Speaker 1: Joining me now, Sebastian Thrun, Chairman and Co-Founder of Udacity, and Sal Khan, CEO of the Khan Academy. Welcome to you both. I'll just pick up on exactly what Sharon and I were discussing, Sebastian. Providing skills is one thing, and helping people be sound communicators, rhetoric missions, she said, without being able to say it. How do you provide those skills for

Speaker 2: long-term success in the workplace? It's very much doable. The skill set is shifting a lot with advent of artificial intelligence and so on. But with online training tools, similar to what Sal Khan will talk about and has developed very successfully, and we at Udacity, we have reached millions of people, millions of enrollees, and given them basic skills, not just on software engineering and data science, but also leadership.

Speaker 1: Do you worry, Sebastian, that here comes chat GPT, and I, Kelly, with none of this knowledge, could say to it, hey, create me a website that can write a newsletter and answer reader queries, that it can do that without needing the people in the back office that would have

Speaker 2: formerly required? I'm incredibly excited. Every time society manages to do something in a day that used to take a year, we are better off because we become more productive. We can help more people. Just imagine what it would take to build, say, Google from scratch today. It took 25 years to build it. Tomorrow, you might be able to build in a month. How amazing would it be for

Speaker 1: us as a society if you could innovate that fast? And, Sal, we've spoken about this already. It's good to have you back. So maybe piggyback on what Sebastian is saying, and do you think education or kind of training will continue to evolve, or is it already at the point at which it can equip people in a very efficient way for successful careers? Well, I think it's got to evolve, and it will

Speaker 3: evolve. And this case study that you all just showed is a great example of that. And I love that it shows how employers have a lot more power than they might realize in deciding how all of these things evolve. Traditional higher education, obviously, it's going to work for many folks, but it's very expensive. It's inaccessible. And you could argue that there's often a mismatch between what is taught, what is learned, and then what's actually useful for the job market. And so I think it's things like this, especially if they become more mainstream, especially if they become more portable, where you could take a degree from, say, this program and then go to graduate school or go to med school or whatever. I think this is the way we're going to go. And we're also going to see a lot more blending of high school experiences and college experiences becoming very mainstream to get significant college credit while you're in high school,

Speaker 1: usually for very low cost. You know, I've heard that from people whose kids are just starting, and they say, you know what, technically, she could almost be a sophomore walking in. Sebastian, what is that blended model going to look like? Listen, the pandemic literally showed us that we can all learn high school online. We can learn what you already offer online. So at some point, it does feel like we have all these outdated terms for a fundamentally similar product that gives us access to an incredible breadth of programming.

Speaker 2: I mean, I think Sal is very correct. It has to evolve rapidly. ChatGPT, if you haven't played with it, and DALI and so on, can basically do every homework assignment for any high schooler at this point. So we have to ask the question, are we teaching the right stuff at high school going forward? Because maybe the skill set is wrong. And that evolution will really fuel the world of education and learning. And it's not just high school and college. It's in my books, it's lifelong learning. It's people of my age who still have to learn new skills to stay current. That is going to happen. I think in the future, people will speed home and maybe half a day a week, a quarter of a day a week, train themselves, something new,

Speaker 1: something interesting to stay on top of things. Sure. No, listen, we love doing that as well. Sal, give me sort of a glimpse into business model evolution and maybe even investment ideas that might result from everything that you guys are saying.

Speaker 3: Well, I think the big thing, as Sebastian just mentioned, old homework is getting very dated very fast. But what I think is exciting is these introduce the idea for whole new modalities. It's not too far off where every student is going to have access to an artificial intelligence tutor. It's not far off where it's not going to write the essay for you, but it'll write the essay with you. You can get immediate feedback on what you write. That will make you a better writer. And to the question about these large language models or AIs being able to code for you or write for you, we all know that the real talent is how you put the pieces together, how you actually solve real problems. I remember when I was coming out of college in the late 90s, everyone was, and with a CS degree, everyone was saying, oh, I don't know, those jobs are going to get outsourced to India. Well, 20 years later, some of them did, but the high-level job stayed here and engineers are getting paid more than ever. And I think you're going to see that the people who can keep abstracting themselves and use the tools well, like Sebastian's describing, are going to be very marketable for a very long time to come.

Speaker 1: What would you add to that, Sebastian, especially for those thinking through the investment implications?

Speaker 2: The other thing that's really happening right now, it's going global. It's really that we are democratizing access. Udacity has a very strong relationship with the Middle East. In Egypt, we just created over 70,000 people, and many of them became freelancers. And they bring to the country more than $100 million of hard currency every year, just based on education that wasn't available in Egypt before. It's really a move to give every person on the planet, every age, every ethnicity, every geography, a seat on the table. And that's happening right now at this moment. It's super exciting.

Speaker 1: All right, we'll leave it there. Gentlemen, thank you both for your time. Really appreciate it.