The top 6 people in artificial-intelligence edtech

As Quizlet's director of AI and machine learning, Cheng has spent the past four years trying to prove that machines can help humans learn new subjects by asking questions in novel ways. Cheng led the team that developed Quizlet's latest AI tutor, Q-Chat, which uses the Socratic method to help students master key concepts. According to Quizlet, over 3 million study sessions have used Q-Chat, which Quizlet built with OpenAI's tools. Cheng also led efforts to build Quizlet's "smart-grading" system, using predictive analysis to mark answers as correct without exact text matches if the underlying meaning was correct. More recently, she initiated a feature that instantly generates personalized study content when students plug in their notes.

Check out the full list of the top 100 people who make AI intelligent.

Khan made waves when he launched the tutoring web platform Khan Academy in 2008. Now he's embracing new technology again in the form of generative AI. Khan Academy launched its new AI teaching assistant, Khanmigo, earlier this year and plans to integrate the tool within Instructure, one of the largest classroom-management-software platforms in the world. Khanmigo can help guide students to correct answers over chats and provide technology-enhanced essay feedback, grading, lesson planning, and rubric creation for teachers. "If we put the right guardrails, we can mitigate the risks. But I think we're at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen," Khan said in his April 2023 TED Talk.

As CEO of the nonprofit Code.org, Partovi helped establish one of the premiere organizations for teaching young people computer science, including AI and machine learning. In May, Partovi teamed up with other leading education companies and organizations, such as Khan Academy, to launch TeachAI, a nationwide effort to help teachers better understand AI and support its use as a classroom-learning tool. Leading technology companies including Amazon, Microsoft, and the Google-backed Code.org, and it has raised $200 million in funding. Partovi's interest in nurturing tech talent runs in the family: His twin brother, Ali, runs the startup accelerator Neo, and both brothers are prolific angel investors.

Tegmark, a Swedish-American physicist who has studied everything from cosmology to machine learning, is primarily known for his scientific research and as the president of the Future of Life Institute, or FLI, a nonprofit that works to reduce risks that come with powerful transformative technologies. In March, the FLI under Tegmark's leadership published an open letter to pause all AI-research experiments more powerful than OpenAI's GPT-4 for six months to ensure that safety standards are implemented to protect humans against threats AI could pose. More than 30,000 people, including Elon Musk, Stability AI's Emad Mostaque, and Steve Wozniak, a cofounder of Apple, signed the letter.

Thomas is on a mission to make AI knowledge accessible and fair to everyone. The experienced researcher founded the Center for Applied Data Ethics at the University of San Francisco, where she studies the ethical issues of how machine learning centralizes power. She also cofounded Fast.ai with a fellow researcher, Jeremy Howard, with the goal of teaching people of any background who want to learn about AI the basics of neural networks and machine learning. The nonprofit offers free online classes and support materials for global learners in multiple languages.

At 22 years old, Tian, a Princeton senior at the time, made national news when he invented a tool to detect AI-generated text as part of his senior thesis project. Now Tian runs his startup, GPTZero, full time and has raised $3.5 million in venture-capital funding for creating an AI-detector tool. Next up, Tian and his CTO, Alex Cui, are expanding the scope of GPTZero beyond plagiarism detection to be a broader AI-detection utility. The idea, Tian previously told Insider, was to build detection technology and apply it "to as many industries that are being affected by AI as possible, including education, finance, journalism, cybersecurity, and everything beyond."