“I Know Kung Fu”— Kaplan’s Grok Uses Machine Learning for Learning
Another Possible Product Review, by TBD Insider.
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It’s still science fiction to learn Kung Fu in under a minute or “download” a pilot program for a V-212 Helicopter into your brain. But education leader, Kaplan is using something like the Matrix to deliver working knowledge and skills with remarkable speed, comprehension and retention.
Sadly, Kung Fu is not yet part of the library.
We’ve been consuming classes from Coursera and Udemy for years over virtual realty gear, but so far the delivery has been only incrementally better than sitting in a classroom. A few more floating, interactive graphs and a professor that seems like she’s in the room. But by and large, the last mile of our limited brains has kept the pace of learning to what feels like glacial time.
I’ve always wanted to get my math skills up to a level where I could follow mathematical notation on topics such as game theory, economics or physics and understand it. So when Kaplan invited me to try its new system, codenamed Grok, I jumped at the chance.
The Grok environment is unlike any other education space I’ve been in. Just a dark VR room and a voice asking me what I want to learn. I say Math. It asks me to show it examples of what I mean. I pull up a VR browser and surf to various texts on mathy subjects. Then it goes to work backsolving what one needs to know to fully grok the content.
Then something unexpected happens. Grok presents me with a few basic arithmetic problems, and it’s clearly checking how fast and accurately I answer. But almost immediately, it switches — before I tire of basic 7th grade math — and shows an array of pictures, colors, sounds, all in a kind of game where I have to sense and respond.
Kaplan explains that what Grok does is build an understanding of what you know and how you learn very quickly, and then it tailors your total-immersion learning experience.
Here’s where things get weird…and wonderful. It’s one thing to get drilled on math concepts like the natural log, sin and cosine, and integrals; but the Grok experience is like learning math while listening to Pink Floyd on LSD. For me, Grok figures out somehow that I learn best with rhythm. So where it decides I don’t know a subject well enough, instruction comes with a distinct rhythmic quality. And I have to say, I’m amazed to discover that I’m remembering and using new concepts so well that I breeze the periodic questions to check my comprehension.
One of Kaplan’s big themes is the notion of being able to use knowledge outside of the context in which you learned it. For example, if I say that A=B, and B squared is 4, most people would say that A must = 2. But if I say, “what is negative 2 squared,” most people would say 4. Hence the correct answer was that A must be 2 or -2. That’s a bit of grade-school math one forgets out of context.
Grok is big on context, and the VR games it constructs and makes me play are all about laying down deep and wide neural connections to the subject matter — in a way that I can recall and use in any context. It’s amazing.
After a week of Groking for 1 hour a day, I chose a book on quantum computing and tried to follow the extensive math. At this level, math is really a language, and following it requires language-like skill.
I got through the first two chapters amazingly without a hitch. I knew what I was looking at and even had formulated some interesting questions. But it didn’t take long for me to get stuck. So back to Grok I went with the book, and a week later, I read that book cover to cover with reasonable comprehension.
Am I now a Kung Fu master of advanced mathematics? Far from it. But can I read, comprehend and formulate not-stupid questions about what great mathematicians write? Yes — I Grok Kung Fu.
This story is fiction, based on our fevered imagination of products and services that could be delivered to market based on current and emerging know-how — given sufficient resource and intent. Any resemblance to real products, either released or planned, is coincidental.
