Ever since the release of ChatGPT less than two years ago, it seems as if everyone wants to build their own AI system. Including schools and educational organizations.

How hard could it be?

In the education space for example, there’s Sal Kahn, who made a big splash with his video tutorials almost twenty years ago and now is building an AI tutorial chatbot. Although there’s a big question of whether machines should be tutoring kids at all.

Then there’s ISTE. At its big conference in 2023, the CEO of the organization presented the rollout of Stretch AI, the “first AI coach specifically for educators”. Still in beta.

But announcing an AI project, and throwing lots of money at it, is hardly a guarantee of success.

Just ask Los Angeles Public Schools where administrators held a high-profile launch for their $6 million AI chatbot named Ed this past March. Only to find out three months later that the developers of the system were on the verge of collapse, making the future of Ed very questionable.

However, some AI experts viewed this project as a disaster waiting to happen.

But Amanda Bickerstaff, founder and CEO of AI for Education, a consulting and training firm, said that was an overreach.

“What they were trying to do is really not possible with where the technology is today,” she said. ”It’s a very broad application [with] multiple users — teachers, students, leaders and family members — and it pulled in data from multiple systems.”

She noted that even a mega-corporation like McDonald’s had to trim its AI sails. The fast-food giant recently admitted that a small experiment using a chatbot to power drive-thru windows had resulted in a few fraught customer interactions, such as one in which a woman angrily tried to persuade the bot that she wanted a caramel ice cream as it added multiple stacks of butter to her order.

If McDonald’s, worth an estimated $178.6 billion, can’t get 100 drive-thrus to take lunch orders with generative AI, she said, the tech isn’t “where we need it to be.”

I’d be willing to bet that McDonald’s put more than $6 million into their project and didn’t rely on a startup with big promises.

The bottom-line lesson that other school districts shouldn’t have to pay LA-level money to learn is that the development of general purpose AI systems, ones that are appropriate for use in the process of teaching and learning, is very much in the early stages.

Expecting to produce a working product in a relatively short time for what amounts to pocket change in the AI business, should get some people fired. 

The photo to accompany this post has nothing to do with the subject. Just a nice orchid from the Smithsonian greenhouses. Enjoy.