Episode Details
Back to EpisodesJoleen Liang: 40M+ kids educated by adaptive AI — #93
Description
Dr. Joleen Liang is Co-founder of Squirrel AI, which pioneered adaptive learning at scale, first in China and now in the US. By 2021 its technology had served over 60,000 public schools in 1,200 cities across Asia. Squirrel AI has implemented large knowledge graphs mapping out the main concepts in the K-12 math, science, and language curriculum. The Squirrel learning tablet actively observes student behavior (including eye-tracking during video lessons) and adapts its presentation and testing to individual learning patterns.
Chapter markers:
- (00:00) - Joleen Liang: Co-Founder of Squirrel AI
- (02:14) - Squirrel AI: Beginnings and scale
- (14:44) - AI vs Human Teachers
- (33:51) - Learning environment: tablet, headphones, human supervisors/analysts
- (51:11) - Challenges and Opportunities in the US Market
Music used with permission from Blade Runner Blues Livestream improvisation by State Azure.
–
Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus.ai, SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU. Please send any questions or suggestions to manifold1podcast@gmail.com or Steve on X @hsu_steve.
Announcing this for some friends at Mechanize - a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough in coding capabilities of frontier models.
Mechanize is hiring!
Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists.
For example:
Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors $500K salary
Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t yet solve $300K salary
Mechanize understands that my readership is highly selected. There is a VERY GOOD CHANCE you will be interviewed if you apply via the link above.