Binance co-founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao wants to provide free education for up to a billion children worldwide with his Giggle Academy venture, he told an audience at Token2049 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE).
“In a few years, I think, I want to teach 100 million or 1 billion kids for free,” Zhao told the audience. Giggle is a free online platform that provides elementary education through gamified lessons.
“With the technologies we have today, it’s not that hard to make an app that will stick, that’s educational, but also glues the kids to the device,” the crypto entrepreneur said.
Giggle’s concept paper outlines the project’s goal of providing K-12 education globally for free by offering non-traditional educational courses in topics such as negotiations, finance, entrepreneurship, sales, legal, accounting, blockchain, and AI in phases.
In April 2024, the Binance co-founder announced he was stepping away from the company and focusing on educational initiatives as he prepared to serve a four-month prison sentence for violating US money laundering laws, which he completed in September 2024.
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The growing role of generative AI in education
Zhao also discussed the heavy use of generative AI in crafting the course materials for Giggle Academy, a growing trend in online and traditional education.
In June 2023, Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology announced it would allow the limited use of generative AI in classrooms, including ChatGPT, to aid in classroom discussion and teaching.
The KTCT Higher Secondary School in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, a grade school in India, introduced an AI-humanoid teacher to one of its classrooms in February 2024 as part of an early pilot program.
Andrej Karpathy, a former executive for Tesla and OpenAI, founded Eureka Labs, a startup dedicated to creating AI-powered teaching assistants, in July 2024.
The goal of the startup is to bring subject matter expert-level education to students worldwide and bypass language barriers.
“This teacher and AI symbiosis could run an entire curriculum of courses on a common platform. If we are successful, it will be easy for anyone to learn anything,” Karpathy wrote in July 2024.
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