How is Google engaging with AI and education?

This season Libby Hills from the Jacobs Foundation and AI researcher Owen Henkel continue to speak with leading researchers, practitioners and educators on the Ed-Technical podcast series about the cutting edge of AI in education. They will break down complex AI concepts into non-technical insights to better understand what the research says and help educators sift the useful insights from the AI hype. 

This episode is the first of a three part mini-series with Google. There is a lot of interest in how big tech companies are engaging in AI and education and what their future plans are – in this mini-series, hear the latest directly from Google. 

The genesis of this mini-series was a short Ed-Technical episode from earlier this year. Libby and Owen discussed a paper Google released about the work they had done to fine-tune a LLM called LearnLM to make it more useful for education. This work was motivated by a realisation that some of the core behaviours of LLMs (helpfulness, sycophancy) aren’t aligned with what’s valuable from a learning perspective, and prompting can only go so far. 

This first episode focuses on how Google is integrating LearnLM’s capabilities into existing Google products like YouTube and new products like LearnAbout. The next episode in the mini-series will focus on LLMs and tutoring, and the final episode will be a more technical episode on the development of LearnLM. 

Libby and Owen had a chance to talk to a number of folks across a range of teams, including LearnX, Google Research and DeepMind so we capture a range of different perspectives. There was too much great content to squeeze into three episodes but all full interviews will be up on the Ed-Technical YouTube channel. 

This episode includes excerpts from interviews with four members of the team.

Rob Wong is the Product Lead for LearnX, a team within Google that builds learning features on Search, YouTube, and Gemini chat, and also works on LearnLM in partnership with Google Research and Google DeepMind. Rob joined Google five years ago, spending his first few years in Google Research at the intersection of AI and learning, and the last few at LearnX. Before Google, he spent over a decade at startups (Hulu, Sidecar, Udemy, and Opendoor) and before that spent time in management consulting, PE/VC investing, and corporate strategy. 

Julia Wilkowski leads a pedagogy team at Google. Her team collaborates with Google product teams to apply learning science principles and teaching best practices. She also works on LearnLM, helping infuse pedagogy into Google AI model infrastructure to power learning journeys across Google products, including Search, YouTube, and Classroom. In previous roles, she designed and delivered learning experiences for audiences including Google engineers, fiber optic installers, members of the general public, and Google sales people globally. Prior to Google, she designed and delivered learning solutions for astronauts, K12 educators, and sixth graders. Every day she strives to blend the effectiveness of hands-on science lessons with the impact of scaled learning experiences.

Markus Kunesch is a Staff Research Engineer at Google DeepMind and tech lead of the AI for Education research programme. His work is focused on generative AI, AI for education, and AI ethics, with a particular interest in translating social science research into new evaluations and modeling approaches. Before embarking on AI research, Markus completed a PhD in black hole physics. 

Angie Mac McAllister, PhD is a Group Product Manager at Google with a vision: to make a personal AI tutor available to everyone. Focused on developing learning features for Gemini, Mac combines 35 years of experience in education with cutting-edge AI to help students become better learners. Mac’s PhD in Educational Leadership informs the work, ensuring that these powerful technologies are grounded in learning science and accessible to all.

Links

Google’s technical report on LearnLM
Ed-Technical short episode on Google’s LearnLM paper 
Article about Learn About, Google’s experimental new AI tool