Name: Brainstorm Tech 2023: A.I. And The Future Of Education
Uploaded: 2023-07-12
Duration: 15 min 51 s
Description: Dan Rosensweig, Chairman, President and CEO, Chegg In conversation with: Jeremy Kahn, FORTUNE

Dan Rosensweig, Chairman, President and CEO, Chegg In conversation with: Jeremy Kahn, FORTUNE 

Brainstorm Tech 2023: A.I. And The Future Of Education 

Conferences

Dan, thanks so much for being here with us. Thanks for having me. Um We're gonna start out. Not everyone here is probably familiar with Chad and, and what you guys do, give us a little pocket history of cha pocket history is long and some days great and some days pretty crap. Well, give us a short version. Um So we're probably the largest educator in the United States. We are direct to consumer company that started by inventing textbook rental, which sort of bankrupted two of the publishers to try to save kids money in college and then stumbled onto a concept of online homework help and built a service that 8 million students pay us for globally and has 100 million questions asked and answered that are all accurate and um have been broken down by their components and um, we help kids learn in ways that they've never been able to learn before. Cool. Um And one of the ways you're starting to think about helping kids learn in ways they never have before is the use of generative AI, which is, and I, I understand that you guys were working on using generative ai to potentially create some sort of, you know, personalized tutor when Chat GPT comes along and then, you know, you basically say come out to the market and say, actually we're getting some headwinds here from, from Chat GPT. I think your CFO said there were maybe 100,000 and potential subscribers that we're not going to subscribe. Maybe now because of Chat GBT. And when you say this, you know, your stock takes quite a hit. You lost about 48% of value in a single day. I think what you're saying is the reason I was invited, I'm the poster child for getting your ass kicked in the public markets by AI since I lost 48% of value in five minutes. So for those of you who didn't want to take that, I took it for you. Yeah. Well, thank you, my pleasure. You know, what did that experience teach you? What did you learn from that? That don't tell the public markets anything? Look. Um I despite my youthful appearance have been in tech since 1983 and was the publisher of the largest computer magazines. For those of you old enough to remember PC magazine, computer shopper. Um my background of helped start it and see it. And Yahoo um is that there's always another thing that just when you think it's done just when you think you're bored with it, somebody invents something and some of these things are sort of false messiahs, you know, NFTS and some of them are real like mobile or like cloud computing. And in this case like A I so AI can be used for extraordinarily good things or really bad things and the bad people don't have to follow laws or rules and they'll do it first and they'll do bad things and they are and then the good people will try to follow all the regulations and laws and they'll be further behind, but they'll create great things. And if you ask yourself, if a I could do anything, you'd want to cure cancer, right? And you'd wanted to help educate the world so that people can be optimistic and hopeful and productive. And so we have a vision for combining what she has always wanted to do, which is combine your academic support, skills based support and support in your life, mental health crisis, alcohol crisis, drug crisis, all of these things are affecting our kids in ways that you may not understand and believe it or not. The average age of a college kid is 25 62% of all college graduates are women. 40% of them work 30 hours a week or more and have kids and have jobs. So the ability to hone in on a really personalized learning style and way and specifics about you for you, what you want to learn or need to learn, we are absolutely fired about it and we think incumbents will win over new people, which is not been the history, but we think this case may be the way it goes. So we're pretty fired up. Go on. You're in the process of building this product called Checkmate, which is going to be a gene of ai personal tutor. And I think you have a demo of what this is going to look like that you can show us. So let's take a look at that now. Yeah, it's, we hope to be the first personalized learning assistant and you can walk us through what we're seeing here. So none of you use chig. But if you have kids, all of them do. I mean, we are literally 88% awareness on college campus. So what we do is you would type in a question now and we'd give you a step by step solution on how to get to the answer, what the answer is, why it's the answer. And it's pretty much in one format. Although we do offer videos, we are now going to take the accuracy of that, which has been built over 13 years. And we are going to make conversational relevant personalized based on the 100 million answers that we have the 17 million new questions we get asked a year. But just imagine the following scenario as you see this, you start to have a conversation with somebody that knows, you knows how you're feeling that day knows what you're studying, knows when your midterm is, knows what you're good at, knows what you're bad at. Builds you a personalized plan advocates for you. And then over time takes a look at all of your test that you upload, tells you what professional skills you develop, offers you the opportunity to learn skills you don't have and ultimately connects you to a job and ranks you. We're building a community which will connect student to student to be able to share. These are all things that she did not do and now will be doing, going into the future and really, really, really quickly. So A I has changed the opportunity. As you see here, we can connect you to a study group of people who are doing, studying exactly what you're studying live now in person, online things that will advantage the student in ways they've never been advantaged before. So imagine you're a typical student in this country that has been unsupported by your school system that the future for you has got to be to get some form of skill based education to allow you to be competitive in the world. And now finally, somebody knows you by, by you having to do very little work and us being a to analyze, assess and build you a program directly and specifically for you. We can know your professor, your school, your textbook. So we can what's changing with AI now is we're moving away from the model we have now, which is, it responds to you to it predicts for you. We will be able to know exactly what you're learning on Tuesday of next week and bring it to you in the format that you learn best in the language that you learn best at the level that you learn best and assess you and prove to you that you are improving. None of that has been available before. And so, you know, I look at the world and I say we have a brand, we have reach, we have the accuracy. We have the students love us to death. We have over an 80 score with students and we have this database that's been built of a learning taxonomy over 13 years and all the data from every school, every professor and every student, we will be able to use A I on top of our stuff, which is why the journalists are not going to be able to succeed against the vertical. So this is a change and an opportunity for us that we've never seen before. And we think the market just got 10 times larger for us. And I want to get the questions for the audience. So please think of questions for Dan and I'll come to you in a minute. By the way, didn't the video look pretty cool? I mean, imagine if your kid needed help, right? This is the thing that's going to help them because no professor can scale and you probably didn't know this, but a million professors in colleges are adjunct professors getting paid 40 grand a year. You probably didn't know that the overwhelming majority of tests that your students get are not written by the professor or graded or ever seen. They're bought from test bags. We are going to serve the students needs not the schools. And you said you think you can win out over a journalist chat bot. But, you know, you were hit by the fact that, and I'm sobered that people thought, you know, chat GP, you could do a lot of this. Why, you know, if, if you know what would prevent open A I from just saying, oh, we'll just set chat GP loose on some curriculum and, and, you know, we don't need checkmates. So look, the only thing that could beat us is if something is better and free. Um, well, it's free right now. It's free right now. But it's older generations as you know, it's not getting better. The older generations are actually getting worse. The hallucination hallucinations are getting worse. We are seeing traffic return to check because students are now realizing that it's not accurate. They were never designed to be accurate. Chat GP T was never designed to teach you anything. It was designed to give you something. Well, if you need to learn, you need to learn, you can't have somebody do the work for you. So students are understanding that because they actually have to go out into the workforce and be successful. But the real reason is because verticals, we all use verticals. Right? If, if, if journalists, when Google would have won, Google wins is a business model. But it doesn't, it didn't win commerce, it didn't win travel, it didn't win shopping, it didn't win video, had to buy youtube, it won organizing the world's information and sending you off to places with no explanation. Everything else has done. It has not succeeded in it, the ability to have the accurate data to have the learning taxonomy, to be specific to a vertical and not have to be equally good across a lot of verticals leads to mediocrity. So the rectangle served its purpose for a long time. Brilliantly, I might add. But here this is about students actually needing to learn and know and be able to leave there with confidence, Ted GPT is not going to know your history, it's not going to know what you did yesterday. It's not going to know the history of your class or the history of other students, what jobs those students get. It's not designed for that. So we are and so the combination of using them on top of us, we think is going to be extraordinary and what you saw that was all done in 90 days, that's how fast things are moving. And if you've seen Adobe Firefly, I have the honor of serving on the Adobe board that all came together in less than three months. I stop you there. Let's get some questions from the audience. There's a question in the back there. Thanks Dan Steven Wolf, D, Steven Wolf D, Dan Rosenstein. Um I'm curious, one of the real benefits of having A I is personalization. And when you think about the consumer base, the student body, I'd love for you to double click a little bit on the diversity of that student body. And why personalization is so important for those students. So thank you, Stephen, because it's actually an essential question because probably most of the people in this room have this vision, that college is what you went to. So it's not if you knew that the largest college in this country was an online university, would it surprise you? Would it surprise you to know that as 170,000 students, it's Southern New Hampshire University. Would it surprise you to know that one out of two students never go to college and one out of two that do never finish. So the ability to speak to somebody because not everybody who came to this country or even was born in this country, depending on what you're born, had the same experience learning or the same culture of learning or some families had to go and work, right? In order to support the family, the prioritization had to be survival rather than the luxury that my kids have. And when you appreciate that language is a barrier culture is a barrier fear of asking a question. Think about the teachers, how hard they work in grade school and you know, and up to 12th grade with a, with a room that has people that know two people came from the same background. So you can't do it anymore, it cannot possibly scale. So the ability to understand who you are culturally, what's important to you, what device you use, what may be going on in the rest of your life. We're going to be able to connect you if you have mental health issues to a counselor because that's a real thing. You may need to earn, earn an income. We may find that will connect you to a job on your campus one day because these are who we actually serve, not who we would like to believe that we serve. So I'm going to stop you that because I want to get you another question. Another question over here. I just get excited. Hi. Um I'm Nadia. I'm class of 2021 Harvard and I'm just gonna expose myself. That's 83 Hobart. Nice. Um I'm gonna expose myself because I am concerned in talking to a lot of the young people that I meet in my day to day work um about the level that GP T is being used to complete essays to do homework and problem set. Uh, I was a user but not because I gave a talk about learning, but because it gave me answers to problem sets. And I think I meet a lot of young students out there where they're not necessarily interested in using TCP T for learning, they're using it because it makes it easier to complete homework. I raised my pre feed around my junior year of college and because I was on full financial aid, I was also not super invested in doing it. I was just like easy, easy, like get degrees to be honest. And so, yeah, I think that a concern of mine just as like a Gen Z elder is feeling like they, these sorts of tools are making it easier and easier to honestly just get the answers and de prioritizing, um you know, really engaging curiosity. I wanna give an answer. So I'm gonna let him start answering my question. Yeah, I, well, I don't think that's the question. I think, I think the question is so you're gonna hate my answer because I think you're thinking about it from the exact wrong way. I think the laziness of academic institutions, the fact that they don't change their curriculum good for you to go to Harvard probably earn it. That's 4000 people out of the 21 million people in this country. So the state of California college counselors to students 1000 to 1. So the fact is these students were giving no support, no learning, no background. They put their hand up, they borrowed money that they'll probably never be able to pay back to make their lives better. So, what the kids at Harvard did? I don't give a shit about right. I care about the kids who are trying to make their lives better. Now, the truth is you can only cheat if the professor doesn't do any work. If the professor doesn't write their own question, doesn't change. The question gives you a take home test that's on the schools. We need people that know how to learn. So if you have the job that I have and you got a chance to talk to these students who thank me for the fact that we existed for the first time. Anybody caring about them and being able to help them while they raise a child work 40 hours a week and can't make it to the class because the class is scheduled at a ridiculously inconvenient time. I mean, the state of California is 115 community colleges. They created 115 online schools. Why? Same textbook, same class unions. So my view is we are being built for the student that is self initiated, that wants to learn, that needs to understand that needs to graduate with a skill and that's what we're going to do because we're going to assess and evaluate them. The fact that it's going to we're going to have to wrap it up there. Ok? But that ones are right on time. Well, somebody asked me a happy question. We'll have to maybe the networking sessions we can ask you a happy question. But that's right. Thank you so much for being with us. All right. Thank you, everybody. Thank you.