Inside the black box: How Google is thinking about AI & education (part 1 of 3)

35 snips

Nov 18, 2024

Rob Wong, the Product Lead for LearnX at Google, dives into the innovative intersection of AI and education. He sheds light on the challenges of modeling learner profiles and the importance of balancing user needs with educational value. The discussion showcases exciting AI tools like YouTutor and Learning Coach Gem, emphasizing personalization in learning experiences. Wong also explores the shift to an 'AI first' approach and the ongoing efforts to fine-tune AI for supportive, engaging education. Prepare for insights into the future of learning!

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

ANECDOTE

Noodling

Libby Hills asks Owen Henkel about the weirdest thing he learned online.
He learned about "noodling", a fishing technique where people catch catfish with their bare hands.

ANECDOTE

Piggies in the New Forest

Owen Henkel searched online about pigs released in the New Forest to eat acorns.
The acorns are harmful to horses, and the pigs help manage the ecosystem.

INSIGHT

Episode Focus

This episode focuses on how Google integrates LearnLM into products like YouTube.
Future episodes will cover LLMs in tutoring and LearnLM's technical development.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

This episode is the first of a three part mini-series with Google. There is a lot of interest in how big tech companies are engaging in AI and education and what their future plans are - in this mini-series, hear the latest directly from Google.

The genesis of this mini-series was a short Ed-Technical episode from earlier this year. Libby and Owen discussed a paper Google released about the work they had done to fine-tune a LLM called LearnLM to make it more useful for education. This work was motivated by a realisation that some of the core behaviours of LLMs (helpfulness, sycophancy) aren’t aligned with what’s valuable from a learning perspective, and prompting can only go so far.

This first episode focuses on how Google is integrating LearnLM’s capabilities into existing Google products like YouTube and new products like LearnAbout. The next episode in the mini-series will focus on LLMs and tutoring, and the final episode will be a more technical episode on the development of LearnLM.

We had a chance to talk to a number of folks across a range of teams, including LearnX, Google Research and DeepMind. There was too much great content to squeeze into three episodes but all full interviews will be up on our YouTube channel.

In this episode we include excerpts from interviews with four members of the team.

Rob Wong is the Product Lead for LearnX, a team within Google that builds learning features on Search, YouTube, and Gemini chat, and also works on LearnLM in partnership with Google Research and Google DeepMind.

Julia Wilkowski leads a pedagogy team at Google. Her team collaborates with Google product teams to apply learning science principles and teaching best practices.

Markus Kunesch is a Staff Research Engineer at Google DeepMind and tech lead of the AI for Education research programme. His work is focused on generative AI, AI for education, and AI ethics, with a particular interest in translating social science research into new evaluations and modeling approaches.

Angie Mac McAllister, PhD is a Group Product Manager at Google with a vision: to make a personal AI tutor available to everyone. Focused on developing learning features for Gemini, Mac combines 35 years of experience in education with cutting-edge AI to help students become better learners.

Links:

Join us on social media:

BOLD (@BOLD_insights), Libby Hills (@Libbylhhills) and Owen Henkel (@owen_henkel)
Listen to all episodes of Ed-Technical here: https://bold.expert/ed-technical
Subscribe to BOLD’s newsletter: https://bold.expert/newsletter
Stay up to date with all the latest research on child development and learning: https://bold.expert

Credits: Sarah Myles for production support; Josie Hills for graphic design