Education

BREAKING: Google Research just dropped the textbook killer. Its called "Learn Your Way" and it uses LearnLM to transform any PDF into 5 personalized learning formats. Students using it scored 78% vs 67% on retention tests. The education revolution is here.

A number of people are talking about implications of AI to schools. I spoke about some of my thoughts to a school board earlier, some highlights: 1. You will never be able to detect the use of AI in homework. Full stop. All "detectors" of AI imo don't really work, can be defeated in various ways, and are in principle doomed to fail. You have to assume that any work done outside classroom has used AI. 2. Therefore, the majority of grading has to shift to in-class work (instead of at-home assignments), in settings where teachers can physically monitor students. The students remain motivated to learn how to solve problems without AI because they know they will be evaluated without it in class later. 3. We want students to be able to use AI, it is here to stay and it is extremely powerful, but we also don't want students to be naked in the world without it. Using the calculator as an example of a historically disruptive technology, school teaches you how to do all the basic math & arithmetic so that you can in principle do it by hand, even if calculators are pervasive and greatly speed up work in practical settings. In addition, you understand what it's doing for you, so should it give you a wrong answer (e.g. you mistyped "prompt"), you should be able to notice it, gut check it, verify it in some other way, etc. The verification ability is especially important in the case of AI, which is presently a lot more fallible in a great variety of ways compared to calculators. 4. A lot of the evaluation settings remain at teacher's discretion and involve a creative design space of no tools, cheatsheets, open book, provided AI responses, direct internet/AI access, etc. TLDR the goal is that the students are proficient in the use of AI, but can also exist without it, and imo the only way to get there is to flip classes around and move the majority of testing to in class settings.

Claude Code course by @AnthropicAI it's FREE, check it out if you haven't yet here's the link to the course https://anthropic.skilljar.com/claude-code-in-action…

How will AI affect education, now and in the future? Here, we reflect on some of the benefits and risks we've been thinking about.

In 2026, I expect we’ll see the birth of the first AI-native university. Over the past several years, universities have dabbled in AI-enabled grading, tutoring, and scheduling. But what’s emerging now is deeper, an adaptive academic organism that learns and optimizes itself in real time. Picture an institution where courses, advising, research collaboration, and even building operations continuously adapt based on data feedback loops. Schedules optimize themselves. Reading lists evolve nightly and rewrite themselves as new research appears. Learning paths shift in real time to meet each student’s pace and context. We’re already seeing precursors. ASU’s campus-wide partnership with OpenAI produced hundreds of AI-driven projects across teaching and administration. SUNY now embeds AI literacy into its general education requirements. These are the building blocks for more foundational deployment. In the AI-native university, professors become architects of learning, curating data, tuning models, and teaching students how to interrogate machine reasoning Assessment shifts, too. Detection tools and plagiarism bans give way to AI-aware evaluation, grading students on how they use AI, not whether they used it. Transparency and tactful application replaces prohibition. And as every industry struggles to hire people who can design, govern, and collaborate with AI systems, this new university becomes the training ground, producing graduates fluent in orchestration who help augment a rapidly shifting workforce. This AI-native university will become the talent engine for a new economy. Do you think an AI native university will arise in 2026? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Are there examples of universities that already integrate AI agents into computer science programs? Feels like one of those things that will necessarily be part of all CS programs in a few years - in the meantime, pretty much all students prob already use them anyways…

So grateful for this past year. 1. @gradi3nt_ascent tripled in size from 8k to 25k subscribers. 2. I published my first book with @BloomsburyAcad 3. Grew from 2k to a community of 100k followers on LinkedIn. I wrote about the newsletter journey and what's next for Gradient Ascent, writing and education, especially given how AI has commoditized learning. Or has it? Post linked below. Happy New Year!

A friend in China recently asked me how to improve her English. She’d struggled with it for years as a student, labeled herself “bad at languages,” and now wanted to try again for her career. But she couldn’t sustain her efforts. I asked how she’d been studying. She said she bought grammar books, pronunciation guides, vocabulary lists, and tried to memorize them. Why? “Because I need to start from the basics and learn systematically.” There it was. Even years after leaving school, she still had the student mindset. The education system had brainwashed her into thinking learning must be systematic, bottom-up, textbook-driven. I told her: This is no way to learn as an adult. Instead, find content in English you’re already interested in. Decipher it with dictionaries and AI tools. Learn vocabulary from that content. Define the “job to be done” for English—a tool for communication and understanding—and work backwards. What are you trying to understand? Read that. Make that your textbook. As adults, we need to do a 180-degree reversal of how we learned as students. In school, you start with foundations and work upward. You won’t apply what you learn until years later. But the basics are also the most boring. If you try to learn this way as an adult, you’ll quit. Adults should do the opposite: Start with a real-world problem. Figure out what knowledge you need. Then go backwards to learn it. AI accelerates this dramatically. It’s a 24/7 world-class tutor that answers any question, as long as you know what to ask. I experienced this myself when trying to become more technical. A few years ago, I wanted to learn coding, so I watched intro CS lectures. I got bored fast. I couldn’t connect the content to anything I needed in real life. This year, I started using AI coding tools like Google AI Studio, Replit, and Cursor. I described my product ideas in plain language, and they turned into working products in minutes. Every time an idea became real, I felt elated, empowered. Before, screens of code gave me headaches. They reminded me of my inadequacy. Now, I saw code as just a tool to achieve my goals. I asked AI to walk me through the codebase structure, the languages and technologies, what each file did, how everything connected. I had it add detailed comments everywhere. After a few projects, I’d learned more about coding than a year of college CS lectures. It wasn’t “systematic.” But I’m not trying to become an engineer. I’m trying to become technically literate so I can use code as a tool. Why this reversal? • Students’ full-time job is learning. Adults have other jobs and responsibilities. After a long day at work, who has the energy for boring lectures? • Students must learn. The system forces accountability: exams, homework, class attendance. Adults learn purely by choice. Nobody forces you. This means sustainable learning requires intrinsic motivation. If it’s boring, you quit. • Students have defined goals. Do well on exams. Adults must define their own goals. Otherwise, you lose motivation fast. The common thread: Sustaining motivation is the key to learning anything as an adult. Because you’re not going to learn overnight. So if you’re trying to learn something, start with a problem or project. Figure out the job to be done. Work backwards. Learning becomes fun. Learning becomes sustainable. Forget “learn first, do later.” Do first, learn later. You don’t get good and then produce output. You produce output and then get good.

Coursera has acquired Udemy for $900M

We're now rolling out interactive images to the @GeminiApp for more visual and dynamic learning. It’s designed to help you visually explore complex academic concepts, turning studying from passive viewing into active exploration. Learn more → https://goo.gle/49H4K8e

ChatGPT for Teachers:

GenZ is the social media-native generation. Raised on influencers, followers, and virality What will the AI-native generation be like? Feels like it might end up the most empowered, most educated and capable generation of people so far

We entered YC with $16K MRR. 100% bootstrapped. Today, we’re at $75K MRR, a 4.7× increase in just 6 weeks ( and $1.1M in annualized run rate) and on track to double before the end of the year. It’s been wild watching Parrot evolve from a scrappy experiment into a product people genuinely love using daily. Every day, new users tell us the same thing: “It doesn’t feel like I’m studying. I’m just scrolling.” That’s exactly the point. We’re building the first language app designed for the way people actually spend time on their phones, swiping through short, entertaining videos. Except this time, it’s productive scrolling. We’re just getting started. The retention is improving, the love is real, and the growth is compounding. Super excited to keep talking to users and making Parrot 100x better.

Two hundred people joined our Claude Code for Beginners course last month. Most had never written code. Eight hours later, they'd each deployed a working project. Here are 6 of the 23 questions they asked, compiled by @nityeshaga

how LLMs killed computer science

Compiled my favorite resources for learning AI into a free website:

Gemini Nano Banana Pro can solve exam questions *in* the exam page image. With doodles, diagrams, all that. ChatGPT thinks these solutions are all correct except Se_2P_2 should be "diselenium diphosphide" and a spelling mistake (should be "thiocyanic acid" not "thoicyanic") :O

New essay. Build education machines. Enjoy.

Helping students come up with good startup ideas is like hooking them up to the deck catapult of an aircraft carrier. If you succeed, they're gone. What are they supposed to do, not work on the idea? And working on a startup is incompatible with being a student.

Learn to code.