Teachers and students across the U.S. are testing an AI-powered tutor that could change the way education works.
Khanmigo, created by Khan Academy founder Sal Khan, was designed to help students learn and teachers teach. Khan, whose lectures and educational software have been used for years by tens of millions, immediately saw the potential of AI for education.
“It was pretty obvious this technology was going to transform society,” he said. “It was pretty heady stuff.”
Launching Khanmigo
Khan has been finding creative ways to help kids learn since 2005. After getting degrees in math, computer science and engineering from MIT and an MBA from Harvard, Khan was working for a hedge fund when he started recording math videos to help tutor his young cousins.
Not long after, with the help of donors including Bill Gates, Khan quit his finance job and started the education nonprofit Khan Academy.
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OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman and Sam Altman, fans of Khan’s work, reached out to Khan, hoping to evaluate their newest AI model that today powers ChatGPT, using Khan’s database of test questions and content. They also gave Khan early access to the model in 2022. Khan Academy educators and engineers used OpenAI’s technology to build the AI tutor “Khanmigo” — a play on Khan’s name and the Spanish word “conmigo,” or “with me.”
Khanmigo is now being piloted in grades 3 through 12 in 266 school districts across the U.S. Khan says his company won’t sell the data they collect through Khanmigo or give it to other tech companies, but the data is used to improve Khanmigo’s memory and personalization.
Khanmigo is free for all teachers in the U.S., but school districts have to pay $15 per student per year to cover computation costs.
How Khanmigo is helping students
Students at Hobart High School in Hobart, Indiana have Khanmigo on their laptops ready to help them with their questions. In chemistry class, Abigail Rinas asked Khanmigo for examples of types of acids. Khanmigo gave examples then asked the student if she could think of household items that might contain acid.
“It wants to help you understand what it’s telling you and not just give you the information,” Rinas said.
When Khanmigo first arrived at Hobart High School in 2023, employees at Khan Academy asked students to try to “break” the AI tutor. Some kids would try to trick Khanmigo into giving them the answers to their questions. Hobart Superintendent, Peggy Buffington, told 60 Minutes some kids were even “bullying the bot.”
“I think that was the elementary school kids that were doing it,” student Maddie Turpa, who uses Khanmingo in her business class, said.
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Students said Khanmigo has been very helpful when they feel uncomfortable asking questions in class. They described Khanmigo as “positive” and “reassuring.”
Sarah Robertson, a former English teacher who now works for Khan Academy, showed 60 Minutes how the AI tutor can help kids improve their writing and help them think more critically.
It was tested using an essay 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper wrote in sixth grade about his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt.
Less than two minutes after Cooper hit the “start revising” button, Khanmigo delivered a detailed evaluation of his essay, applauding some of what Cooper wrote, but also, suggesting some revisions, including for his topic sentence. Cooper revised his middle school essay and asked Khanmigo what it thought.
“[It says] ‘connecting childhood events to her later life will make your essay more cohesive and insightful.’ I mean, yeah. It’s good advice,” Cooper said.
How the AI tool is helping teachers
When she taught seventh grade English, Robertson limited herself to 10 minutes of editing per essay.
“I had 100 students. So it would take me 17 hours to give feedback on every single student’s first draft,” she said.
Beyond helping with providing feedback to students, Khanmigo can also help teachers catch cheating. Cooper asked ChatGPT to write about his mom and plugged what the chatbot wrote into his essay on Khanmigo. Khanmigo immediately sent an alert to Robertson.
“It says that you pasted 66 words while revising from an unknown source,” Robertson said. “So if I click on that now, it’s going to load your essay and it’s going to show me exactly what you just did.”
Khanmigo is also being used at Hobart High to help teachers plan lessons. Chemistry teacher Melissa Higgason told the AI tutor she wanted a four-day course during which her students would investigate the physical and chemical properties of matter. It took Khanmigo minutes to come up with a detailed plan. It would have taken Higgason a week.
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Teachers can also use Khanmigo to monitor their students’ understanding of subjects in ways they never could before because it shows what questions students have asked.
“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,” Higgasson said.
Confronting concerns about AI’s role in education
Some teachers may worry that AI might replace them in classrooms.
“I’m pretty confident that teaching, any job that has a very human-centric element of it – as long as it adapts reasonably well in this AI world – they’re going to be some of the safest jobs out there,” Khan said.
Even as Khan develops Khanmigo, he says he wants teachers in classrooms, eye-to-eye with students.
“I mean, that’s what I’ll always want for my own children and, frankly, for anyone’s children,” Khan said. “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.”
After getting early access to OpenAI’s advanced AI technology, it was obvious to Khan that AI would transform society. He did have some concerns, though.
“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, it could also be used to support students, to give them more feedback,” Khan said. “To support teachers for all this lesson planning and progress report writing that they spend hours a week doing.”
New uses of AI in education
OpenAI President Greg Brockman gave 60 Minutes a preview of a new AI vision feature that will be available to ChatGPT paid subscribers soon. It can see what someone is doing through live video and interact in real time.
During a demonstration, the AI quizzed Anderson Cooper on his anatomy skills. As Cooper drew body parts on a blackboard, in an outline of a human figure, the AI could understand what he was drawing.
“The location is spot on,” the AI tutor said. “The brain is right there in the head. As for the shape, it’s a good start. The brain is more of an oval.”
It also seemed to pick up on Cooper’s anxiety, telling him there was “no pressure, Anderson.”
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Khan hopes the new vision technology can be incorporated into Khanmigo and be available to students and teachers in the next 2 to 3 years. But he wants it to undergo more robust testing and meet strict guidelines for privacy and data security.
During Brockman’s demonstration of the new vision technology, he also asked the AI to write a song, that rhymes, about the formula for the area of a triangle, then sing it using a British accent.
“Absolutely. Let’s give it a try,” the AI tutor said. “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.”
Seeing it in action can “feel like magic” at first, said Brockman.
“After a week you start to realize, like, how you can use it,” Brockman said. “That’s been one of the really important things about working with Sal and his team, to really figure out what’s the right way to sort of 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.”
Khan has his own take on the advances.
“It feels like we’re in a science fiction book,” he said.
