Microsoft and Khan Academy announce AI partnership

Today at Microsoft Build, Microsoft and Khan Academy announced a new partnership regarding AI tools.

First, Microsoft is donating Azure AI optimized infrastructure to Khan Academy which will allow Khan Academy to offer Khanmigo AI-powered teaching assistant to all K-12 educators in the U.S. for free. Previously, Khanmigo would cost teachers $4 per month. So, this will be huge news for teachers in the US.

As part of this partnership, Microsoft and Khan Academy will also work together on exploring small language models such as Phi-3 to improve and scale AI tutoring tools. The goal is to develop new, open-source small language models based on Phi-3 that can offer state-of-the-art math tutoring capabilities in an affordable and scalable manner.

Even though Khan Academy will provide feedback and benchmarking data to evaluate model performance, Khan Academy’s user data will not be used to train the model.

In the future, Microsoft will work to integrate more Khan Academy content into Copilot and Teams for Education to reach more educators and students.