Google Learn About is the patient teacher with a bag full of tricks we all wished we had as kids
AI chatbots can be useful tools for learning about the world, but they are usually not designed as teachers and often come with caveats about the origins of their data. Google has launched a new AI tutor called Learn About to solve these problems. It is a personal teacher who can adjust his teaching style in real time. Learn About is not just a conversational AI chatbot; it combines visual aids and the ability to expand and simplify topics as necessary, like an interactive and intelligent textbook.
Learn About does not rely on the Gemini AI models that Google uses in most of its AI services. Instead, it uses the LearnLM model that was introduced at Google I/O this year. LearnLM is specifically trained on education and research-oriented data and should encourage users to think for themselves. That means the AI not only provides a quick answer, but also tries to convey the facts and knowledge behind the simple answer, including diagrams and annotated text, along with suggested topics related to your original question.
LearnLM also makes the common hallucinations and misinformation spewed out by AI chatbots less of a problem. You can ask a question, suggest a topic, or even upload images and let the AI work with whatever it can find about what’s in the images. More information is currently available to a limited number of US users, but expansion is likely coming soon.
Robotic education
As an experiment, I asked about building a humanoid robot. Learn About didn’t just quote an encyclopedia about what that would entail. Instead, I was given a whole list of necessary elements, broken down into images, context boxes, and further reading material. The ‘Get Images’ button at the bottom did exactly what it said, while the double-check with Google only seemed to confirm that the information was correct. The ‘go deeper’ button quickly led me down a path of technical details for machining an arm joint. Two paragraphs later I was lost.
I had a lot more fun with the ‘simplify’ button, because every time I tapped it the AI became more creative by being simple. First they talked about building a robot as a toy, then they tried to explain how to build a robot as a gingerbread man, then they talked about a puppet show, and then they talked about a magical Lego man. Then the AI apparently decided that I didn’t understand the analogies and used very small words to explain robots without any window dressing. Yet for younger and younger children, the analogies and their accompanying pictures and diagrams were like a window into textbooks.
People don’t always want a personal teacher. Sometimes the trivia expert version of AI is preferable. But Gemini and LearnLM point out that Google wants people to continue to view it as the source of all knowledge, whether that’s a simple yes or no about the location of a famous monument or a full-on lecture on its history and place in the local culture. With ‘More information’, Google can position itself as an information source and digital learning partner. And I have to give Learn About credit for inspiring my upcoming gingerbread doll show about robots.
