It’s my pleasure to welcome the new subscribers. One of the reasons I decided to write Learning Curved is because there is a lot happening at a fast pace and I wanted to make sense of it for myself. Hope you all find it useful. Here are a few stories that caught my attention recently.
Brain damage or enhancement
A study from MIT Media Lab came out called “Your Brain on ChatGPT”, which created headlines like ‘ChatGPT use significantly reduces brain activity, an MIT study finds’. While the study was limited in several ways, it sparked a lot of discussion including 3 interesting pieces from Ethan Mollick (‘Against Brain Damage’), Niall Ferguson (‘AI’s great brain robbery’) and Neal Stephenson, author of sci-fi book Diamond Age which imagined what we could call a future, advanced AI tutor (‘Emerson, AI, and The Force’). All these pieces referenced the MIT paper and drew slightly different takes. I don’t want to butcher their take and you should read them yourself but the common arc of arguments is not about whether AI is good or bad but about how you use this powerful technology and who really benefits from it.
Why this matters: We will see a lot of studies come out on the impact of AI in education (I plan to cover what’s already out there in one of the next editions), but we have to keep asking the important questions of when does it work, under what conditions, who benefits and why. To me, the story in the Diamond Age of how the three recipients use the powerful technology is the most interesting parable for today’s times. Neal really wrestles in his piece about how to make this technology work for most and the short answer is - ‘it’s not a given’.
New education related announcements from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic
OpenAI is testing a new mode that’s rolled out to some users called ‘Study together’. It is expected to act like a tutor instead of giving answers. I don't have access to it yet. Google has announced a ton of features including AI tools for teachers. Anthropic has its own set of solutions.
Many of these seem point solutions. For example, a feature that helps create lesson plans or a tool that helps with homework, in isolation, would be considered point solutions—they solve one problem very well but do not address the broader, interconnected needs of education as a whole. Learning requires integration. It is not just about solving a single problem or mastering a single skill, but about connecting ideas, using prior knowledge to develop advanced skills, and growing over time.
Why this matters: It is not my intent to review or comment on products here. We are in early stages and all experiments matter. What makes it interesting is that these will be very large experiments to learn from. OpenAI has more than 1 billion users, Google Gemini is hitting half a billion users.
Detailed review of Alpha School
In Learning Curved #1, I had mentioned Alpha School. They describe themselves on their website as ‘a school where kids crush academics in 2 hours, build life skills through workshops, and thrive beyond the classroom’.
This very long post, from one of the parents who moved to Austin to enroll their kids in Alpha School, is perhaps the most detailed and in-depth description of how Alpha School works. And it is a fascinating post.
From the post:
It isn’t genuine two‑hour learning: most kids start school at 8:30am, start working on the “two-hour platform” sometime between 9am-930am and are occupied with academics until noon-1230pm. They also blend in “surges” from time to time to squeeze in more hours on the platform.
There is no “generative AI” powered by OpenAI, Gemini or Claude in the platform the kids use – it is closer to “turbocharged spreadsheet checklist with a spaced‑repetition algorithm”……….At the end of the day the students get a report on their achievements that day, as well as overall feedback (this is potentially where the “AI” comes in. The computers track both clicks and eye tracking. It can tell both what the student clicked, but also if they were paying attention or distracted, or how much effort they put into reading the feedback when they got questions wrong).
It definitely isn’t teacher‑free: Teachers have been rebranded “guides”, and while their workload is different than a traditional school, they are very important – and both the quantity and quality are much higher than traditional schools.
The bundle matters: it’s not just the learning platform on its own. A big part of the product’s success is how the school has set up student incentives and the culture they have built to make everything work together
…Yet the core claim survives: Since they started in October my children have been marching through and mastering material roughly three times faster than their age‑matched peers (and their own speed prior to the program).
Why this matters: In some ways, all the three stories in this edition are related. We are moving fast with breakthroughs in AI capability, we are building multiple solutions, and we have experiments that are as broad and open as OpenAI/Gemini approach to as targeted as what Alpha is trying to do. These are exciting times.