how i think ai will solve education

Hey, can I be honest?

I just wrote an exam as a junior in university and I can't remember a single thing I studied.

Turns out, it's not just me. Almost no one from my class actually remembers the stuff they learned just a few days ago, after the exam.

I've been thinking a lot about why lately.

And the more I think about it…the less "education" as a whole makes sense.

It feels like we're paying $100k+ to learn things we can teach ourselves online. Harvard literally has its lectures posted on YouTube, there's endless content out there.

This guy proved it by doing a 4 year MIT degree in 1 year without ever going to class.

And at the same time, you see AI literally changing entire industries, in the craziest ways.

Self-driving cars.
Robots in warehouses.
Models writing code for end-to-end products.

Everything is changing faster than ever.

But schools and universities are still teaching us to pass exams? to do the same old job applications, send out resumes……doesn't feel like anything is changing.

This is weird to me.

Even when I think about AI and education today, the main things that come to mind are AI tools to help you study better, take notes, generate flashcards, or AI for teachers to build lesson plans, or AI for people to learn new languages etc.

But most of us don't learn something for the sake of learning. We learn something for an outcome.

You learn coding to build something.
You learn marketing to get customers.
You learn French to be able to speak it fluently.

But most of these education systems are built around the act of learning. So that leads to things like 500-day Duolingo streaks but you still can't speak French, online courses you never finish, LinkedIn certifications that look good but don't change anything.

Or university exams you pass but don't remember what you learned.

So…what's a future where this is different?

If you look at the best "education companies" today, you'll notice they're not even education companies. They're environments where a person walks in as a 2/10 in their ability to impact the world, and leaves at least a 6/10 to pursue their goals in some domain.

A friend of mine called these 'human capital factories' which I really like. Places where literal new human capital is created.

My favourite examples of these are Stanford, Y Combinator, The Knowledge Society, Google's Moonshot Factory.

These environments are different because people are pushed towards doing something real, with the right balance of learning, accountability, someone who believes in them and a community of others doing the same.

The best human mentors, teachers, and guides do this naturally. But you can't scale these environments because they're so high-touch. That's why Stanford can only admit 10,000 students every year, and Y Combinator only takes in 1,000 companies every year.

What if AI could unlock that scale? That's a future I'm excited about but let me explain what I mean.

Imagine the entire Stanford engineering program lived inside an AI driven environment.

It could combine the best parts of a tutor, teaching assistant, office hours, problem set generator, and study partner all in one. A person would learn faster, and be pushed towards real world outcomes (projects that actually use what you learn and exist in the world).

What if instead of learning about aerodynamics, you'd learn to build a rocket engine from scratch, and learn everything about it as you go with this AI driven environment guiding you.

(Btw me and my friend actually built one from scratch, it's not as hard as it seems and can be done with a few raw materials over a week).

But what could this AI driven environment be? Well, I did say I'd be honest so honestly, I don't know. But here's some experiments I've run which give me a vague idea:

So I've been helping people make their first apps with AI.

Helping each person believe they can build things no matter how non-technical they are, pushing them to overcome waiting for a "good" idea, showing them how to use an AI agent to go back and forth, how to publish it on the internet, how to monetize and find their first 5 users.

With each step I kept thinking: there might as well have been an AI model to help them do each of that - One that talks to you like a therapist, helps you overcome limiting beliefs, helps you pick an idea, think through the smallest version of it. Shows you what buttons to click, what prompts to type. Guides your idea into reality.

Basically it pushes you to real world outcomes and therefore actual learning.

So I built ship-your-ideas.replit.app to test if it could help someone make their first app, publish it live on the internet and send it to 5 real people.

Almost every single person who used it actually built something with AI and got someone to use it. But the catch is, they did it in-person surrounded by others doing the same. When the same thing was online, only half the people used the bot.

But it was cool to see someone go from watching a bunch of coding tutorials but never built anything, to someone who shipped their first app, got real users, even fixed bugs based on feedback. Some even made their first $100 online.

That's a solid transformation from 3/10 to 6/10 in this domain.

Now imagine this existed for someone who wants to be a filmmaker. The AI guides you through making your first film. You learn along the way. It shows you what buttons to click, how to colour grade, how to edit, who to reach out to, how to convince actors to join your project. All while helping you push through mental blocks.

For the first time ever, someone who wants to make films doesn't need to "learn filmmaking" for years. They can just go make a film with AI guiding you along the way. The way someone at Stanford or YC would.

So when I think about AI as a force for good, I don't think about better study tools or smarter flashcards. I think about this environment where AI models and community push anyone to become anything.

It feels like a new interface for learning - like an AI chatbot with a voice that acts as your therapist, a Cursor that sees your screen and shows you what buttons to click, an IDE to build out the app, with a game-like progress tracker.

Most successful founders I know use AI as a co-founder already, even people at AI companies use their own AI models to write code, do the marketing etc.

So it feels like we're getting closer and closer to an end-to-end human capital factory on the AI model side. But models alone won't do anything, they need a better education system around it.

Which to me is a community of people focused on the same outcome in the same domain as the person using that AI driven environment.

Hopefully what I'm working towards solves that community part.

P.S. - I spent 3 hours on this, and I feel like what I wrote doesn't 100% make sense. Lol. But if you liked it and wanna chat more, message me here.

— Sid