The Future Of Education Will Tap AI, Not Be Replaced By It, This Founder Says

Here's a question that's been percolating since ChatGPT abruptly entered the mainstream: Does AI provide more avenues to enhance and augment education, or drive it into obsolescence? According to Under 30 Europe lister Joel Hellermark, the future of artificial intelligence and machine learning is rife with possibilities that can help the ways in which humans learn and collaborate, not replace them. He offered the calculator as a comparison: "If we think about it just like an insanely powerful calculator, you'd want everyone to just learn to use the calculator. Why should you sit there and do a bunch of calculations? The 26-year-old cofounder of software company Sana Labs has been immersed in the coding space since taking online Stanford courses at just 13 years old in Sweden. Now, at his startup, he's built an AI-driven software to help businesses manage workforce onboarding and training. The program pulls from correspondences, documents and the internet to answer questions and help train employees. Sana introduced the product to the world just as it was shutting down in 2020, and initially offered their platform to hospitals free of charge (over 2,000 took them up on the offer). Sana has since landed paying clients, including Klarna, Merck and Electrolux, and has raised $54.5 million. Hellermark, who dropped out of school at 19 to start the company, envisions a near future where the content we interact with is presented to us dynamically and with our personal contexts in play. "We're so used to creating content and then someone consumes the exact thing that you created– that goes all the way back to the printing press," says Hellermark. "It hasn't changed that much since.