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

Ed-Technical

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:

• Google’s technical report on LearnLM
• Ed-Technical short episode on Google’s LearnLM paper
• Article about Learn About, Google’s experimental new AI tool
• Article by Angie Mac McAllister about new Gemini learning features

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