Live from DevDay — the OpenAI Podcast Ep. 7

1. AMAndrew Mayne0:00

   [upbeat music] Welcome to the OpenAI Podcast, where we're live from OpenAI DevDay. Here sitting with me from SchoolAI is Caleb Hicks. Caleb, hello.

2. SPSpeaker0:19

   Hi, thanks for having me. This will be fun.

3. AMAndrew Mayne0:21

   So, Caleb, you're working on tools for helping educators and helping people, uh, basically in the classroom understand progress of students?

4. SPSpeaker0:28

   That's right, yeah.

5. AMAndrew Mayne0:30

   So first off, what was your reaction so far to DevDay?

6. SPSpeaker0:33

   Uh, a ton of fun, I think makes it... Uh, a, a, a lot of things to be excited about that help us build, but also help students and teachers be more creative as well, so that'll be fun.

7. AMAndrew Mayne0:43

   So what have you been working on over the last year? What has changed with AI that's accelerated what you've been doing?

8. SPSpeaker0:49

   Ooh, um, I think probably the biggest advancement over the last year for us- so we, we, uh, put AI in students' hands. That's the main, uh, the main thing that we focus on, is safe, managed, uh, AI that can act as kind of one-time personal tutors for students.

9. AMAndrew Mayne1:06

   Mm-hmm.

10. SPSpeaker1:06

    And so probably the biggest change from OpenAI has been model progression.

11. AMAndrew Mayne1:12

    Hmm.

12. SPSpeaker1:12

    I think we get two advantages from that. One is, uh, significant leaps in intelligence.

13. AMAndrew Mayne1:18

    Mm-hmm.

14. SPSpeaker1:19

    Uh, and the other one is, uh, you know, improvements in cost. Because we are working with, uh, an industry that isn't known for paying big dollars for software, uh, it's been important for us to be able to manage students using this in a cost-effective way. So those have been the two areas that AI progression has helped. From our work, it has been a lot of, uh, orchestration, which I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit.

15. AMAndrew Mayne1:43

    Mm-hmm.

16. SPSpeaker1:43

    Just, just getting different AI agents and models to work together, uh, for the best outputs for students in particular.

17. AMAndrew Mayne1:52

    So a couple of the releases we saw today, one was the Agents SDK.

18. SPSpeaker1:56

    Yeah.

19. AMAndrew Mayne1:56

    Now, and you've talked about that. How much have, one, tools changed the ability of, one, to work faster, and, two, the scope of what you find is capable now?

20. SPSpeaker2:06

    Yeah, I think we're seeing teams across industries work way faster-

21. AMAndrew Mayne2:11

    Mm

22. SPSpeaker2:11

    ... and building better software because they've got kind of this always on expert, hyper-senior, uh, engineer next to them that they're pair programming with, right? And, uh, so we see that with our teams as well, and that just allows us to, to build better software faster, uh, and get it in the hands of teachers and students, which is what we're here to do.

23. AMAndrew Mayne2:35

    What has been the biggest shift you've seen in talking to educators or people like that in regards to AI in general?

24. SPSpeaker2:42

    Yeah, great question. So every teacher, school, and district is on a very similar journey. It starts with permission, right?

25. AMAndrew Mayne2:48

    Mm-hmm.

26. SPSpeaker2:48

    Two-and-a-half years ago, it was everyone under the sun was just banning AI altogether.

27. AMAndrew Mayne2:54

    Right.

28. SPSpeaker2:54

    Uh, we've, we've moved past that into productivity-

29. AMAndrew Mayne2:57

    Mm

30. SPSpeaker2:57

    ... as teachers and, and school leaders realizing, "Hey, this helps me in my job."

Episode duration: 1:01:14