What was the timeline of AI in education in 2023? The year 2023 started with school districts scrambling to respond to a newly launched free app called ChatGPT and ended with more than 40 school districts and 28,000 students and teachers piloting Khan Academy’s AI-powered tutor and teaching assistant, Khanmigo, in the classroom. AI and large language models dominated headlines throughout the year, and knowledge of generative AI became even more mainstream. Take a look at a timeline of AI in education and explore the top moments in 2023, including the number of times Khan Academy made headlines with our AI-powered tutor and teaching assistant, Khanmigo.
2023 Timeline of AI in Education
Jump to a specific month in the timeline of AI in education moments: January | February | March | April | May | June | July | August | September | October | November | December
January 2023
NYC education department banned ChatGPT on education department devices and internet networks. Districts and schools across the country grappled with how to respond to generative AI.
The Khan Academy team was working furiously to make Khanmigo the best possible AI-powered tutor and teaching assistant. Our Chief Learning Officer, Kristen DiCerbo, described our process in this Linkedin post.
“In September 2022, I didn’t know the term ‘prompt engineering’ but I wrote to our contacts at OpenAI that it needed ‘the right instructions’ to act like a tutor. We quickly learned how to write (‘engineer’) the instructions (‘prompts’) to the model to get it to ask questions. Even with those instructions, it really defaulted to answering questions…But we got better at prompt engineering. And we got new versions of the model, and they got better at following our instructions…I went back to two of the real experts in the field and read papers by Micki Chi and Art Graesser. Their work analyzing the moves of human tutors and this paper that summarizes the AutoTutor work over 17 years were foundational. We thought a lot about the back-and-forth between the tutor and the student, creating over 100 examples of the kinds of interactions we wanted.”
February 2023
ChatGPT was estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users in late January, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. In February, OpenAI announced a monthly premium subscription.
Google launched AI chatbot Bard, Meta unveiled LLaMA, Microsoft integrated GPT into their Bing search engine, and Snapchat launched My AI.
March 2023
OpenAI released a new model, GPT-4, and as a launch partner, Khan Academy had early access to the model.
On March 14, Khan Academy released our new AI-powered tutor and teaching assistant, Khanmigo, in a limited pilot period. Founder and CEO Sal Khan spoke to NBC News about our pilot.
Khan Academy released a free course entitled AI for education, which featured practical tips and strategies for using generative AI to create engaging learning experiences and improve learning outcomes.
April 2023
Educators embraced AI in the classroom. Instead of running away from AI and banning it in schools, the administrators and teachers who tested Khanmigo were excited about the possibilities and understood its benefits. “Hopefully we are showing how positive this can be,” said Sal Khan in a Washington Post interview. “Most people see the power here; they just want reasonable guardrails.”
U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Raimondo convened a task force to be competitive on the technologies that would become key to economic and national security over the coming decades. Sal Khan and six other individuals would serve on the U.S. Section of the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council (TTC) Talent for Growth Task Force.
Sal Khan delivered a TED Talk at TED 2023 in Vancouver on how AI can save (not destroy) education. “We’re at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen,” he said in his talk. TED announced that Sal Khan’s talk was one of the top 10 most popular in 2023.
May 2023
In May, the U.S. Department of Education released a report on artificial intelligence highlighting opportunities and possible risks of using AI to improve teaching and learning.
UNESCO brought together 40 education ministers from around the world to create a coordinated response to generative AI tools and to share policy approaches and plans on how best to integrate these tools into education.
Several school districts piloted Khanmigo with students and educators during the last few months of the 2022-23 school year. “It has been a game changer,” said a high school teacher at a partner district in Hobart, Indiana. “I’ve been able to differentiate in ways I haven’t been able to before.” A reporter from the New York Times witnessed Khan Academy’s AI-powered tutor in action at Khan Lab School and wrote that “automated study aides could usher in a profound shift in classroom teaching and learning.”
June 2023
At one of the year’s biggest education technology conferences, 40 sessions, posters and presentations focused on AI in the classroom. Education leaders, teachers, coaches, and more shared everything from tips on using AI creatively in the classroom to how to make art, poetry, and music with AI. The Khan Academy team attended the conference and had a booth where educators were able to interact with live demos of Khanmigo.
Sal Khan met with President Biden and a group of AI experts on June 20 to discuss artificial intelligence’s benefits and risks. Sal shared how AI can benefit education by providing a tutor for every student and an assistant for every teacher.
Khan Academy reduced the price of Khanmigo and removed the waitlist. Thousands of parents, teachers, and adult learners signed up for access to the AI-powered tutor and teaching assistant.
July 2023
President Biden announced that seven leading AI companies had voluntarily committed to managing the risks posed by AI. Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI committed to working with the White House to move toward the safe, secure, and transparent development of AI technology.
Indiana Secretary of Education Katie Jenner announced Indiana’s AI-Powered Platform Pilot Grant to help schools and districts explore opportunities for AI to help support students and teachers. Indiana school districts were invited to apply for grants, and more than $2 million was awarded to 36 recipients (a total of 112 schools). These grants made it possible for more than 45,000 students statewide to interact with an AI-powered platform during the remainder of the 2023-2024 school year.
Thousands of educators attended Khan Academy’s webinar about how to use AI in the classroom. Alongside a group of other educators, Kristen DiCerbo, Khan Academy’s Chief Academic Officer, presented a webinar to teachers that answered questions about using AI to design lesson plans, integrating AI into the classroom routine, and using AI to save time.
August 2023
Khan Academy collaborated with Code.org, ETS, and ISTE to bring an AI 101 course to teachers, a free professional learning series that instructs every teacher on how to use AI safely and ethically in their classrooms.
Bill Gates interviewed Sal Khan on the Unconfuse Me with Bill Gates podcast to discuss how AI can help close the education gap. “I’ve been a fan and supporter of Sal Khan’s work for a long time and recently had him on my podcast to talk about education and AI,” Gates said on Linkedin. “For decades, I’ve been excited about all the ways that software would make teachers’ jobs easier and help students learn. These changes are finally starting to happen in a dramatic way. The current state of the art is Khanmigo, a text-based bot created by Khan Academy.”
IBM released a survey about the massive need to reskill the workforce. More than half of the 3,000 executives surveyed estimated that 40% of their workforce would need to be reskilled as their businesses implemented AI and automation over the next three years. Millions of workers raced to acquire new AI-related skills.
September 2023
Gallup released a survey citing fears among 22% of American workers that technology would make their jobs obsolete in the near future. The fear of tech grew more in the past two years than at any time since Gallup started measuring the trend in 2017. Other job concerns remained stable.
October 2023
Business Insider released its AI 100 list, which included people who were not only pushing the boundaries of the field but who were also trying to ensure that AI developed steadily and responsibly. Sal Khan was included on the list for launching Khanmigo and “embracing new technology again in the form of generative AI.”
Khan Academy announced free new courses in digital literacy. The courses were designed to help learners stay informed and learn digital literacy skills as they navigated the digital world. The courses included those on AI, internet safety, and social media literacy.
TeachAI released the AI Guidance for Schools Toolkit geared toward school district administrators, state education officials, and global education leaders. The toolkit provided useful guidance for setting policies and spotlighted examples of exemplary practices.
November 2023
Khan Academy further reduced the price of Khanmigo thanks to significant engineering strides that reduced the high computational costs of AI. As a nonprofit, Khan Academ’y’s goal has always been to ensure that cutting-edge AI educational tools like Khanmigo were not a luxury but instead a resource available to all. For $4/month or $44/year, parents, educators, and adult learners can enjoy unlimited access to Khanmigo. Khan Academy also reduced the district price from $60 per student/per year to $35 per student/per year. During this school year, more than 40 school districts and 28,000 students and teachers are piloting Khanmigo in the classroom. Learn more about our district Khanmigo offerings.
Common Sense Media launched inaugural AI product ratings so parents could better understand how AI works and find out which tools were the most trustworthy. Khanmigo received an overall 4-star rating from Common Sense Media, making it one of their top-rated AI-for-education tools, above others like ChatGPT and Bard.
Good Morning America showcased how Khanmigo is transforming the classroom experience and bridging the tutoring gap. The segment took viewers inside First Avenue Elementary School in Newark, New Jersey, to show Khanmigo in action.
Only two states—California and Oregon—have issued policy guidance for schools on AI platforms, according to a report by The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE). Eleven other states are developing guidance: Arizona, Connecticut, Maine, Mississippi, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Vermont, and Washington.
December 2023
A research study by Stanford University found that AI tools have not boosted the overall cheating rates in high schools in the U.S., despite the widespread fears in the beginning of the year as school administrators and educators grappled with the popularization of AI-powered chatbots.
Fortune hosted an AI conference to examine new business cases for AI with C-suite executives, leading academics, and prominent policymakers. Sal Khan spoke to the audience about why Khan Academy decided not to run away from AI but, instead, vowed to be the trusted brand that puts the right guardrails in place.
“In hindsight, it was a blessing that ChatGPT launched when it did,” Sal Khan said at the Fortune conference. “Because it allowed everyone to process a very imperfect tool and, frankly, by about March 2023, they started saying, ‘If only someone we could trust would put the right guardrails around this, so it avoids cheating, makes it transparent, helps solve the bias.’ Then we’re like, ‘Here you go.’”
Bill Gates hails AI education tools in year-end letter — calls Khanmigo ‘mind blowing.’ In his annual end-of-year letter, Bill Gates praised Khanmigo and other advancements in AI-powered education. In his own words he calls Khanmigo and other AI learning tools “mind-blowing because they are tailored to each individual learner.” Gates emphasized how Khanmigo is “already remarkable” and shared he has confidence Khanmigo and similar platforms will only get better in the years to come.
What will the timeline of AI in 2024 look like?
We hope you enjoyed this look back of the top moments from 2023. Looking ahead, it’s likely that the timeline of AI in education has only just begun. The year 2023 has been a pivotal chapter, showcasing how AI can enhance learning and teaching. The journey along the AI timeline is just beginning, holding immense promise for the future of education.
Stephanie Yamkovenko
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