This AI tutor could make humans 10 times smarter, its creator says

There is only one primary school in Baziyan Village, in the Badong District of China's Hubei Province. Like many places outside of the country’s biggest cities, Baishaping Primary can struggle to find quality teachers.

But students and staff at the school are receiving help from a surprising source.

The children there have been taking lessons from an AI tutor – an experience that is becoming ever-more common for learners across the country.

While China has come a long way in narrowing gaps in education, disparities still exist, such as an imbalance between quality educational resources in urban and rural areas. This can leave students in some places lacking high-quality education.

At Baishaping Primary, many pupils were struggling to make progress in subjects including maths and literacy. So the school’s teaching staff was bolstered with a new educational AI platform.

To identify gaps in their knowledge, students were tested with an AI-based adaptive learning system from educational technology company Squirrel Ai Learning, which then created personalized lessons comprising the most suitable learning materials for each student.

Unlike large language model-based tools such as ChatGPT, which can explain a topic or even write an essay, Squirrel Ai’s system is what it calls a large adaptive model (LAM). This combines adaptive AI – which learns and adapts to new data – with education-specific multimodal models, which can process a wide range of inputs including text, images and video.

For Squirrel Ai, these inputs include data from more than 24 million students and 10 billion learning behaviours, as well as “wisdom from the very best teachers from all over the world”, according to founder Derek Haoyang Li, who spoke to the World Economic Forum at the Annual Meeting of the New Champions in June 2024.

The company works with teachers for every course it offers to break down subjects into thousands of “knowledge points”, in order to spot gaps in students’ understanding as accurately as possible.

“We use an AI algorithm to imitate the best teacher in the world,” Li explains. “Like Da Vinci plus Einstein together, to give every student in this world equal education, to have personal tutoring.

“I think education could be dramatically changed by AI,” he continues. “The human brain could be 10 times smarter.”

After just a month of using the system, Baishaping Primary School was seeing significant improvement in its students’ grades, engagement and confidence.

“We find their own learning pace, and give them the right material and the right coaching,” Li says of students who use the platform. “And they can understand that, ‘Wow, I can learn and I can learn so easily’.”

It’s not just Baishaping students using Squirrel Ai’s system. Launched just a decade ago, the company has over 2,000 learning centres in 1,500 cities and countries, with more than 24 million registered students. It has also provided 10 million free accounts to some of China’s poorest families.

The learning data from all of these students helps train the algorithm, but these centres also help the company reach more people in a country where most children do not have access to laptops and high-speed internet.

Squirrel Ai’s growth is indicative of a wider boom of AI education in China and around the world. According to some estimates, the country is leading the way in the billions of dollars being invested in the sector.

Globally, annual spending on AI and virtual reality in education is predicted to soar from $1.8 billion in 2018 to $12.6 billion by 2025.

There is an opportunity for AI and other emerging technologies to help address widening global gaps in education, according to the Forum report Shaping the Future of Learning: The Role of AI in Education 4.0.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimates that an additional 44 million teachers will be needed by 2030 to fulfil targets set out by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 4, which aims to ensure inclusive and equitable education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.

This teacher gap is affecting both developed and developing economies, but is particularly acute in sub-Saharan Africa.

Alongside, 250 million children are not in school, and AI tutors could help generate learning materials tailored to specific needs and capabilities wherever students are in the world.

The Forum report continues that AI could support those already in the teaching workforce and ensure teaching emerges as a “future-ready” profession. Technology will never replace human teachers, it says. But “AI and other emerging technologies can immediately address some of this gap”.

As Squirrel Ai’s Li predicts: “In the future, the teacher will be like a pilot. They should know how to use AI to take more people to a better place.”