Introduction

It's really nice to see everybody here and some familiar faces and I have to confess it is kind of true.

I do have a crush on Claude and I'm a little bit obsessed with it. I even upgraded to the 75 pound a month package. And it's still not enough.

Exploring the Potential of AI in Education

So, and I'm actually frustrated with it as well because, and it's a really interesting journey because I've always been in ed tech and I know there's some wonderful fellow ed tech people here who've been on the journey in this glorious sector where I feel we have like a really mission driven purpose to do something really powerful in the world. And now, I think, is our time actually with AI. We've got an opportunity to build out the application layer.

And kind of part of my fascination with Claude, apart from the fact that I find it incredibly useful, is that for as brilliant as it is, and it is truly brilliant, it lacks a lot of the needs of the application layer.

And, you know, just this weekend I was studying GCSE with my son, and we were uploading poetry to Claude and lit charts and teacher's notes and dumping everything from the Google Drive and You know, it was a laborious task to train it to identify a metaphor and to understand the insights that were needed to drive literacy and deep reading and all these things that we find so powerful.

Challenges in AI and Education

and to do it in an efficient way that was aligned. We talk a lot about alignment in our company and also age appropriate.

And these are things that AI doesn't truly understand yet and why we think the application layer is very valuable.

Age appropriateness in particular takes an awful lot of tuning.

AI thinks that every child is smart. Every child has the potential to be smart. I do believe that.

We could hack any system and make any child smart. I've always believed that.

But children don't start out that way. It's a journey. And nor did AI start out that way.

Company Achievements and Collaborations

So just a few more facts and then we'll go to the demo and then I'm going to show you our roadmap. It's a six-week roadmap, so we're not really spilling the beans.

So we are a Google accelerator startup. We have won two Innovate UK government grants of half a million pounds each for our AI.

One was for knowledge graphing, and the other one was for what we call deep reading, which was actually lifting a line to knowledge out of books. We are partnered with some of the largest publishers in the world, Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, MIT Tech Review, there's a long line of others to be announced.

We are actually the only company in the world that has the rights to mine copyright protected texts from these publishers with AI. And we, I think, achieved that in part because they believed in our mission. And I think the other thing is that we respect copyright holders.

We believe that it's very important to leverage AI to drive the bleeding edge of human thought and that human creativity needs to be protected but also powered by AI in a way that's going to ensure, ironically, that AI is always better because AI leverages humanity and these are very valuable ideas.

Unveiling Study Hall

Okay, so what is Study Hall? It is an end-to-end teaching and learning platform in schools.

We have about 30,000 students right now. We are both in the state sector and in the independent sector. We're in some of the most deprived schools in the country.

We are the second largest reading age test provider in the country. And we also are independent schools.

We have, I won't take you through the boredom of our platform on the school side, but assessment, curriculum, and all kinds of kind of classroom teaching resources.

Features and Market Presence

We are also B2C. So we have a full AI-powered consumer app.

And we've been, I have to say, in stealth mode for two years, which is kind of depressing. And I keep saying we're going to merge next week and then next week. So we are finally emerging in about two weeks.

The demo I'm going to show you is about 80, 90% there. And then I'll show you a video of what's to come. But it's been really exciting.

Demo: Deep Reader Functionality

So what you're seeing here is your teacher's classroom co-pilot. And I'm going to go straight to reading, because that's what we're going to demo tonight.

One of the books we have, which is an amazing book from Penguin Random House, is called The Coming Wave. And so we've got the entirety of the book in here, just like a Kindle. This actually is pretty much of a Kindle on steroids.

So your techies, I thought it'd be appropriate to show you something that was suitable for your age and interest graph. And nothing about the age, more your interest graph, I meant.

And you basically can see that there is what we call embedded background knowledge inside the book. This background knowledge is actually pre-generated AI and it goes across a number of categories. Entrepreneurship, literary devices, quotes, key quotes. I really like this one, symbols about the coming wave of technology symbolizing the disruptive forces poised to reshape society.

This works in Shakespeare, it works in the coming wave. So if you are a GCSE student, which is my son now, you were trying to identify a metaphor inside Shakespeare's book, or if your teacher had the good sense to teach this book instead, which would be far more interesting for a 16-year-old boy, in my opinion, and we will get the boards to change their ways, mend their ways,

Victorian ways, you would be able to practice the curriculum embedded inside things that are far more interesting. So as a teacher, I can create annotations for my class, it's fully social.

Now it's time to consider what this means and a glimpse of the world after the deluge. And I can say, what do you think? There's no AI in this part, by the way. The world will look like after the deluge. Because I want to know what they think.

And everything we design, we design with a human in the loop. It's not always about AI. But we reserve the AI for coaching the kids and for kind of the surprise and delight.

And then I can say, okay. Let's do some questions now.

So I didn't invite a group, actually. That's what I just realized. No wonder that didn't work. I apologize.

So I have to do that again. But let me just put this here and sign this annotation at class. And I'm going to assign it to that group.

What do you think? Again, not as good an annotation as the last one.

I don't rehearse these demos in part because I always want to see what's going to happen. So I always pick another chapter. I won't be able to answer the questions quickly because I didn't rehearse the answer, just so you know. So I'll probably act a lot like my son. I don't know.

And so now I can create questions, and these are also pre-generated. So I'm gonna generate a whole bunch of questions here. We have multiple choice short answer polls.

And we've done, there's a lot of live AI in this, but we have done quite a bit of costing analysis, and it is our view that it is completely unsustainable. and probably not very environmental, to live generate everything. Why would you ask an AI to explain to you the same metaphor every single time in live generation and use all of that compute power? It's just not necessary.

Finding evidence is one of my favorite ones. And you can see that these are all available, so now as a teacher I could assign all of them, which is what I'm going to do, just to go very quickly here. And then I will assign this for my class, setting the date for this evening, because I'm not a very nice teacher, and I'm going to give them homework at the last minute and ruin their amazing good fun.

And I didn't set that end date, sorry. Great. And now I'm going to sign it.

Now I'm going to go over, this chapter is scheduled. By the way, this is just one of many, many tools on our platform. So now I'm gonna go over to all assignments. I'm now Dylan.

And I'm gonna look for Deep Reader. And annoyingly, this is one of the things in the software development is at the bottom of the list, should not be at the bottom of the list, should be at the top. And so you can see that I have the chapter.

And I've got, actually that's not the same chapter that I assigned, hold on one second. Dylan. That was an old chapter.

Okay, let's see if this one is it. And it's still not the right chapter. Well, bear with me because that one's already been answered.

Let's see if I can see if Chapter 9 is here. Okay, let me refresh because maybe it just didn't capture it yet. Chapter 9.

Let me go back. This chapter is scheduled and I can edit this assignment up until this is Chapter 9. Edit my dates.

Oh, sorry. It's because I set it for tomorrow. Well, at least I know it works.

OK. So let's see if that will work. Save changes.

Dates have been successfully updated. And let's refresh that now and see if we get that in there. OK.

So my annotation is here, so I can respond to my teacher. Great. I'm not going to really answer much. because I'm pretty lazy.

I've got embedded background knowledge, embedded vocabulary. Let's look at the questions. The question here is, is it acceptable for government to have the ability to use force to maintain order and promote progress, even if it means some people's freedoms are limited?

I guess we disagree with that. All right. So this is a social poll. There can be hundreds of people on it across the class. We believe in getting everyone's opinion on things. Opinions matter, especially in this day and age.

Now, oh, good. So we're going to have one, which is in your own words, identify the main idea of this passage and provide some key details that support that main idea. So I'm not going to do a very good job at this, but my main idea is this passage is about the risk of containment.

And I'm going to submit that answer and see what it says. Thanks for your answer. I've asked your teacher to review my work. I'm just the assistant.

So we can actually... Let me see if I can find another question here. Also go back and forth with the AI and debate the question. Is it acceptable?

Okay, we're going to ignore that one because that's a poll. Based on the text, what can you infer? So this one is actually a multiple choice question.

I'm so sorry, guys. Uh... And we'll log in again as Dylan.

Limitations and Observations

Anyway, I think you get the idea. There are a number of other features here, such as finding evidence, which is one of my favorite ones, where students are expected to find evidence in the text, and the AI evaluates their ability to find that evidence.

So here we are at chapter nine again, and let's find a question that we haven't answered. We actually, the funniest side, like you have to be careful with these Google Cloud credits, because you don't realize it, and then you can find you had like a $10,000 day, which we had the other day.

I just don't have enough controls on, so probably that's why it's calling.

All right, so what can you infer from the author's statement? Nation state isn't perfect. And so I don't have time to read this through, but I am not sure how to answer this question.

It's going to tell me that thanks for your answer about your teacher. Sorry, because I think I put it on tutor mode. So when I do that, it won't answer any of the questions.

I can annotate for myself, as you can see. And that's a multiple choice question. Those are boring. Let's not answer those.

And we can go on to another chapter. So all right.

I didn't get to show you everything I wanted to show you today, but I think that's probably long enough for this demo. But what you see is that...

Future Developments

There is a full AI coaching mechanism inside the book. It's going to be available for anyone to try in about a couple of weeks. I hope you'll try our MIT Deep Reader.

We have a partnership with MIT Technology Review. And in that, we are using all of the articles, about 300 a month plus guest contributors. If anyone wants to be a contributor, let me know.

to teach children about robotics, artificial intelligence, climate change, biotech, using an AI reading coach.

So I'm just going to end before we go to questions with all the things that we're working on now that are coming out in the next six to eight weeks. That our study hall, our different halls that we're launching, and then we'll stop.

Nice little stock footage. I guess there's no point using real footage anymore, is there?

AI Reading and Writing Tools

So Dakota is our AI reading coach.

And you can see it's the same kind of UI we just did. That's an AI tool garden that we're launching for teachers. It's actually really straightforward.

A lot easier to launch than a deep reader. Our AI, by the way, is very safe. We actually have kind of a special commendation from Google for this.

So, we have lots of books besides The Coming Wave, by the way, Wonder, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, all the bestsellers, and news. And the classics, which I kind of underestimated the potential of the classics, but as my son said, I really wanted to read Shakespeare with an AI coach, because I can't stand Midsummer Night's Dream, so you can imagine. why that could be valuable for a 16-year-old boy.

Writing Hall, which we're working on right now, which is an AI writing coach that annotates the text very precisely in line and helps you with that.

And then you'll see Creator Hall, which is helping kids learn how to generate images.

Again, this is the power of reading and writing in one passage. We have both the reading and the writing.

Diverse Educational Opportunities

Exam hall, we have over 15 different question types.

So it's not all wall of text. There's quite a lot of really beautiful UI to kind of change it up. And we're constantly going to be adding different exam boards.

And then Creator Hall. So you can learn how to prompt AI. It's non-trivial to get that quality of image, by the way. Each one of these demos took me about half an hour just to get the quality, which we think is a valuable skill for kids to learn.

Conclusion

So that is Study Hall.