Google Tested Its AI Tutor In Real Classrooms. It Worked

I sat down with Irina Jurenka, research director at Google DeepMind. She is the person behind Google’s new Sierra Leone study, that claims in just over eight weeks their AI tutor helped students gain more than a year of extra schooling.That's a huge claim. Irina told me to "...take it with a grain of salt." But hold that thought, because plenty in this trial survives the salt.Jurenka is a neuroscientist, and she spent her first five years at DeepMind on theoretical questions about intelligence. Then lockdown happened. "COVID hit and I found myself sitting in my living room and realizing that I'm doing a lot of work that maybe a few people read, but really it's not making a difference in the world," she said. "I wanted to have something with more immediate social impact, but I didn't know what that might look like."Language models were just getting interesting. She moved over to work on reasoning, and as a neuroscientist asked where humans actually build theirs. "It became clear that it really has to do with formal education." Four years ago, well before any of this was everyone's business, her team set up what she calls an educational grand challenge project inside DeepMind. She could already see the risk in the technology. "Language models are really built to be assistants. Assistants do the work for you and in learning you really want to do the work yourself. That's where you learn."Any teacher who has watched a pupil paste their homework into a chatbot knows exactly what she means.You can't prompt your way to a teacherGuided Learning, the tool used in Sierra Leone, is Gemini rebuilt to teach. And it was rebuilt. Her team started where everybody starts, writing a prompt telling the model to act like a teacher, and hit the ceiling fast."It's kind of the same as writing a one-pager on teaching, handing it to an average stranger on the street and expecting them to come into a classroom and teach a room full of students," she said. "They'll definitely do better...