Magic School, Inc.

So on three planes.

One, in education, especially K-12, I think that they should stop trying to find a new model like magic school or school ai i'm sorry to all those platforms but teachers already have enough stuff to worry about and that crap pivots too much go to google if that's where you are in google classroom figure out how to use the ai there if whatever your whatever your legacy software is just figure out how to use the ai that's in there don't go shopping For the small to medium-sized business, I think you have two choices.

And I hate to say this to small to medium-sized businesses, and I would not go to a big enterprise third-party software, but there are a lot of smaller businesses that have kind of made this their thing.

There's a business called SMU AI that we work with, right, that have built this router that can do that for your company.

Yeah, because funny enough, some of the leaders in those spaces in third-party software like Khan Academy and Khanmigo, now Sal Khan came back about eight months ago and was like, oh, yeah, the way we were doing it, it's not working.

We're going to have to pivot and do something else.

And Magic School has had layoffs.

I don't know what their issues are, but you have these developer-type problems.

Let's take a break.

And when we come back, let's talk AI and Seattle schools.

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How is AI being used in Seattle schools this year? Slides from a recent SPS teacher training have circulated online that lay out a policy called Seattle AI Literacy, or SAIL, that suggests AI integration is fully underway, which has created a bit of a preemptive backlash among some parents.

Now, I know that LA has banned access to all AI and New York City has restricted it to high school and up and called for a one-year moratorium in AI use in schools.

It was sort of like one of the main inspirations for starting Solo Founders program.

It was a company called Magic School.

And the founder at Deal, he was a former high school principal.

And he wanted to get teachers to use ChatGPT.

It was the interface.

And that when you had this sort of, black box this sort of empty sort of chat window it was really intimidating because it could both do anything but by the ability to do anything it could also kind of feel like it couldn't do anything at all you'd have to really sort of like go through this um this cognitive friction of trying to figure out like what am i going to put what i'm going to prompt right um I do think that in a lot of ways what people tend to do with the sort of AI solutions is they tend to move towards something that's like kind of an open-ended sort of thing like ChatGPT or CloudBot, something like that.

But what Adeel did, maybe this is useful for you, maybe not, is he essentially was like, no, no, people like... tools that do things they like buttons they like um they like something that's not like completely open-ended because that's what they're used to so he built what i would describe as like micro apps or applets um inside of magic school which is essentially there's now i don't know probably a hundred of these tools in magic school uh but when he started out i think there were three or four maybe five and And the idea was each tool had a very specific purpose.

Now, somebody who's critical and trying to poke holes would say, oh, they're just like these little wrappers on top of GPT, right? But the reality was that the little wrappers were the difference between somebody not using chat GPT and somebody becoming, you know, hourly active user or whatever of magic school.

Thank you to all the teachers for doing what you do every day.

Colleen, there has been a buzz all summer about the Pope's new encyclical on AI, and I'm wondering if you've read it.

So, you know, the Pope is like from my neighborhood, right?

Yeah.

On the front side.

Okay.

So I'm curious then, like lesson planning, using AI for a teacher lesson plan.

What do you know about this? And you're truly teaching me because I'm so nerdy.

And it works really well.

I find you can do it with ChatGPT, but I find I like the platform Magic School for that particular task.

So that's the first thing that I'm doing to have authentic materials in my class.

And the second one that I really liked, and it's quite surprising, actually, it's Suno.