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Crypto industry flexed its political muscles in 2024 election | 60 Minutes
Rarely in American politics has a new industry spent so much money, with such apparent impact, as the cryptocurrency business did in the last election. “Cryptocurrencies” like Bitcoin, are digital assets, created and maintained by networks of computers. Mystifying to some and mesmerizing to others, they’re used for transactions and as high-risk investments with potentially high rewards. At least 17 million Americans own crypto, and how the industry should be regulated in the U.S. has been the subject of much dispute. With an important piece of legislation now before Congress, perhaps it’s no surprise that big crypto companies were among the top donors in this past election. And since the election, the price of Bitcoin has hit record highs. It isn’t clear whether the crypto industry will get Congress or the incoming Trump administration to craft the regulation or the legitimacy that they seek. But they’ve been investing a whole lot of their own cash to get something….
In the final months of a hotly contested race for a Senate seat in Ohio, Republican Bernie Moreno received $40 million of positive ads from a political action committee known as a super PAC.
The ads didn’t mention cryptocurrency at all, but they were paid for by crypto companies. and they helped Moreno defeat Democrat Sherrod Brown…
… the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and an outspoken critic of crypto.
Margaret Brennan: In a close election that kinda money makes a huge difference, particularly in the end of a cycle. Do you think you tipped the scales?
Brad Garlinghouse: Do I think that putting that amount of money in the Ohio election had an impact? Absolutely.
Brad Garlinghouse is the CEO of a company called Ripple, whose cryptocurrency XRP became the third-largest in the world this past week. Ripple and two other companies contributed $144 million to super PACs that supported pro-crypto Republicans and Democrats.
Brad Garlinghouse: Do I think we had an impact to elect a Democratic senator in Michigan– Elissa — Slotkin? Yes, absolutely. Do I think we had an impact in Arizona? A Democratic senator in Arizona, Gallego, absolutely.
Overall, crypto companies contributed one-third of all direct corporate contributions to super PACs. Of the 29 Republicans and 33 Democrats the industry backed in congressional races, 85% won.
Brad Garlinghouse: It’s incredible.
Margaret Brennan: So you see this election as a major victory?
Brad Garlinghouse: For sure.
Margaret Brennan: But some people will look at that and say, “You teamed up and bought an election.”
Brad Garlinghouse: At the end of the day, voters voted. We– we– we educated voters, as many industries do, about candidates.
Margaret Brennan: But you helped supercharge the candidates with the money in the coffers, right, on whatever it is–
Brad Garlinghouse: We absolutely did.
Margaret Brennan: –they wanted to talk about.
Brad Garlinghouse: That’s absolutely right.
Margaret Brennan: So, in your mind, is the message for any lawmaker looking to run for office that they have to take your industry seriously? Fear your industry?
Brad Garlinghouse: I think all citizens should want people in Congress, in the Senate and the House, who are going to look to how do we use technologies in ways to benefit citizens.
But the best news for the crypto industry came at the top of the ticket.
Margaret Brennan: Before this cycle, in June of 2021, Donald Trump was saying, “Bitcoin seems like a scam.” Do you understand what happened with that transformation?
Brad Garlinghouse: I didn’t have a front-row seat to that. I think it’s clear that Donald Trump embraced crypto and crypto embraced Donald Trump.
Three weeks before the election, Trump announced the launch of a new digital coin that he had a financial stake in.
Margaret Brennan: Is that a conflict of interest in your point of view?
Brad Garlinghouse: Whether or not it’s a conflict of interest, the voters have knowingly said, “We want this person to be our president. The voters have spoken more so than I have.
Trump’s Cabinet picks have had very positive things to say about crypto. Here’s what his choice for Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, told Fox Business News…
Bessent on Fox Business News: “Crypto is about freedom and the crypto economy is here to stay”
Perhaps most significantly, this past week Trump selected a new head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Paul Atkins – a former SEC commissioner who’s done some consulting for crypto companies, is expected to take a very different approach than Biden-era Chair Gary Gensler, who filed more than 120 lawsuits against crypto companies. Last year, Gensler told the House Financial Services Committee ….
Gensler: “I’ve never seen a field that’s so non-compliant with laws written by Congress”
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse says the SEC’s approach was the main reason his company and two others created the biggest industry super PAC, called Fairshake.
Brad Garlinghouse: People are like, “Wh– why did– why did these companies come together and organize and say, ‘This matters'”? And– it– it’s a reaction to a war on crypto.
Margaret Brennan: So if the– if there had been a different SEC chair than Gary Gensler–
Brad Garlinghouse:I’m not sure Fairshake would exist.
Margaret Brennan: Really?
Brad Garlinghouse: I’m– absolutely.
In response, an SEC spokesperson said: “any amount spent by the crypto industry on legal defense or influence peddling pales in comparison to the savings lost by crypto investors to frauds and failures.”
John Reed Stark: It was definitely a war on crypto.
John Reed Stark, former chief of internet enforcement at the SEC, says he owns no cryptocurrency and has never worked for the industry. Like Garlinghouse, he believes voters have given President-elect Trump a mandate to govern.
John Reed Stark: As far as these election results are concerned, the clear mandate is the SEC needs to lay off crypto And that’s exactly what’s gonna happen.
But that doesn’t mean this former SEC official thinks the agency’s actions were wrong.
John Reed Stark: crypto is a scourge. It’s not something that you want in your society. It has no utility. it’s just pure speculation. Remember, there’s no balance sheet to crypto. There’s no financial statements.
Margaret Brennan: You’re talkin’ about SEC filings. There’s no public disclosure mandate.
John Reed Stark: Exactly. Nothing. But also there’s no audit, inspection, examination, net capital requirements– no licensure of the individuals involved. And there’s no transparency into it. that creates real systemic risk, not just risk for investors But the other part that people don’t really talk about enough are the dire externalities that are enabled by crypto.
Margaret Brennan: What do you mean?
John Reed Stark: Every single crime you can conceive of is easier to do now because of crypto, especially ransomware, human sex trafficking—sanctions evasion, money laundering. North Korea is financing their nuclear weapons program using crypto.
Sam Bankman-Fried’s conviction for fraud at one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world is a case study of what can happen without proper oversight. Based in the Bahamas, the FTX exchange collapsed in 2022, imperiling $8 billion of customer assets, much of it beyond the reach of U.S. regulators.
Margaret Brennan: There were crimes there. There was fraud there.
Brad Garlinghouse: I view that as not t– dissimilar than if we say Bernie Madoff went to jail, that doesn’t make every hedge fund manager– a criminal.
Margaret Brennan: Of course–
Brad Garlinghouse: The– there’s a lotta good actors in crypto.
Ripple’s CEO says his company employs 900 people and has been working with regulated financial institutions to create a faster and cheaper way for people to send money overseas. XRP is the digital currency it uses to do that. But Ripple also sold the digital currency XRP to investors, and XRP now trades on exchanges, where people can buy or sell it in the hope of making a profit.
Margaret Brennan: So the SEC sued your company in December of 2020. That was the tail end of the Trump administration. Why?
Brad Garlinghouse: Well, their allegation was that Ripple and our sales of XRP represented the sale of an unregistered security.
Margaret Brennan: A security like a stock or another asset class?
Brad Garlinghouse: Correct.
Garlinghouse says Ripple has spent over $150 million fighting the SEC in court, arguing that the digital currency XRP shouldn’t be subject to the agency’s registration and disclosure requirements, as if it were a stock offering.
Brad Garlinghouse: I went to Harvard Business School. I think I’m reasonably intelligent about something like, “What is a security?” So never once had I considered the possibility– that, “Okay, maybe XRP’s a security.”
John Reed Stark: I’ve read every case. I’ve read every motion. And judges have said over, and over again that these are securities. And they haven’t said it like, “This is a close call.” They said, “This is an obvious call.”
Brad Garlinghouse disputes that. He also argues that existing securities laws don’t fit well with the new technology, and Congress needs to draft new rules for these new digital assets.
Brad Garlinghouse: We haven’t been asking to be deregulated. We’ve been asking to be regulated. So we have been saying, “Hey, look, just give us clear rules of the road.”
Margaret Brennan: So w– what was your strategy with putting money to work in the election? Was it to then go write those rules of the road that you want written?
Brad Garlinghouse: No. Our– our goal has been to simply get rules written. I mean, the– the good news is there was–
Margaret Brennan: I mean, not just any rules.
Brad Garlinghouse: Well, th– there was– a bill passed this summer– in the House, bipartisan support called FIT21.
Margaret Brennan: Uh-huh.
Brad Garlinghouse: it was a Republican bill. Seventy-one Democrats supported it.
FIT21 tries to create a new regulatory framework for digital assets. While the SEC will still play a role, the legislation gives more responsibility for regulating cryptocurrencies to the CFTC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees futures markets for everything from gold to pork bellies…and already has some jurisdiction over bitcoin.
John Reed Stark: the SEC is about– maybe ten times the size of the CFTC. The SEC’s mandate is one of investor protection. They have legions of attorneys who go out and do these inspections, examinations, and audits. The CFTC is more about the integrity of the marketplace. I don’t blame the crypto industry for wanting to be under the CFTC. It’s a much easier regulatory regime.
Margaret Brennan: It had bipartisan support, and it passed the House.
John Reed Stark: Doesn’t surprise me at all that it has the support it has because–
Margaret Brennan: Why?
John Reed Stark: It doesn’t pay for a member of Congress or the Senate, whoever you’re talking about, doesn’t pay for them to be (laugh) anti-crypto. There’s no– there’s no one that’s gonna give them contributions because of that
Lawmakers from both parties told us crypto firms will not escape scrutiny, since there are consumer protections in the bill. And while it’s not clear whether republican leaders will reintroduce FIT21 in the new Congress, there is bipartisan agreement that something must be done to plug regulatory gaps and prevent confusion in a market that already exists.
Brad Garlinghouse: Where is the United States better served? Are we served by creating clear rules of the road and having this industry thrive here at home? Or should we push it offshore where people are less protected?
Margaret Brennan: But even some of the big financial names on Wall Street have been skeptical of crypto. Jamie Dimon called it pet rock
Brad Garlinghouse: There are big skeptics I think anytime a new technology, a new industry– emerges. The counter to what you’re describing is the most successful ETF ever in the United States–
Margaret Brennan: Exchange-traded fund.
Brad Garlinghouse: –was the Bitcoin ETF. The Bitcoin ETF went live I think in January of this year, and attracted more assets in– in a f– s– faster amount of time than any ETF ever before.
Exchange traded funds, or ETFs, are like mutual funds. Offered by well-known investment firms and big banks, they make it easy for people to invest in bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies without directly buying it themselves. Even Jamie Dimon’s bank offers clients investments in these assets he once described as pet rocks.
John Reed Stark: Am I surprised that these big banks have gotten into the crypto space? No, because there’s huge amounts of money to be made in fees.
Margaret Brennan: Do you think that everyday people who want to make money in the crypto space understand the risk that they assume?
Brad Garlinghouse: I think many people understand it’s a volatile market. And I think many people, you know, choose to participate. Many people choose to participate in the gambling market, also very risky. Should we, as– a government, tell people how they should and shouldn’t use the– their hard-earned money?
With the value of Ripple’s XRP currency up more than 300% since the election, Brad Garlinghouse recently announced the company was putting another $25 million into the industry super PAC Fairshake. With that donation, Fairshake already has $103 million to spend on pro-crypto candidates in the mid-term elections two years from now.
Produced by Andy Court. Associate producers, Annabelle Hanflig and Richard Escobedo. Broadcast associates, Grace Conley and Musa Ali. Edited by Warren Lustig
CBS News
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.
CBS News
Sal Khan wants an AI tutor for every student | 60 Minutes
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.