just feels like to actually see it– you are– I mean, I’m sort of speechless.

Greg Brockman: The first time you see this stuff it really does just feel like this magic and almost incomprehensible. And then after a week then you start to realize, like, how you can use it. That’s been one of the really important things about working with Sal and his team, has been to really figure out what’s the right way to sorta bring this to parents and to teachers and to classrooms and to do that in a way so that the students really learn and aren’t just, you know, asking for the answers and that the parents can have oversight and the teachers can be involved in that process.

Teacher: You can ask a follow up question… 

Sal Khan hopes this new vision technology can be incorporated into Khanmigo and available to students and teachers in 2 to 3 years — but he wants it to undergo more robust testing and meet strict guidelines for privacy and data security. 

Anderson Cooper: I can also imagine a lot of teachers watching this and thinking, “Okay, well, this is just gonna replace me. Why would I want this in my classroom? It’s like a Trojan horse.”

Sal Khan: I’m pretty confident that teaching– any job that has a very human-centric element of it is– as long as it adapts reasonably well in this AI world, they’re going to be some of the safest jobs out there.

Anderson Cooper: You think there will always be a need for teachers in the classroom, talking with the student, looking the student in the eye?

Sal Khan: Oh yeah. I mean, that’s what I’ll always want for my own children and, frankly, for anyone’s children. And the hope here is that we can use artificial intelligence and other technologies to amplify what a teacher can do so they can spend more time standing next to a student, figuring them out, having a person-to-person connection.

Teacher to students: Two tens…two tens. you got it. Good work Kayla. 

Produced by Denise Schrier Cetta. Associate producer, Katie Brennan. Broadcast associate, Grace Conley. Edited by Sean Kelly.