Younes Mourri is the CEO and Founder of Livetech.ai, a course platform that offers low-cost high quality instructor-led courses in high-demand technical subjects. Younes is the co-creator many of the most popular artificial intelligence MOOCs, including Andrew Ng’s Artifical Intelligence class and Deeplearning.ai’s Natural Language Processing specialization.
Younes holds a Master’s and Ph.D in Artificial Intelligence from MIT and a Master’s in Statistics from Stanford, where he has taught Deep Learning and Applied Machine Learning.
Resources:
The Batch (weekly newsletter) from Deeplearning.ai
Kian Katanforoosh, founder of Workera
Andrew Ng, Co-founder of Coursera and Deeplearning.ai
Younes Mourri is the CEO and Founder of Livetech.ai, a course platform that offers low-cost high quality instructor-led courses in high-demand technical subjects. Younes is the co-creator many of the most popular artificial intelligence MOOCs, including Andrew Ng’s Artifical Intelligence class and Deeplearning.ai’s Natural Language Processing specialization.
Younes holds a Master’s and Ph.D in Artificial Intelligence from MIT and a Master’s in Statistics from Stanford, where he has taught Deep Learning and Applied Machine Learning.
Resources:
The Batch (weekly newsletter) from Deeplearning.ai
Kian Katanforoosh, founder of Workera
Andrew Ng, Co-founder of Coursera and Deeplearning.ai
Welcome to Season Two of edtech insiders, where we talk to the most interesting thought leaders, founders, entrepreneurs, educators and investors driving the future of education technology. I'm your host, Alex Sarlin, an edtech veteran with over 10 years of experience at top tech companies. Younes Mourri is the CEO and founder of Live tech.ai, a course platform that offers low cost high quality instructor led courses in high demand technical subjects. Younes is the CO creator of many of the most popular artificial intelligence MOOCs in the world, including Andrew Yang's artificial intelligence class from Stanford, and deep learning.ai is natural language processing specialization among others. Younes holds a Master's and PhD in artificial intelligence from MIT, and a master's in statistics from Stanford, where he has also taught deep learning and applied machine learning. Younes Mourri, Welcome to EdTech insiders.
Younes Mourri:Nice to be here. Thanks, Alex.
Alexander Sarlin:It's so great to have you. You're doing such interesting work. And you have such an incredibly deep background in education. I want to start by just asking you in a few sentences, you know, what brought you into education technology, your background is in AI, you know so much about artificial intelligence and machine learning and data science. How did you get into edtech?
Younes Mourri:Thank you. Yeah, this is a very good question. So a little bit about my background, I was born and raised in Morocco. And I grew up in, you know, a different country from the US. And over there, we do not have a lot of resources, or as many resources as you could find here in the US. So for me, education was always important, and allowing learners to have access to very high quality education was critical, especially that I came to Stanford later on, and realize, you know, the opportunity I had, and I wanted to give back at some points to the community, and especially to developing countries like Morocco, where I grew up. So that type of background growing up in a third world country pushed me to work hard in the field of education, and to just try to give back, especially after I ended up here,
Alexander Sarlin:and you know, people probably don't know a lot about this, but you have been sort of the secret sauce, behind the scenes in so many of these massive Coursera courses on artificial intelligence and deep learning. Give her listeners just a little overview of your relationship to Andrew Yang, and deep learning and Coursera.
Younes Mourri:Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I'm, first of all, I'm very grateful. And I feel like I was very lucky to be part of the team that helped build those courses. And, you know, sometimes in life, it's just a lot's of luck. Sometimes you're just walking, literally, I was walking, get the gym, running. And then suddenly, I met this person who was working on building a course, he was like, Do you want me to make an intro, he made the intro, I ended up building the first course then the second course then by the end, like 10 courses. So it is just like, absolute coincidence that I ended up, you know, building these big courses with deep learning without AI and this Coursera and also how I ended up teaching it at Stanford. So, but yeah, I mean, like, I love the experience, I always love creating new courses, I enjoy teaching. And for me, I don't see that as work, I see it as a passion. So every day I wake up, and I'm just super excited to, you know, take difficult concepts and break them down into little bits that could be explained on a, you know, at a massive scale. So, yeah, I mean, I'm, yeah, it's it was exciting. And I'm always excited when it comes to teaching, and especially on campus at Stanford, or at Coursera, on deep learning about AI. Yeah, and
Alexander Sarlin:you know, you're seeing a massive scale, but it is a truly massive scale. Those deep learning AI courses are have millions of students in every country in the world, they're sort of have redefined what online learning really means, especially for the fields of AI, deep learning, machine learning. So you've been sort of core to that revolution. And now you're taking some of what you've learned from all of that work with Coursera with deep learning, and turning it into a startup, which is live tech AI, just launched a few weeks ago. tell our listeners what live tech AI is all about.
Younes Mourri:So yeah, I mean, throughout my journey, working in education, teaching on campus and online and MOOC style. I learned to lots of things and one of the things that I learned was, at the end of the day, I always end During the personal touch to courses, and I feel like a lot of the learning is done by having someone in front of you, you can ask them questions, they could answer you back. So for me, there was always like that personal touch missing. But the issue with live learning is that it's not very scalable. And it repeats itself a lot. Like when I teach a class just two or three times in one year, I'm already kind of tired of teaching the same content, the same jokes, the same intros the same conclusions all the time. So I was thinking of, Okay, how about if there was a way where you could make these live lectures more accessible, and more scalable, because if you managed to build a platform, where you could have massive reach, but also you keep the personalized component to it, then I think that would improve the learning because, as I'm sure, you know, cohorts based courses, they have 80% completion rates, and they're projects based, and there's a lot of advantages to them. The only disadvantage is that they're not scalable. And from the educators perspective, they would always, almost always, rather to a MOOC, because it's recorded once and it reaches massive amounts of learners. From the learner perspective, they would rather be on a little, you know, in a little cohorts where it's more personalized, and just better experience overall. So the question was, how do you align these incentives? How do you give the educator the benefits of scale, while giving the learner the benefits of little cohorts based courses, and that was where lifecycle LTI came in, where it allows educators to create curriculum, and then they could approve other educators to teach us. So in this way, you can actually scale because you can think of it as like, you know, each course is a mini platform in of itself. And you can have several educators teaching your class making, you know, a big, like a big reach, and the learners will also have access to different cohorts at different times. And then they will get the advantage of the personalized, you know, component to teaching. And the loss of the teaching is also like, you know, a little bit of personal relationships with the students and, you know, giving them tips and building that trust. So this, I thought it would enable that, because in order for us to enable such you know, scale at, you know, with live cohorts, it requires that you zoned in on one vertical, that's why we only chose tech, it also requires that you build features, just for specific courses. So that's why we're going to focus with one course and make sure that we get to work with one course, and then grow from there to different courses. So that's, that's another like, that's why we ended up building life tech.ai. And the other also big components with like, tech that to like, let's say you go to a corporation, and they tell you, Okay, I want to train 10,000 people, how are you going to train 10,000 People with with little cohorts, if you don't have an actual platform that is actually catered to a specific type of class, not even like, I'm not even talking about tech, or engineering, or computer science, or AI, I'm talking within like, one sub niche within the niche of this class, and making sure that you get it right over there before going in expanding. So that's the core of our mission. That's what we want to do. And we have Yeah, of course, we have the b2c components and the b2b components. And for us, for me, like, given that, you know, I grew up in a developing country, and I know how it feels like to pour for these people. That's why like our b2c components, like we take a 10% cut, I don't know what other cohorts based platforms do. But for me, I'm genuinely doing that. I don't mind, you know, making a living by teaching on the platform, I just want to get that reach and to have that impact on all different types of people. And even within the US, because a lot of times, so there are two, there are two things, a lot of the scores based courses, they tap in from learning and development budgets, which usually that's why they price very high. But, you know, I feel like the people who really need to learn these skills to get a job, they don't have $1,000 to pay, they don't have $800 to pay, they don't have $2,000 to pay, like, you know, I don't know how much the average American family makes in the US. But I know that, you know, it's very difficult for them to go and one course is not enough. That's the thing. Like the average bootcamp in the US is around $14,000 $14,000 To save it's it's very, very hard like, and these people like they genuinely need a real solution. And there's a huge demand for computer science and you To demand for software engineers and data scientists, and the question is, anyone can have a very high margin business, you know, you just go you take one course and you price, you know,$500 $1,000. And great, like, okay, it's small scale, but it's small scale, but it's high margin. And at the end of the day, it could be a great business. But the real question is, what could you do to have, you know, low prices, low margin, and that's where it becomes much, much harder and way, way more difficult and a much greater challenge. So that's the challenge we're trying to solve, you know, where we're trying to go after, you know, anyone who does, who cannot afford to pay these high prices and help, you know, convert them into great engineers.
Alexander Sarlin:So putting together some of these ideas, and I'm gonna, I want to dig into each of them, one by one with you, but you're combining some of the best aspects of cohort based courses, which is, you know, hands on learning project based where you have access to an expert, and a cohort of peers, with some of the best aspects of MOOC based learning or you know, scalable learning, especially using artificial intelligence features, where it can be scaled enormously, and therefore it can keep the costs pretty low or very low. So your life tech AI is trying to offer large scalable classes where there are expert curriculum creators, but then also course sort of practitioners and people delivering on the platform, so that there's always access to an expert, but you're not paying, you know, exorbitant prices, like those that might be paid in a bootcamp or some cohort based courses, big scale, low cost, high quality, which is the sort of triangle that everybody wants to get to in education. But it's, it's been really hard to break. So you mentioned that tech is your sort of core beachhead. And there's, I think there's a few reasons for that. But tell us about what kind of technology people can learn on live tech AI, and why you feel like technology is the best place to go from a curricular perspective.
Younes Mourri:Yes, so the types of courses that we offer, we offer the complete sets of coming in not knowing how to code all the way to becoming an experts, you know, specific, you know, full stack engineer, or AI engineer, or data scientist, or data analysts, or even like software and AI strategy, and just, you know, being able to spot new opportunities, if you're a consultant, or being able to, you know, put in a strategy for software and AI, if you're a manager or a business person. So the our goal is to target all of these, you know, technical verticals, and different types of profiles within the company. So that's the types of courses that we have on the platform. And then why are we only focused on tech? Well, one, because I don't want to venture into something that I don't know. And, you know, tell people that, okay, I can offer you, I don't know, some type of, you know, soft skills, or, like, you know, it's, it's just, it's not my field, I've been coding, you know, for the majority for the major parts of my life. And that's all I know how to do. I know how to build technical courses, I know how to teach technical courses, I've been doing that for a while. And I want to continue doing that. So that's one thing. And two is like, by 2030, According to McKinsey, and different reports is there's going to be a lack of 85 million software engineers in the world and the US alone, there is a lack of 1 million software engineers, so there is a huge demand for that. But the thing is, like, if you were to charge very high, to become a software engineer, you're not solving the problem. Like the person who could afford to pay, you know, $10,000 $20,000, to actually, you know, become a software engineer, those are very few, you know, the people who want to transform to solve this, you know, 85 million shortage that's coming up. The only way is you have to target the mass, like, there is no other way around. And, and once you go at large scale, I feel like you need to have low costs and low margin. And that's the challenge. Like, it's not an easy problem to solve. And that's why like, nobody ever solved this before, because I feel like a lot of people think that it's not even possible. And we'll see it's going to be a challenge. But we're very optimistic. Like we studied the markets, and we'll see how how things evolve for us.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, it's really exciting. And, you know, that's the kind of challenge worth going for something that is incredibly important solves a humongous need, and that nobody has solved before. You know, it's not just something that everybody that there's a playbook for you got to sort of go out on your own. You know, one of the things you've mentioned in the past that I find really interesting about technology as well is it's at the forefront of sort of alternative credentialing, it's a type of skill that can get people work, even if they don't attend traditional universities or even boot camps. I'd love to hear your talk a little bit, you know, from your background, coming from Morocco, but also going to some of the most elite educational institutions, about how you think about, you know, evening that playing field and offering online learning to accelerate the education and career of non college goers.
Younes Mourri:Yeah, no, definitely. So I feel like as we make more progress, at least in the future, I think what's matters more, is what you could actually build, especially when it comes to tech, because you can tell me, Hey, Eunice, I could build this website. But at the end of the day, it's either you can build it or not, it's not like, there is no I can build 80% of this website, the only missing feature is the login and the logout, it doesn't work that way. So that's why I feel like, like, is a very, very, you know, hard skill. And there is a huge demand for it. And people don't care as much like, I'd rather have someone who had experienced building tech products, and who can scale them, then someone who's just a fresh grad, even if they're from a top institution, but they don't have experience building, you know, a production level code. So Tech is a lot about, you know, experience in the field, it's about your ability to build products, you know, from scratch, or even contributes in a meaningful way to existing products. It's like, I don't know, you can think of it as a carpenter, it's a skill set that you can study as much as you want from textbooks. But at the end of the day, what matters is have you ever, you know, built, you know, a chair out of woods before or not like, there isn't, Oh, this guy, you know, he graduated from this top institution. But if he doesn't really have practice building products, it's very, very different. And that's why again, we do project based learning, because it's makes it you know, more applicable to the real world.
Alexander Sarlin:I totally agree. And it's been really interesting to see some of the top tech companies and the big tech companies in the US sort of come out and say, Hey, we're caring less and less about whether our applicants have bachelor's degrees, we just if they can pass through our coding gauntlet, you know, in our coding interviews and show what they can do, then we want them and we desperately not only want them, we need them, because there aren't enough people who have that skill set. So you are an AI expert, like, you know, squared to you really know this field very, very well. And and you mentioned that artificial intelligence and machine learning is one of the elements that can sort of help bridge this gap between making something that is scalable, high quality and low cost. Talk to us a little bit about some of the different ways that live tech AI is going to use AI, whether it's currently or in the future to support this project and make sure you can actually, you know, meet this hard goal.
Younes Mourri:Yeah, yeah, this is a very good question. So I can tell you about our roadmap, where we're at, and how we plan to use AI to solve this difficult problem of reaching scale at a low price while maintaining life cohorts. And the first thing is, I feel like, we already have a chatbot for every course, meaning we do fine tune the latest NLP models on each course, including the course contents, and everything to allow us to create, you know, a personalized learning experience for the learner. The second thing we're working on is also, as I said, the 40% of the educators time is spent grading. So that's the next thing. And it's not about building. You know, any auto grader that just matches like, the outputs should be like three and you guys five, I'm sorry, it's wrong. It's more about, you know, how do you actually force the learner to think in a way that they should be thinking and allow them to debug their code. And that's where it gets very interesting, because just in May, I think this may 2020 to a few months ago, anyways, one of the latest Google AI papers came out which talks about chain of thought learning. And what it does is instead of like making the prediction that this is a yes or no, as a label, it tries to walk you through a logic that's a human being would reason through before getting the outputs. And the training of these new AI models and these new NLP models would allow us to help learners think the same way. You know, a teacher would walk them through the problem in office hours, because when you go to office hours, they don't give you the answer right away. Like there is a methodology of walking the students through his code, and through his own logic, and to show him where where's the MIT like to show him the mistake that's, that's appears in is quote through his own logic. And if we aren't able to replicate that, then I think that would solve a huge amount of one, a huge amount of time for the educator. And two, it's just going to make the learning experience way more personalized for the learner, because now he has someone, or codes or codes like a bots that would allow him to walk through his bug. And there are no more code reviews or anything. So that's the goal. And that's why we're only focusing on tech. Because to go after these markets, you really need to focus on one thing, and even within tech, you probably need to focus on this one course. And make sure you do it right.
Alexander Sarlin:I would imagine that, you know, another benefit of auto graders is it saves enormous time for the instructors or facilitators, I've taught an online class and the grading was by far the biggest time sink, even though obviously, it's really valuable. And I know how important feedback is. So I'd love to hear you talk about that as well will the AI it'll support the students, but I imagine it will also support the educators.
Younes Mourri:Yes, exactly. And that's one of our main, like, value ads on the platform is when we want to get like a very qualified the educator. So you want to go and get to VP of Engineering at some very big firm, I think your chances are very close to zero, get them to come and teach on your platform, especially if you tell them that they have to give code reviews. And in that way, what that does now, as I said, like you suddenly have very, very highly qualified educators, because you give them these auto graders that would allow them to one last grade and to to give, you know, good, valuable feedback to the learner. So yeah, that's another very important parts of of life, second RTI, that I think is critical. So at least being able to reach, you know, mass scale, at an affordable price.
Alexander Sarlin:It's a really exciting vision. You know, we spoke recently to fadul who runs next heard university on the podcast, and they're trying to work on a $4,000 degree and deliver an entire degree $4,000. And I asked him, you know, how can you make that happen? That's amazing. And his answer was really interesting. And it feels very, I think he's a kindred spirit to what you're doing with live tech, which is, if you really sort of dissect all the different pieces that go into delivering an educational experience, and then actually say, which of these need a human and which of these can be automated or through artificial intelligence or outsourced or made lower cost in any way? There's a lot of cost savings. And it feels like you have some interesting ideas in that in that way. So, you know, we haven't actually mentioned the costs of the courses, but they are very low. I mean, there are free courses on their their courses for $30 $70 for, you know, very high demand skills. How are you making sure that the costs of the courses can stay really low?
Younes Mourri:Yeah, that's definitely a good question. So I think the unit economics for each course, like you should look at each course independently. So for example, one is, because it's new, a lot of the educators just believe in our mission. And a lot of these course author's they're down to help in any way that they could. And that's why they want to make sure that, you know, they could build these courses, and then allow other people to teach them. So I think a lot of it is people who want to give back to their communities, in one way or another. And you can see, like, a lot of them are industry professionals working, for example, at jump trading, or working at Intel, or working in different big corporations, we also have partnerships with Microsoft and the Microsoft also, like they don't want to get paid for these courses, we spoke to them, and they're really interested in our initiative. We're also in talks with other big, you know, providers for the cloud. And like other than Microsoft, it's a lot like when you go into a field, with the intention of helping out you realize how many people are willing to give you a hand, and, you know, join you in your mission. So the most of the people who are teaching right now on the platform are actually course authors. And they're very qualified, you know, they, they went to good universities, they're industry professionals with high paying jobs. So for them, it's they see it as a side thing to help out. And that's why they build these courses, and they're charging very, very low prices. And another important thing I feel like is for the active educators now, I think what you're getting at is, how can you make it sustainable for an active educator to come and teach? And, you know, make it comfortable, you know, living by teaching on the platform, for example, and the unit economics that if you end up having 30 People 40 People pay $100 It's still pretty good For the active educator, like the platform takes a 10% cut, I think it's fair because especially if the active educator is going to help promote his course, it's very fair, and it's still a decent amount. So for us, we're placing another very big bet that the active educator could market his or her class. And that's why we could afford, you know, lower margins, cheaper courses. And also, yeah, there's that. And then we also, like, have other plans to for marketing and all to partner with, you know, marketing providers, maybe they take a cut of the class. So like, we're still like, you know, figuring out the exact strategy to go. But at least from the unit economics, on the b2c side, most of the people who are teaching are aligned with our mission.
Alexander Sarlin:And I mean, I think about the huge core of sort of adjuncts that teach in universities around the country, teaching community colleges, and they make, you know, very little money per class. And they have to do every piece of the teaching themselves, they have to do great every paper, they have to write, you know, write the curriculum, and write the slides and everything. And I think the idea of sort of splitting out the course author, and the active instructor, as you mentioned, really changes what the actual role of teaching is. And you definitely have to give feedback, you'd have to, you know, support their students, but some of the most time intensive parts are removed. So in that world, as you say, something like, you know, three or $4,000, for teaching a course. And of course, depending on what country you're in, can be pretty meaningful. And I, you know, obviously, these numbers will change over time, depending on how things go. But I can see the value. And it's a really, it's an interesting bet. So it feels very exciting, ya know,
Younes Mourri:for sure. And then the other thing I wanted to add that I then talk about is, why are we also just focusing again, on tech and tech changes very quickly. So the the amount of time it takes you to build a recorded course, in tech, by the time you're done, there's probably new stacks and new technologies. And maintaining these technical courses, in of itself is almost a full time job. And that is why I genuinely believe that we should split, you know, the person who's in charge of the curriculum versus the people who are delivering it. Because if you own a course, your job is to make sure that your course is always updated, it's not to teach the course. And in that way that allows and that's actually guarantees that you're actually always teaching the most relevant and the most updated content. And this is a no, this is a problem that you will only see if you actually were working in building technical courses for a long period of time. And I think it's a very big problem, because you take any technical course on YouTube, for example, two or three years in, it's not as useful or as relevant as it used to be like, take, you know, a React js course three years ago and the React js course now and maybe you know, a next Jas course to three years ago and the next Jas course now, and it's a tremendous amounts of time, effort and energy to maintain technical courses. And that is why another like, you know, interesting artists, what I find to be interesting insight is that I think you need, like one needs to split them up, to make sure that the learner is guaranteed that they're actually learning the latest technologies.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, I think that's really powerful. I mean, when I was working in boot camps, that was a very consistent topic of discussion. That was, that was an environment where the curriculum creators and the facilitators of teachers delivering it were a little bit separate. And you're absolutely right, with anything technical, the biggest concern of the course creators was continually iterating, and cycling back and saying, how many changes have to happen before we refresh the curriculum? Or do we want to constantly update it for every new point release of the tools we the tools we teach? And I think it's a really interesting insight. So, you know, I want to use that as an interesting segue. So we, you know, we've mentioned that you've been involved in creating AI courses on Coursera. But it strikes me as you know, it's so relevant, you've been really in the thick of it in this, seeing what it takes to create course, where, you know, trade courses that in the MOOC case, there's no instructor, but it has to be work at an enormous scale with people with a hugely wide range of experiences and, you know, prior knowledge, and also to work in a funny, you know, this sort of unusual context where Andrew Yang is the face of all the courses in machine learning and deep learning on Coursera. But I know and he knows, I don't think he'd be ashamed to say that it's not a one man show. He is definitely not writing all the assignments. He's definitely not writing all the content. So it's really like a team sport. And there are these sort of different types of contribution And I'd love to just hear you one more time talk about, you know, that really unique experience creating these incredibly large courses at Coursera. And sort of how that's informed your thinking about this division of labor, that you're sort of proposing for live tech.
Younes Mourri:It's definitely a teamwork. Like, there's the people who are the people who are, you know, working on slides, people working on assignments, people working on graders, there's the cast, that's actually recording, there's the cast, doing the video editing, you know, there's the cast, doing the marketing, it's, it's not only, you know, one person that usually delivers a course, it's a tremendous amounts of effort, energy, and requires an entire team to get these courses up and running. And I think that, that gives me also a lot of insights into, you know, how I feel like, you know, courses should be like built, and the different components of building the course. So for example, you have a course author who builds the course, then you have someone who delivers the course. And then you have someone who might be, you know, marketing the course. And that's why I feel like, you know, what I was trying to do it, like Tech is one make, take, like, what I learned everything that I learned and try to make it to replicate it so that we get a, you know, to have its work as a life's like, through live cohorts through live courses. And also to make sure that, you know, everyone is doing their, you know, a fair share of work, catching Morlino being in charge of an entire vertical and the course creation process, that idea, like, led to the idea that like, Okay, now we have course authors, and we have acts of educators, and maybe parts of the course another, you know, maybe another revenue share might be the person who's actually marketing the course, because it requires a team right now. Okay, we have, there's the platform, there's the course author, there is the person teaching the course. And now maybe we're gonna add, you know, maybe a person who's marketing the course. And just, you know, each one is an expert at their own little thing and the come together, and your platform, maybe that connects all of them.
Alexander Sarlin:That's really awesome. Yeah. You're really speaking my personal language when you say that, because I think it's so funny how learners when they're taking, you know, when they're in any kind of educational experience, tend to attribute sort of everything to the teacher. And you know, we saw this in boot camps as well, they'd write these long reviews, and the only person they'd ever mentioned is their instructor in the boot camp. And that's wonderful. That's how it should be, I guess. But we would know that behind the scenes there were, you know, dozens of people involved in delivering that educational experience. And of course, none of them get, you know, they're all behind the scenes, so they don't get much, much thanks. That's true. And media as well. I love your thinking about, you know, marketing the course delivering the course, creating the course has really been different synergistic functions that are all important. And if you put them together in the right combination, you can deliver, as you say, scalable, live project based experiences at scale. It's really exciting. You mentioned this really interesting idea. I've never heard this before of this chain of thought, AI. And you know, I have to ask, while I have you here, you're you really are like an AI expert. And we don't get to talk to them that often on this show. What gets you most excited about artificial intelligence in education, I think that's a great example, this chain of thought can break down the logic of an idea. I like thrilled about that. But I bet you have a bunch of ideas like that, what do you think will the future of AI in education might
Younes Mourri:look like? So the thing that excites me a lot is one the use of these large language models being applied to the field of education. And then the other thing is, you could see like today, when you go to Open AI, there's like, you know, you can get co pilots, you can get other types of models, whether it's open AI or elsewhere, that will help you even code. So you can just tell us what you want to code. And it's quotes for you. And it's a scary concept, because, you know, you're a software engineer, but you can see this model, you know, it's kind of competing with you in your day to day coding sessions. So that's very exciting is one the use of chain of start learning, and then the applying gets to take into coding, because right now, it's being applied to maths problems, because GPT three, doesn't do that, well, you know, on math, and then this chain of stop learning, I think it was by Google, and it's the power model, that one showed that actually, they could get some very promising results. And the use of that to education, I think is going to be very, very exciting. The other thing is, a lot of these big companies are opening these huge models for individuals like like psychedelics, AI or companies like like psychedelics AI to us. So that's going to allow because you know, to train them from scratch You need millions of dollars, but you could just take it and fine tune it on your own problem or your own task. And by doing that, I feel like suddenly it's like, okay, we're live tech, that's AI, it's a small team, but at least we could have access to these huge language models. And that's going to, you know, open up so many opportunities, because maybe I'm using it for coding or I'm using is for try to tweak it for my auto graders, or for my chat bots, or whatever, you know, thing is actually being used. Other companies might be using it, you know, to automate office hours, like hey, bots, for example, or other companies might use it for math problems, or other companies might use it for science problems. And, you know, these big companies are actually contributing a lot to the education ecosystem by just allowing us to use these models. So that's something that really excites me. Yeah,
Alexander Sarlin:that's sort of standing on the shoulders of giants being able to customize these incredibly sophisticated open source in many cases, models, to a specific education use case it it really is a new world. And it's funny, because I think that you know, somebody with your background, you know exactly how to do that. Right. But I think people don't always appreciate from the outside how much you know, how much under the hood of a lot of different AI tools is really are really these, the same few very sophisticated that, you know, models that people are customized to their use case, that's a good thing is we don't want to reinvent the wheel. That's sort of a core premise of coders everywhere, you know, if somebody's already done something amazing, use it, and make it work for you, rather than starting from scratch. That's, I think it's a fascinating answer. So I wish we could talk more, we're almost at the top of our time here. I end every podcast with two questions. And I'm really curious about your answers. What do you see as the sort of most exciting trend right now in the Ed Tech landscape? You've been starting the company going around talking to various people? What do you think people? Are? Our listeners should keep an eye on something that sort of right around the next corner?
Younes Mourri:Yeah, well, I think a lot of the trend that is in education, lately is coming one from personalized learning. And to I feel like, you know, 10 years ago, it was the face of MOOCs and massive open online courses. And today, you could see a lot of these platforms, you know, like, like tech, that's AI, that's our targeting cohort based courses. And I feel like the trend is a little bit shifting towards, you know, like, because people just in general, they prefer live instruction. So there's that. And I think the the other interesting thing is, I don't know whether it's going to be live tech, that's AI that solves the problem or not, is how do you replicate this model to developing countries? And how do you make it available at scale, and that's, I think, is a very interesting challenge and the use of AI technologies in different, you know, formats, to be able to reach these, you know, underrepresented groups, or even within the US people who would want to break into tech, but do not have all the resources. So I think that's one of the things that excites me the most, at least in the education space. But there's a lot, there's a lot, that's actually, you know, that people should keep an eye out on. I feel like assessment is another big one, like word Cara Dotty I recently, they're they're working a lot assessment technologies. There are other companies, I just forgot their names, what's working on, like, evaluating candidates for through their response rates from the interview question and trying to, you know, get their personalities, there are others working on, you know, test monitoring, for people to take exams online, see if they're cheating or not. So there's a lot of pretty cool things. And I feel like at the end of the day, a lot of these companies are trying to solve, you know, similar problems to different angles. So, but for me, at the end of the day, it's all it's always about, you know, making education more accessible to everyone at an affordable price and spread the learning as much as you could.
Alexander Sarlin:That's a terrific overview. And I see lots of new things in there that I had not heard of. So that's fascinating. And then what is one resource? It could be a book, a blog, a Twitter feed, that you would recommend for anybody who wants to learn more about any of the topics we talked about today?
Younes Mourri:Yeah, no, for sure. Usually, I get a lot of my news and updates from LinkedIn, Twitter, just following your people who are advancing in pushing the field forward. And you know, there are a few people that I like to follow. One of them is a very close friend of mine, Qian Catan feroce. And joining is another person you can follow. There's also deep learning data I used to work there. They have like the weekly deep learning about AI batch. So yeah, I mean, this is usually how I like To You know, stay up to date and learn what's new in the field. Of course, there are all different, you know, journals that you can read about that would publish new information every now and then.
Alexander Sarlin:Fantastic. We'll put links and the names of all of the companies and resources that you just mentioned in the show notes for this episode. Eunice Mori live tech AI incredibly exciting and you're you're tackling one of the biggest problems in education, you bringing high quality, live instruction at scale to developing countries. All the best to you. I can't wait to see what you do next.
Younes Mourri:Thank you so much. Thanks, Alex. And it was a pleasure being here. Thank you.
Alexander Sarlin:Thanks for listening to this episode of edtech insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the tech community. For those who want even more edtech insider subscribe to the free ed tech insiders newsletter on substack.