Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a powerful tool for younger generations as it increases accessibility to quality education and prepares them to be able to compete and succeed in the modern, evolving workforce. Meta is among a multitude of companies doing its part to support these efforts.
Most recently, the company signed on to the White House’s “Pledge to America’s Youth: Investing in AI Education,” committing to provide over $20 million and partnering with Pearson to develop and supply K-12 education-specific AI tools to U.S. school districts serving military communities. In a statement from their Chief Global Affairs Officer, Joel Kaplan, Meta notes the reason behind this localized decision as “We want to give back to hundreds of thousands of military families who serve our country and help prepare the next generation to thrive in the economy of the future.”
Arizona State University’s (ASU) EDge AI
Llama, open-source models from Meta, provide a solid foundation for AI education tools, helping students across the globe. Beyond specialized tools, Meta Llama is also being used to power larger AI education endeavors like Arizona State University’s (ASU) EDge AI. ASU Next Lab and the ASU SolarSPELL Initiative have been collaborating for almost a year and a half to develop an offline, open-source AI tool that could be integrated into SolarSPELL’s solar-powered digital libraries, acting as a sort of offline search engine.
According to an ASU article about the project, “The student team has been running EDge AI prototypes on different devices, the smallest of which are Raspberry Pis — single-board computers that can be held in the palm of one’s hand.” There are several benefits to working with this small of a technology, including affordability, energy efficiency and portability.
The main goal of this initiative is “reaching communities where access to technology, especially AI, is limited due to financial barriers, lack of internet access, or even unreliable power,” including remote and underserved communities. This is the core reasoning for creating a product that can function offline, but the offline nature of the devices is also useful for other reasons. As Bea Rodriguez-Fransen, ASU’s Next Lab co-founder and director, notes, “Because it’s offline and everything is stored and processed locally in your device, you not only protect your data, but also you’re able to upload your own knowledge base.” This can serve as a way of further helping specific groups within the target community of those who lack sufficient access to technologies, the internet, etc., like indigenous groups, “who endeavor to protect their cultural heritage by carefully supervising the tools used to distribute or transform their intellectual property.”
FoondaMate
Another great AI education tool powered by Llama is FoondaMate, or “study buddy” in Zulu, an AI chatbot that is accessible for middle and high school students on WhatsApp and Messenger to receive conversational help with schoolwork. Many students who utilize the tool attend schools that suffer from problems like limited availability of individualized teacher attention, not enough textbooks and a lack of access to computers.
The company’s founding was based on Dacod Magagula’s (co-founder of FoondaMate) experience growing up attending an under-resourced school. He used the internet to help advance his learning outside of the classroom, and he wanted to provide the next generation with an AI-powered solution to do the same.
Since launching in 2020, students in South Africa using FoondaMate have seen a 30% increase in university eligibility compared to fellow students who did not use the tool. Tao Boyle, the other FoondaMate co-founder, notes that “LLM (large language model) technology, when paired with a localized knowledge base and delivered in a way that is affordable and easy to use, may become the single most transformative tool for equal access to education we have ever seen.”
None of this would have been possible without Llama as Boyle commends the LLM for being “the perfect model for training on tone and deploying at scale to resource-constrained students,” as well as Meta’s emphasis on safeguard mechanisms.
UC San Diego’s (UCSD) TritonGPT
As AI continues to permeate across society and become more ingrained in the day-to-day routines of many Americans, many colleges and universities are also starting to assess what they can do to best set their students up for future success. An example of this is UC San Diego’s (UCSD) TritonGPT, an in-house generative AI suite of specialized assistants, including a General AI Assistant, Phishing Analyzer and an Expert Notetaker. The tool is available for free to all UCSD faculty, staff and students.
Llama is the default model and what the application was initially built on, but they have expanded to include OpenAI and Gemini models as well so that users can choose from different LLMs based on their specific needs. TritonGPT is also hosted securely on-site at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), allowing the university to protect sensitive institutional data and provide a private alternative to commercial AI tools.
As more universities incorporate AI and it starts to become as commonplace as the computer is in today’s student workflows, this demonstrates another key reason why access to quality AI education for K-12 students is so crucial. K-12 AI education is now becoming a necessity for student success in all career paths, from college to the workforce and beyond.
Access to quality education is just one of the key features available to students in schools with greater AI adoption, along with other valuable features like personalization and interactive learning opportunities. Greater accessibility is extremely important as it has been found to improve individuals’ “employability, earnings, and health outcomes” as well as a country’s “economic growth, competitiveness, and innovation.”
According to Coursera’s senior partnerships manager, Jesús Rosario, “AI represents a massive opportunity for us to help level the playing field for a lot of people when it comes to access, equity, and affordability.” These use cases of Meta tools show how the goal of AI integration into K-12 education is to amplify human potential, not replace it. It is just the latest technological advancement being deployed in an attempt to ensure that more Americans are equipped with the proper skill set needed to have the opportunity to thrive.