With a working prototype in place, Khan Academy’s engineers began adding a front end and new tools. To address the panic about cheating, they built a chat history that allowed parents and teachers to search for evidence of plagiarism or bad behavior. They came up with a feature where students could talk to historical figures, and then created rules (must not be a genocidal maniac) to ensure that figure wasn’t Hitler.
Launch day for GPT-4 and Khanmigo was set for March 14, 2023, a Tuesday. “This is a story that I don’t really like to tell a lot of people,” Ms. Shieh said. “But 72 hours before launch, we still didn’t have a model that they were satisfied with.” As she frantically relayed Khan Academy’s feedback to OpenAI’s researchers, her anxiety spiked with every vibration of her phone. “They’re texting: ‘Jessica, it’s Friday. Do you have an updated model yet?’ Saturday: ‘Do you have an updated model yet?’ I was so, so nervous right until delivery.”
Khanmigo launched. Watching its introduction in classrooms in New Jersey and Indiana, I saw that some students immediately found it helpful. Others lost interest upon discovering it would not simply hand over the answers. Teachers tended to be more inspired users, and over time, Khan Academy shifted its engineering focus to add more than 30 new features for them — a reminder that A.I., like most of the technology that’s preceded it, is rarely used the way you expect it to be.
A year after the release, Mr. Khan was hardly euphoric. “We need to be realistic that there’s no simple answer for student engagement,” he told me. Even as Khan Academy touts a 731 percent increase in Khanmigo’s reach year over year, Ms. DiCerbo has been bracing. “So far I am not seeing the revolution in education,” she said. Khanmigo remains Khan Academy’s major A.I. commitment, but the organization has also begun developing other products, including Writing Coach, a tool that helps students outline, draft and revise essays, to complement its core offerings from before the A.I. era.
These are not admissions of failure — just recognition that there’s a vast difference between a product release and a transformation. Everyone is fanatically impatient to know how the A.I. story ends, eager for gains large enough to offset their anxieties. But progress in education arrives slowly — unevenly distributed, heavily resisted and tangled up with ordinary human behavior. Khanmigo exists now as a reflection of the process through which it was born: Imperfect. Improving. And desperately in need of thoughtful humans to help it succeed.
