Latest / aiEDU Studios / Kumar Garg: How philanthropy can fuel scientific innovation

Transcript

Kumar Garg: How philanthropy can fuel scientific innovation · aiEDU Studios

• 0:01
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Hey everybody, I'm Alex Katron.
• 0:06
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I'm the co-founder and CEO of AIEDU and we're here for what is sort of like one of the very early recordings of AIEDU Studios.
• 0:15
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Our producer, cj, is here.
• 0:16
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): We haven't even decided if we're calling this a podcast or a show.
• 0:19
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): By the time we publish this we'll probably have decided that.
• 0:21
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): But I'm very excited to have Kumar Garg, a longtime confidant, advisor, funder and supporter of AIEDU, and someone who has now very recently gone off and sort of shifted vantage points and become a founder in his own right of an organization called Renaissance Philanthropy.
• 0:41
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): So we're going to hear more about what Renaissance is all about.
• 0:45
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): But before we dive into any of that and even giving you a chance to share your background, I was curious if you could, why don't you start by sharing a little about who you are?
• 0:55
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Very high level, your journey.
• 0:57
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): You were at the White House, you were at Futures, but then I'd like you to land on.
• 1:03
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): You know, what are you obsessed with right now?
• 1:06
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Great, Well, great to be here.
• 1:08
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's great to see the good, to see this work and great to see all the progress the organization's been making.
• 1:15
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's really been fun to watch, I think.
• 1:18
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Just to sort of quickly cover the highlights, so yeah, I was born in India.
• 1:21
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I was born in Delhi.
• 1:24
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I came to the US in middle school, grew up in the suburbs of New York, studied political science and computer science back in college and I caught the political bug.
• 1:36
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I got the political bug right as I was getting naturalized.
• 1:40
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I was on college campus when the presidential primaries were happening, so that got me the political bug and went to work for then Howard Dean when he was the anti-war candidate seems like a long time ago and had a.
• 1:56
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know, talking about managing a team, I actually managed a team of 20 people as my first job, so like I was the deputy communications director for New Hampshire for Dean.
• 2:07
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know it's one of those things where when you first start like you're doing everything and then the campaign grows around you and so then you know you're like handling a whole team.
• 2:16
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): That is like sending out trackers on all the candidates.
• 2:19
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): That's handling a candidate that's doing all these press interviews.
• 2:22
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So it was really interesting to have that as your first experience.
• 2:27
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The way I got into education was I was in graduate school, I was in law school actually, and you know I like law school, but it wasn't.
• 2:36
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It just felt a little distant from like well, how does this actually play out in the world?
• 2:41
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And there was a clinic that was being started at the law school specifically to sue the state of Connecticut for underfunding the school system.
• 2:49
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And the reason was the plaintiffs, which were a number of low-income school districts in Connecticut, were basically getting left out of the school funding formula just based on the way it was getting changed, and they couldn't afford.
• 3:02
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They tried to do a version of that lawsuit with private lawyers and run out of money.
• 3:08
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They came to the law school and said would the law school take the case?
• 3:11
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Now it's a kind of dubious proposition for law students to be doing complex litigation.
• 3:16
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So we found a bunch of senior attorneys from various law firms that supervised the case, but it was a student-led case and I thought that was quite interesting.
• 3:25
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So that was like my big area of work throughout school where I would interview all these parents, I would interview all these superintendents, I would try to build the actual case to say why is it that these school districts are struggling?
• 3:41
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): How does finance and school funding relate?
• 3:44
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And I've spent a lot of time actually thinking about how you actually structure litigation to create political change, because you don't actually, you know, win a lawsuit and suddenly the school system changes.
• 3:55
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The school system is a way for you to shine a light on those deficiencies, and so we actually went up to the Connecticut Supreme Court on an emergency appeal because the then governor took the position that there was no right to an education for Connecticut students.
• 4:13
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So we took that to the Connecticut Supreme Court and we won.
• 4:15
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So it was a-.
• 4:16
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Is this a Democratic governor?
• 4:18
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It was a Republican governor, then this is.
• 4:20
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know, politics change and they're, I mean.
• 4:25
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They took a sort of an unconventional position where they said even though you might have a right to an equal education, you don't have a right to an education at all.
• 4:33
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And so we won in front of the Connecticut Supreme Court.
• 4:37
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It was right around then that President Obama was getting elected.
• 4:41
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I was just finishing up the case.
• 4:44
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The case was going back into district court.
• 4:47
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I had real interest in working in policy and I got myself a fellowship to come to DC.
• 4:52
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It was one of those things which, when people now ask for life advice, I always tell them to think about policy fellowships as a way in.
• 5:01
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): There's nothing more powerful when you show up in DC to say you just need to give me a desk and a business card and a phone.
• 5:08
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Somebody else is paying for this fellowship to start.
• 5:12
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So I was able to get a job in the White House Office of Science and Tech Policy, partly because, you know, I'd done some computer science back in college.
• 5:19
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I'd just done this education case.
• 5:22
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I knew something about education and they were like, ok, you know, maybe that's enough.
• 5:25
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And then basically they were hiring me as a generalist to basically say you have some political background, some background in education.
• 5:33
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You kind of learn the rest.
• 5:35
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So they were taking a bet on me.
• 5:37
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I didn't realize you'd been at OSTP starting as a fellow and you were there a full eight years, a full eight years, and so when I first showed up, I literally had no idea what policy was.
• 5:49
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I'd never served in government.
• 5:51
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It was a totally new experience and I would say the first two months I literally had this sort of sense of did I make a big mistake?
• 6:00
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I don't know what I'm doing and I feel like I'm failing.
• 6:03
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I go to meetings but I have no sense of what it means to do this job, and it's a very steep learning curve.
• 6:13
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The thing that I had the benefit of was I was working for the deputy director of the office, tom Clill, and he had this apprenticeship model where he would basically say none of this will make sense.
• 6:27
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But the easiest way for it to make sense is just come with me to meetings, and before the meeting we'll talk about what the meeting is about, and after the meeting we'll talk about what happened in the meeting.
• 6:38
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And what was fascinating was all meetings actually play out at two levels.
• 6:42
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): There's, like the formal reason why you're meeting, but then there's also the subtext, like what is it that the different people in the meeting are trying to accomplish?
• 6:49
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): What are all the side conversations?
• 6:51
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): What is the way policy actually gets done through the workings of, like, the agenda.
• 6:58
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Who's there?
• 6:59
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): What is the larger policy process?
• 7:01
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So from that moment of two months in, I'm like this was a huge mistake.
• 7:05
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): At the six month mark I had done two events with the president.
• 7:10
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): We had launched a major initiative on math and science education that the president announced so it was the first major science announcement that he made and it was all about how do we get kids more excited about math and science education and then that sort of actually like set the stage for my why I ended up being at OCP for the full eight years, where you know I was the first.
• 7:33
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It was one of the major early wins for the science office to have this major initiative announced by the president on math and science education and I had been the person who had put it together.
• 7:42
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And so then every time we wanted to do the next science and tech initiative and pitch it to the West Wing, you know they would say well, you know, you did the last one, you know what?
• 7:53
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And so I sort of became the person who got added to every policy initiative that could get presidential level attention, to every policy initiative that could get presidential level attention.
• 8:06
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So, even though I had been originally hired with this very narrow, specific education job, you know, education became sort of my one-third job, and two-thirds were everything else that was moving through the office.
• 8:17
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So I got a chance to work on advanced manufacturing and space commercialization and the future of the internet, and then the policy actions we took after healthcaregov and everything else.
• 8:27
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So it was, you know, we ran this tech and innovation team with this really wide mandate.
• 8:33
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And so by the time I left you know most people spend two years in the White House I spent eight.
• 8:38
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So it felt like this, like you know, from newbie to gray beard where by the time I was leaving, I was like, oh, like, it's very hard for you to you know, you could pick any topic and I'd be like, oh, you should, here are the five people who work on that.
• 8:52
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Here's how you would construct it.
• 8:53
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Here's how you know we would take this from an idea into making it an initiative.
• 8:58
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Here's how you'd get the agency involved.
• 8:59
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Here's how you get philanthropy involved.
• 9:01
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And you would not find that description of that's what policy is in any book, right?
• 9:10
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): People sort of imagine view of policy is that it's a knowledge production exercise.
• 9:16
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You think really hard, you come up with the right policy answer.
• 9:19
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): There's some mechanism by which it becomes policy.
• 9:23
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): That's what policymakers do.
• 9:24
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But the lived exercise of what policymaking is is actually to think really hard about what's not happening, come up with a list of those things and then figure out what's stopping that from happening.
• 9:37
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Like, actually, this agency needs additional support and doesn't want to boss this other agency around.
• 9:45
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Your job is to take this agency's good idea and give it to that other agency, because there's equity dynamics between two agencies.
• 9:55
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Or, in this instance, this is actually an area where there's really, when we were building the President's Brain Initiative.
• 10:02
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The key insight behind that initiative was that the technology around being able to understand the brain was technically improving a lot, where for a long time, you either did full brain scans or you studied individual neurons, but the idea of studying hundreds or thousands of neurons and how they interact with each other was just becoming possible.
• 10:25
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The idea behind the initiative was this could become a powerful new platform for how we actually do brain science.
• 10:32
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know that actually opened up a whole bunch of new ideas for partnerships with medical technology, with the cloud companies around, how you might actually store large amounts of data because of the way this would work with a whole bunch of different patient groups around diseases you could go after.
• 10:50
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Because of this, and so to actually build an initiative, you actually might do a bunch of things that are not like I'm just changing the reg from here to here or I'm just adding this as a new priority in the next NIH call.
• 11:04
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So that was interesting.
• 11:06
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It was like you sort of learned that in any given moment.
• 11:11
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know America is a big place.
• 11:13
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): There's a living, breathing set of body of work.
• 11:14
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So if you're going to figure out what the right policy answer is, you have to be able to actually first figure out what's happening right now, what's not happening that people think would be a big deal, and then what's the most useful thing government could do.
• 11:28
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Is it that it can convene or is it that it can fund?
• 11:32
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Is it that it's actually the blocker?
• 11:33
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You have to actually change the reg?
• 11:35
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Is it that it can actually make something feel more possible just by stating the goal?
• 11:43
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Sometimes it's just saying this is now more possible and shining a light on it, and then everybody sort of says, oh, you know, this is a much more.
• 11:51
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Is it that it, you know, provides itself as a customer?
• 11:57
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): One of the big things that allows DARPA to be so successful is that it's able to find internal government customers for its innovation.
• 12:05
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So I did that.
• 12:07
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And then, you know, when I left, I started to explore well, what does it mean, you know, if you're working across all these science and tech topics?
• 12:17
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): What does it like mean to not do that for the government, which was kind of a journey, but one of the things I ended up doing was then working with Eric Schmidt, who had just finished as being executive chairman of Google, was interested in science and tech philanthropy and was starting to build a team.
• 12:32
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So I worked with him for just over six years.
• 12:34
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And then Renaissance Philanthropy is just the most recent, so less than a year old, and the real idea is that, yeah, I mean it's been really interesting.
• 12:45
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The idea behind it is how do we take this moment where there's actually an incredible amount of excitement about science and technology, and actually build an infrastructure so that philanthropists who are interested in these topics can actually bet into those topics?
• 13:06
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): People find the topics exciting, but very hard to actually do larger scale bets in them, and one of the reasons is that there's actually not good mechanisms for it.
• 13:19
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So if you might be interested in a particular topic and you might say, well, why aren't we making really fast progress in cancer?
• 13:26
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Or why aren't we seeing more alpha fold like breakthroughs on AI, and you know most of the time you might say, okay, well, I'll talk to a couple of academics on this topic and they might be actually really smart.
• 13:37
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So they'll say, you know you should fund my lab, and so you know the person might say, okay, I'll fund your lab, but then two or three conversations in, you know most folks who can support this kind of work.
• 13:49
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know they have busy day jobs, and so they'll say, okay, I'm sort of funding three people, I'm like going to go back to my day job, but actually the amount of capital they're deploying compared to what their potential to give is minuscule.
• 14:03
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Now you might say to yourself, well, why don't you deploy more?
• 14:11
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But you know these are still folks who want to deploy it into a strategy.
• 14:13
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Well, who's going to put that strategy together so you could actually fund a range of topics with a goal in mind?
• 14:19
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So one of the ideas that we're trying to popularize is this idea of a philanthropic fund.
• 14:24
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So, instead of donors betting on individual projects, just like you do an investment fund, why not you build a time-bound philanthropic fund that says, okay, the goal of this fund over the next five years is to move this space from here to here.
• 14:39
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I'm going to be the LP, the way you are in the investment world, but I'm going to do it philanthropically.
• 14:45
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I'm going to put money to work into that fund and then that fund is going to work across dozens, if not hundreds, of researchers to make a series of whether it's research awards, whether it's catalytic market activity, whether it's policy work, with the fund goal in mind and so that that sort of like question which is could we build these funds as a way to give donors a ways to deploy much more, many more resources, but with still strategy in mind?
• 15:14
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And so it's been exciting.
• 15:15
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So we've been less than a year old and we've already launched three funds, and so people, when we were just coming, said I got a lot of feedback.
• 15:27
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But the biggest sort of feedback I got was just that the advice was almost like good luck.
• 15:35
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Fundraising is really hard.
• 15:36
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Donors are obsessed with control.
• 15:40
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Why would they put money into a fund where they don't get to make all the decisions?
• 15:46
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And you know, the thing I say to people is that you're just seeing the part of the iceberg that's above the water.
• 15:52
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So your experience of philanthropy are active philanthropists with active program officers who are actively managing, just like you would meet a DARPA program officer.
• 16:03
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They're opinionated, but most of the actual philanthropic capital is below the surface.
• 16:10
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's dry powder.
• 16:11
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's people who are busy doing other things, who don't have the time to actually build out a strategy.
• 16:17
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): For those folks you actually need to give them much more pre-built vehicles which they can deploy into, and they actually don't want the control.
• 16:27
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They actually want to bet on a strategy and they actually want to trust the person who's going to be the fund director to drive that strategy.
• 16:35
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So that was the sort of broad thesis as to whether those kinds of vehicles would be important and it's a little meta but, like you know, if you sort of think about, it's partly why we named renaissance.
• 16:48
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Renaissance, which was we sort of hearken back to the.
• 16:51
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know, most of the science and tech organizations always hearken to the 20th century.
• 16:55
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So it's always like bell labs or you know, you know the space race, but we said let's think about, like you know, the space race.
• 17:02
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But we said let's think about, like you know, the scientific revolution that started, you know, with the original Renaissance.
• 17:09
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And one of the things when you read back to that period is that patrons actually played a really powerful role, which is just backing individual artists, individual entrepreneurs and individual scientists in being able to do exploratory work, provided a lot of the risk capital to get that area going and it provided a flourishing even as we, you know that was necessary in that period.
• 17:34
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And so this idea that the patron can play this really powerful role, they don't have to direct the work, they can just, you know, they can say you know, I think this body of work is exciting, you're in charge.
• 17:47
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Why don't you figure out what's next?
• 17:49
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): That sort of patron model I think has fallen a little bit, but it's part of our story and why not sort of hearken to that?
• 18:01
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And then the other analogy I always give is to LPs, which is that a lot of folks totally understand in the investment side that if you're trying to deploy large amounts of capital, you don't do thousands of direct deals.
• 18:16
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's very hard to do that at scale.
• 18:19
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You deploy into funds and then they make the decisions.
• 18:22
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And so from either perspective, either from a finance kind of deployment perspective or from the notion of like, what does it mean to make bets?
• 18:30
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know, having additional ways of doing this work in science and tech becomes exciting, so that's been a little bit of the way we've been doing it and so you know.
• 18:40
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): For example, we launched this fund specifically on AI and math, so you know, AI is in the news a lot.
• 18:48
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Part of the reason it's in the news is that every week there's a new announcement, and the new announcement says there's this new model.
• 18:56
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): This new model is showing additional capability on general reasoning.
• 19:01
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Isn't that amazing?
• 19:02
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And what you know?
• 19:04
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The term sheet that comes out attached to every model is like here's all the public benchmarks and here's how it did on those benchmarks, the implication being that these models are going to be automatically used now in the real world to do stuff.
• 19:19
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): One of the questions you might ask yourself is like well, who's doing that work?
• 19:21
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Who's implementing it?
• 19:23
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Who's actually taking the capability and then running all the experiments that then use that capability on something that really matters, right?
• 19:33
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Oh, we're going to take these models, we're going to mix them with satellites and we're going to try to see if we can detect wildfire within minutes of it starting.
• 19:43
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Or we're going to take these models and we're actually going to make the old medalists, like Terence Tao, more productive.
• 19:49
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So that's what the AI for Math one does, where the idea behind it is not like at an esoteric level, but like what is the workflow of actual working mathematicians?
• 20:01
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Are there ways you could actually build extensions of these tools that could actually allow hundreds of mathematicians to work together on a problem, and so there's actually a lot of ideas.
• 20:12
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Those are not necessarily commercial ideas, right, because it's not like the world has millions of mathematicians but from public and social goods.
• 20:21
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): If you can make working mathematicians more productive and they could solve the underlying theorems that then power the internet or power cyber, it would be a big deal.
• 20:33
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): It feels like a good fit for philanthropy where there aren't necessarily obvious market forces.
• 20:38
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): It's a brilliant model.
• 20:41
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): One of the things as a founder of a non founder of a nonprofit, so sort of.
• 20:46
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): On the other side, and whenever I talk to my peers, I think it always surprised me how much dissonance there is between you know the nonprofits, that that they feel like there is sort of the scarcity of capital, right, and when you talk to funders, they almost feel the same way.
• 21:05
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I mean, many times funders feel like we're really struggling to find places to put our money and I've talked to some of the biggest funders in the country where they did not even meet their targets and I think that it was surprises.
• 21:19
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): You know some of the executive directors that I'll talk to and it's just know some of the executive directors that I'll that I'll talk to and it's it's just, it's it's easier said than done, um, because nobody actually wants to just sort of throw money out Um, and accountability is hard right If you don't have the expertise, um, to really be able to, you know, to validate um impact, because obviously, you know, in the social sector there's a lot of massaging of impact and you know need for someone who can really sort of like see through and ask the right questions.
• 21:48
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): But the other thing that strikes me is you look at some of the biggest foundations and I won't name names, but if you look at some of the biggest foundations in the country, the institutional foundations, you know their fortunes came from this very old 20th century, sometimes 19th century industries, and so it's sort of fascinating this idea of this new crop of millionaires, billionaires who they wrote out of 90s, 2000s really, when venture capital really birthed as a meaningful, if not huge and massive source of investment capital.
• 22:24
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): So it's sort of a model that makes a lot of sense to this sort of newer category of you know high net worth individual that you know where sort of older institutions just don't have that sort of like those that maybe the interest or sort of just the experience with it to really make that sort of like the connection to the model that you're describing.
• 22:43
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Yeah, I mean, I think one way to think about it is you know, we're always heroes in our own story, so it's it's for the, for the researcher with a lab, or the nonprofit leader, for the social entrepreneur.
• 22:57
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know they're like we're doing all this great work.
• 23:00
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): How do we go out there?
• 23:01
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The same thing happens on the donor side.
• 23:03
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I think the distinction, I would say, is that I think you have to take philanthropy more seriously as a sector, and so one of the things I think, if you think about it as a sector, is that people don't actually know how philanthropy ended up operating the way it operates today.
• 23:22
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): If you sort of go back, so Open Philanthropy did these nice deep dives where they said what are the 10 to 100 best successes of philanthropy?
• 23:32
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know it's like someone actually tracking what are the outs.
• 23:36
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): If you were thinking about this as a venture capitalist like you know what are our thousand X wins for the sector, and can we then use a reference class analysis to say, well, what are the underlying components of those wins that then when we're building programs we should build?
• 23:51
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And the funny thing was they did a, they tried to do a lit review and they were like this is like not been done.
• 23:57
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Can you name it?
• 23:58
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Is there any examples that kind of mine Cause I'd be very interested in?
• 24:01
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Yeah.
• 24:01
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So they so basically, so now they put this up, it's actually a really good resource.
• 24:04
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I mean, they basically read so there's individual accounts of famous philanthropists like oh, here's how the early days of the Ford Foundation, or Rockefeller's work with the Green Revolution or the work that, yeah, you know like-.
• 24:21
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Gates and malaria, I'm guessing.
• 24:22
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Yeah, Warren Weaver did with, you know, early days of molecular biology, but it's their pinpoint, but no one had actually tried to put it together.
• 24:31
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So they took one attempt to basically trying to say what are the biggest wins and what do we actually know?
• 24:37
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Like you know, one thing they found is some of the biggest wins have a policy component, so that one of the things that those wins have is that they were enabling a policy change that then sort of ricocheted and got scaled by government.
• 24:55
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): That was sort of interesting.
• 24:56
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Second is they were often taking neglected topics, things that parts of the research community believed but were not mainstream and sort of really helped them.
• 25:06
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So there's a number of different components that they sort of found as like ways to sort of approach it.
• 25:11
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But what was interesting for me was that, one, that that research literature did not exist.
• 25:16
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And two, it's not that if you went out into the sector and you were like you know, surely you know what are the biggest wins of the sector that this was just sort of base knowledge.
• 25:27
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So where's?
• 25:29
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): where's in venture capital?
• 25:29
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): You would ask like what are you when you're making deals?
• 25:32
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Like what are you trying to emulate?
• 25:33
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): They would like, immediately, whatever their you know vertical is, they'll be able to tell you, like the 10 unicorns, that they are sort.
• 25:39
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): We're looking for the next uber or the next, you know, slack or, like you know, platform play.
• 25:45
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): In this specific sass area right.
• 25:47
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So what are your comps?
• 25:47
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Right?
• 25:48
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And so one of the questions I always say is like, who are the 10 best program officers in america?
• 25:53
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): right, like is there even a list like that?
• 25:55
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): it's not right but like.
• 25:56
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But program officers that work at foundations are capital deployment experts.
• 26:02
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know, as someone who's like worked now in this area, I have my.
• 26:06
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I have like my list of favorites of people who I think are incredibly good at spotting things before they anyone else.
• 26:13
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They're good at using money to get those ideas going.
• 26:17
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They're just like really good at it.
• 26:18
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But I'm like you know, I have like a sense making way of doing it.
• 26:22
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But I'm like these people should be heroes Like they, dollar for dollar, are creating often 100x impact for every dollar they're putting out on the street.
• 26:30
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You look them up on the website they just sound like anybody else, right, whereas, oh, I was the early check in Uber.
• 26:38
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): People will put that in their bio.
• 26:44
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So one is, I think there's not as much understanding of like how did the sector end up?
• 26:48
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But the second part is that how the sector ended up where it is is historically contingent.
• 26:55
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So I think that, and so my view is that because the early wins all came from the professionalization of a dedicated staff.
• 27:06
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So if you sort of go back and you say, where does philanthropy come from?
• 27:10
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It comes from things like the Ford Foundation, right, and then the Rockefeller Foundation, which were the pretext to then the Gates Foundation, and all of those were efforts to say, if you build, they were basically efforts to, and then the government was doing the same thing with the creation of DARPA and NASA and others.
• 27:32
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It was the idea that if you build core professional teams of experts, those experts can go out and build strategic depth and then they can be smart deployers of capital right.
• 27:39
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Smart deployers of capital right.
• 27:41
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And so every person who's come since when they say, quote unquote, get serious about philanthropy.
• 27:47
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): What they sort of go down, expected path to go down, is you build a strong professional staff and that staff makes decisions.
• 27:55
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): This is where the arrival of the program officer comes from.
• 27:59
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Now, if you just flip the coin and you say, well, how did investing go right?
• 28:05
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So this is also capital deployment.
• 28:07
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But how do we invest money?
• 28:10
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You could actually say, well, actually investment capital in the US went down a different path, right?
• 28:16
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So in the 50s and 70s you start to have these large pools of capital that need to be deployed.
• 28:23
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It used to be, they were just sitting banks.
• 28:26
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But then you start to have the emergence of these expert deployment engines, the rise of the venture capital industry, the rise of the private equity industry, the rise of hedge funds, the rise of all of these intermediaries that say we're going to become sector experts, we're going to build brand that we're really good at what we do, and then we will go to the endowments, the pension funds, the family offices and we will say we'll put your money to work and here's going to be the and.
• 28:54
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So now that system that now you know you play that out 30, 40 years, it's like direct investing is considered like a risky, you know, like bold move.
• 29:06
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): If you're a limited partner, you might say, well, we mostly invest into funds, but you know we do do some direct deals because we want to, you know, see the work up close and all that stuff.
• 29:17
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But you have to kind of justify it because people would say, like, why are you doing direct investing?
• 29:21
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Of course you should invest through funds, and in my mind these are just two sides of the same coin.
• 29:28
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Why is it that in philanthropy, direct investing through your staff is considered a smart move?
• 29:37
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): That's what it means to do serious work.
• 29:39
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Everything that you do through intermediaries, collaborative philanthropy, pooled funds, everything has a bad name to it.
• 29:46
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's like considered high transaction costs, not particularly motivated, you know you know, most people don't do it.
• 29:54
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They want to do it directly.
• 29:55
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And then on the investment side is the exact opposite, and my theory is just you basically have these two sectors running in parallel, developing different notions of what it means to be serious, but both sectors can borrow ideas from each other.
• 30:09
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): In the investment world, you start to have now people saying, well, you actually need to go pre-seed, you actually need to build studios to actually find ideas that are not yet commercially viable.
• 30:21
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You need to get more active.
• 30:22
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You can't just you know you can also have philanthropy start to say, well, you can actually have expert deployment, you can actually have funds that are led by actual field experts that are time bound, that you can park money in.
• 30:35
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So in my mind, this is like there's no one right answer.
• 30:40
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's just you need to actually think of these as basically in you know, on a risk spectrum, and so you have to think of it as a sector and say, what is it that this sector is missing, that it can learn from other sectors that are also in the business of deploying money, and say, well, why don't we have that?
• 31:00
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Like, is it like?
• 31:01
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Is it that like, the world of professional investing is totally off, like, like.
• 31:06
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Why is it that everyone uses those?
• 31:08
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And I think it's not that they're off.
• 31:10
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They've actually figured out that there's huge value to specialization.
• 31:15
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You can actually build a fund that's very specialized in a particular part of the world or a particular sector or a particular thesis.
• 31:23
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You can be world class at that.
• 31:25
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And you know, one of the challenges always is in philanthropy if you want to have many different interests, you have to build ever larger staff.
• 31:37
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): And that's hard.
• 31:38
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Not everybody wants to have that.
• 31:39
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So can you develop models that are flexible in allowing you to have like you know what I consider more pointy bets, but to have many of them Right?
• 31:52
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And currently people are like, well, you should focus.
• 31:54
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's like you know you can.
• 31:57
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Actually it's.
• 31:58
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's not a question of you focusing, it's a question of do you have ways to make focus bets without driving yourself insane, right?
• 32:09
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Right, um, you focusing?
• 32:09
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): It's a question of do you have ways to make focus bets without driving yourself insane, right, right, um, well, I think you've answered the question of what you're obsessed with, uh, implicitly, um, yeah, no, let's, let's, let's keep going down this, this road.
• 32:15
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I, I, but I have a few, I have a few reactions.
• 32:18
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): One is, um, I think the non nonprofit sector is similarly struggle.
• 32:25
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): It struggles with this the dissonance between sort of like how startups operate and there's like sort of good and bad aspects to it.
• 32:32
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): But there's a lot of like good aspects to the startup model, much of which is like relatively new and recent.
• 32:38
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): And you know, the nonprofit sector just doesn't have the, the muscle memory and, in some cases, just the interest.
• 32:46
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I think there's almost a rejection of this idea that well, we're not a company, we're trying to do good.
• 32:55
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): And I think, in founding AIEDU and I was lucky to be a part of- a couple different nonprofit accelerators that were basically designed to say, okay, let's borrow the best aspects of startup strategy and and try to meld those with sort of like mission impact driven work.
• 33:09
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Right, and you know, I think one of the one of the things that I found is, you know, nonprofits are expected to, you know, skimp on hiring and pay lower wages and hiring and pay lower wages and, um, and and funders are many, especially you know, sort of certain funders, right, are they?
• 33:30
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): They're obsessed with, like you know, restricted funding.
• 33:31
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): That's like very time bound and you know, in the startup world it's always the opposite.
• 33:37
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): It's like no, we need, we need flexible capital, we need the ability to be, to move quickly, to sort of like identify opportunities and like take advantage of like sort of the arbitrage and being that first mover.
• 33:46
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Um, I think there's what you're describing.
• 33:49
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): By the way, I I also recognize that for, like, deep science, um, I assume a lot of that is actually restricted investment and things like that like.
• 33:57
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): But in building enterprises and building sort of like a, you know like five, one, c, threes, um, there seems to be this growing recognition from funders that unrestricted capital, while it may not be the only way that we want to fund it.
• 34:11
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): It's really important for nonprofits to have access to that.
• 34:15
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The other thing that I want to say this is just a comment- yeah, I mean, I think the piece on that that I would just say is that I always you know.
• 34:27
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): That I would just say is that I always you know, whenever we do like meetings with grantees or with, just you know, with partners in the field, like I'll often let's say it's an unconference I will always do like one session on like revenue slash fundraising, and I always get a ton of people that come because I actually think it's a thing that every nonprofit leader worries about, obsesses about how are we going to grow, how are we going to stay alive, but that there's actually very little training or even mental models for how to think about it.
• 35:02
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So, for example, one mental model I give people is I say to people what do you know what your peers do Like?
• 35:12
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): At a very basic level, I'll say okay, you aspire to be a nonprofit that is operating at a 25 million a year term.
• 35:18
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Your revenue across fundraising, earned revenue, sponsorship, everything is $25 million Like, have you looked up the 990s of organizations that are at that size?
• 35:30
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They're like no, and the reason I always tell them to do to look, is that one of the things you realize is when nonprofit leaders are early, they will.
• 35:44
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The wrong lesson they will pick up from startup world is this idea of product market fit right.
• 35:49
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So they'll say you know, like I just need to find something that is working and if it works I'll just scale that.
• 35:55
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know, if you're trying to sell a product and you're like, okay, this product, people are willing to buy it for a price higher than it cost me to make it.
• 36:05
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I'm just going to make more of it.
• 36:06
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's not a bad basic structure.
• 36:10
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But in the nonprofit world, lots of things that constitute revenue have a risk variable attached to them, which is, if you just over-index on that type of revenue, you are actually putting the organization's One, the overall amount of ability to operate at that level is going to be restricted.
• 36:31
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But two, it comes with a question mark.
• 36:33
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So you know this happened like I did a lot of emergency giving during COVID.
• 36:37
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know we were like trying to get resources out on lots of important ideas and I had all these instances where they would be like somebody from Silicon Valley who's like wants to do something important, like, hey, we're going to help people find vaccines, we're going to quickly stand up this organization.
• 36:55
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They're used to raising like venture capital money quick round everything else.
• 37:00
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And so you know I gave them resources quickly.
• 37:03
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): We're in the midst of a crisis.
• 37:04
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And then they would be like, okay, like that seemed to work, I'm just going to keep doing that.
• 37:10
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And I would be like, no, no, no, this is rare, like you actually need.
• 37:15
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): If you want this to be just a short-term sprint, that's fine.
• 37:18
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But if you want this to be an organization you're going to have to build like, you're going to have to figure out what your peers do.
• 37:23
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And what your peers do is they actually build a bunch of different things.
• 37:26
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They develop relationship with the government so they can get grants and contracts.
• 37:31
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They develop revenue streams where you know they're able to like.
• 37:36
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They run a center of excellence so they train others.
• 37:38
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They're able to, like have a core of what they're working on, but they're able to then build revenue in a lot of different ways.
• 37:47
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And the experience I always have with nonprofit leaders is that they will treat whatever they have figured out as very straightforward.
• 37:55
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Oh, you know, we know how to raise money.
• 37:57
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): We just we just go meet with donors, we explain what we're doing and it works.
• 38:02
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And then I'll say, oh, have you tried to ever get a government grant?
• 38:07
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And they'll say no, no, no, you know, that's like too hard Government, so unpredictable.
• 38:12
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Obviously, that's even more true with the way that the past few weeks have gone right.
• 38:18
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But I'll say to that same nonprofit leader okay, like, just like, go on LinkedIn, find someone who used to work in that area.
• 38:26
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Okay, just go on LinkedIn, find someone who used to work in that area that knows how to do government grants, and have them talk to you, hire them as a consultant.
• 38:34
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I've had instances where then that same nonprofit leader two years later will be like oh, we are now a major provider of services and this government agency gives us six different contracts to do that, and so they went from like that is totally impossible to like this is actually a pretty core part of how we keep the lights on, and the only difference was that just the willingness to say one we need to have.
• 39:00
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): We need to try across multiple things.
• 39:03
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): We don't, we can't treat the things we're bad at as black magic and then you know, end an effort.
• 39:08
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So, just as like a little tangent, that the piece.
• 39:15
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): What makes it different when people are doing it on the nonprofit side is that you know it's almost like diversification has this huge extra value, because if you can actually grow and so that's why I always say, look up the 990s you can't find a nonprofit.
• 39:34
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): That's a handful that, once they hit a certain size, if you actually look at their cost structure, they're not having multiple different forms of revenue.
• 39:43
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's the only way to do it.
• 39:46
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So you'd have to ask yourself are we special?
• 39:48
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Or if we aspire to operate at that scale, how are we going?
• 39:53
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): to get there.
• 39:53
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Yeah, it's.
• 39:55
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I mean, there's a whole this whole conversation about grants and government grants and but what you said about policy, I think, is even connected to that Cause.
• 40:05
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I think, especially in the education space, where there's there's very few federal levers, I mean there's funding, but in most cases you're going state by state, district by district, even within states like with local control, like Michigan or Ohio, and it's it is a very arduous path to getting, because you can get one grant.
• 40:26
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): But if you're like trying to consistently get, if you're trying to get into the budget and try to like get part, you know, plugged in with some of these, like you know, local institutions that have 30, 50 years sometimes of relationships in the state house um, I think what's intimidating about that is there is no shortcut.
• 40:43
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): There usually isn't just a consultant or a lobbyist that you can hire that will open door.
• 40:47
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Now there are certainly steps that you can take and we've done that in states like Ohio and Washington and and others.
• 40:53
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): But I think I think part of our success has been this you know, I don't know that I thought it as likeification of revenue models, because we're right now highly biased towards just philanthropic capital.
• 41:04
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): But I think one of the things we've done is we've invested in long-term relationship building and ground game that has begun to unlock big state grants.
• 41:16
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): In Ohio, for example, it took us almost four years to get to a place where we've gotten like now.
• 41:20
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Two was half a million dollar grants back to back.
• 41:24
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But I think the distinction I would make is that I think you're curious about that and exploring, and I find that a lot of times folks who are building social enterprises, folks who are building nonprofits, don't you know?
• 41:41
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You have to be curious around how to put it all together.
• 41:45
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The one example I have is like when I was working in the White House, you know lots of folks would come, you know, be like can I get coffee or can we?
• 41:53
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Can we tell you about our organization?
• 41:55
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know, that's part of the job.
• 41:57
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I would meet with lots of organizations working in education elsewhere, most of the time, like if I met with them a year later, they're like oh, we're coming through DC again, would love to meet you.
• 42:05
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know.
• 42:06
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They would say oh, you know, we were working with 10 school districts.
• 42:09
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Now we're working with 12 school districts.
• 42:12
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And I remember I had this distinct memory where, like every year, I would meet with Project Lead the Way and you know, year one I would meet with project lead the way and greater, and you know, year one I would meet with them.
• 42:26
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They're like we're in 500 schools and then next year I'd meet with them.
• 42:27
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They're like now we're in a thousand schools, the next year I would meet them and they're like, we're in 1500 schools, like, like.
• 42:33
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): What is it that you are doing?
• 42:37
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I mean to be clear.
• 42:38
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I know in the venture capital world that would be seen as sort of middling performance, but in the nonprofit world that's incredible.
• 42:45
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Yeah, yeah, so agree, but I guess what I'm saying compared to the reference class I had, which is like very modest improvement in capturing the market.
• 42:55
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They were getting, you know, they were like consistently growing in these, like you know, year over year turns, and I said, oh, like what is it that you're doing Right?
• 43:06
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And so they were like then, very you know, they had a what I thought was a pretty interesting strategy.
• 43:12
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They said, oh, you know, we actually don't use philanthropy at all to run the core of the organization.
• 43:21
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): We just use philanthropy to buy down the price of the product.
• 43:23
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So they were like we price the product at what it costs us to deliver it at full cost.
• 43:29
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And then we go to philanthropy and we say we would love to provide it to this school district.
• 43:34
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Some school districts are going to pay for the full, but in this district there's a lot of need, there's a lot of opportunity, you can buy it down, but in this district there's a lot of need, there's a lot of opportunity, you can buy it down.
• 43:43
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And they said what that means is that you know, the up and down of our various philanthropic asks never affects our core, it just affects our coverage.
• 43:50
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And they were able to keep growing it out.
• 43:51
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And I was like, oh, that's it.
• 43:52
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Never heard of that model.
• 44:01
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And then the second thing they said was they said, oh, we buy into the sales market.
• 44:03
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They were like we went and we said, well, how do textbook publishers get their stuff out to everybody?
• 44:07
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And they said, oh, it's actually like there's a set formula, you know, for how do you?
• 44:12
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Actually?
• 44:12
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's a sales channel, just like device manufacturing, and you can tap into it.
• 44:16
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And for me, what was interesting was I was like this is is really valuable information.
• 44:21
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): That are sector insights.
• 44:23
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): How do you scale?
• 44:24
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): People always are like how do you scale ideas in education, how do you scale ideas in any sector?
• 44:31
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And those, I think, often exist, but we don't do a particularly good job of actually saying here are the people to learn from, we're figuring out, whereas, like you know, other sectors, people are like, oh, this is.
• 44:46
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know, if you were in the startup world, you'd be like, oh, when you're sort of raising your series A, series B, you get a sales team, the VC funds, you know, the VC firm that's investing in you says, well, given where you are, there's exactly the next, your next growth path involves this way of growing out a sales team to then get this much market capture, and I think you could bring some of that.
• 45:12
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Obviously, it's not a perfect analogy, but you can say what are the strategies that people are using that actually are working for them, that are actually allowing them when they think they actually have something that people want to be able to get way further on the way?
• 45:28
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And so I would, of course, then be like, oh, you should learn from this person, you should learn from that person.
• 45:35
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But I do think that it's the underlying mechanics of how to build effective organizations that sometimes, like, we force our non-profit leaders and social entrepreneurs to just figure it out rather than saying actually, like here are your peers or people that you should go learn from who are doing this.
• 45:57
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know, like at this level, and here's how they did it.
• 46:03
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's easier to do things if you have the right mental model.
• 46:09
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I remember asking Dean Kamen first robotics has 600,000 students in it every year.
• 46:15
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I was like Dean, how did you get it to that?
• 46:19
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): There aren't that many programs that have that many kids participating every year, right?
• 46:25
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So I asked the team, like what is their?
• 46:27
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And they had, like all this rich information about like well, we use parent advocates.
• 46:33
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The parent advocates call school districts that don't have a FIRST program and say, why don't you have a FIRST program?
• 46:38
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And they're like, that strategy ends up mattering way more than all these other strategies.
• 46:43
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I was like, oh, that's fascinating.
• 46:45
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But so that's the part I find really interesting, which is that it is that the field actually knows more individually than it knows collectively.
• 46:59
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And we can make more progress if we systematically think about what is it that our best folks, our best performers in the field are doing and how do we actually help more people who have to level up on that?
• 47:12
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Rather than you know most, you go to an education conference.
• 47:15
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Most of them people want to talk about the problem.
• 47:17
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Right, you know, we just had terrible NAEP scores come out.
• 47:21
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): People want to talk about that.
• 47:22
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know like we should talk about the problems.
• 47:24
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But I actually think like the conference that often needs to happen is like you know, like how do I build highly effective, scalable organizations against that problem?
• 47:37
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And then it's like you know, well, you know, you know like do well, do more.
• 47:49
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): And that doesn't give you a real roadmap.
• 47:51
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Yeah, we just finished conducting a part of New School's venture fund paid for us to do a pricing.
• 48:02
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I wouldn't, call it a competitive analysis analysis more just like a pricing model, um, as we talked to again, maybe co-predators, peers, um to figure out like it's actually very similar.
• 48:08
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): So, emma, uh, nearing our target, um from achievement network, which I would say is another sort of like reference non-profit that you know massively scaled, had a similar model.
• 48:18
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Right, it's like you, you're providing services to school districts like very relationship, relationship, sales, sort of co-funded through philanthropy, but there has to be sort of like a skin in the game on the part of the district.
• 48:30
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): But I mean, even in that pricing analysis, you know most of the peers that we talked to are kind of just like, yeah, we're basically winging it, basically winging it.
• 48:42
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): You know there were no.
• 48:42
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Oh well, obviously you know like this is sort of like the expected you know value of a certain you know amount of training and for this amount of pd for, and which is kind of surprising given that you know what we were looking at is like professional development, right, teacher coaching, you know advisory services, um, these are not you know niche offerings to schools like every single school in the country is paying for these things?
• 49:02
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): um, what they pay is actually often almost all over the map.
• 49:06
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Sometimes it's grant funded and sort of like.
• 49:08
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Schools don't even see the cost and so they're the the um, there is like sort of weird pricey or like lack of elasticity, um, in terms of you know, price and and um, and the fact that we've gone through so many accelerators and even throughout those accelerators, nobody really had answers to these questions.
• 49:29
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): It was often kind of, as you said, it wasn't that they're.
• 49:33
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I don't think it's because they lacked the expertise or the smarts.
• 49:38
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): It was just like this stuff you kind of have to do it yourself, you have to go out and sort of like hustle and have the conversations I want to, I want to talk about.
• 49:48
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): You know, one of the things you said is, you know, a key ingredient to sort of deploying capital effectively, especially and I'm making an assumption here that part of what is driving the need for more, let's say, deep expertise in the part of philanthropy is, you know, many of the big problems that are, uh, folks are trying to solve also involve, you know, increasingly, uh, cutting edge frontier science, yes, which is moving faster and faster, um, and so you have this and I don't know, I don't know exactly what the curve would look like, but you know, one can imagine basically starting in like the 80s, 90s, suddenly sort of just the pace of you know what's coming.
• 50:23
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): When you started at the white house in 2009, um, I guess facebook was just starting, had just gone sort of broad.
• 50:29
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I remember I sent over facebook in 07, right, um, twitter launched in the first in president obama's first term.
• 50:36
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I don't think it was even.
• 50:37
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I know twitter impacted the campaign through um, um, yeah, it was famous video, but that was that was like.
• 50:44
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): So I mean, even even in your time in the white house, I mean there was like all of these technologies that we now sort of look around and almost define society that we live in today, the media, and you know the media infrastructure, um, the media ecosystem, rather, um, and it makes a lot of sense, right, that fund, that foundations and funders need um, I think they struggle to keep up and so I guess my the question that maybe we can workshop together for a bit is um, I've talked to a lot of foundations now, done a lot of briefings, professional learning, you know, sort of different.
• 51:26
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I mean I don't, I don't report to go and, sort of like, tell funders what they should be doing.
• 51:27
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): This is more about like, let me, let me try to help you fill a specific gap that you've identified, which is you have all these foundations.
• 51:30
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): The ones that we talk to are in the education space.
• 51:31
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Um, they've built deep, vertical expertise in education and often within, like, specific components of that, like early childhood or workforce or economic equity, um, social justice, social emotional learning, right, and there's now this horizontal technology.
• 51:47
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And I think for 20,.
• 51:51
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Let's call it like you know, November 22 through like almost the end of last year, I think there was this begrudging admission that you know, ai plus education is not a separate vertical that we can just sort of opt out of Right.
• 52:05
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I think most funders, when you talk to them, they're realizing okay, this is kind of like the internet, this is something that our computers like.
• 52:11
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): This impacts almost everything that we do in some way.
• 52:14
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I think most funders will admit that they don't have the expertise internally and I'm curious what the solution is Because, on the one hand, surely all funders should invest more in capacity building for their teams.
• 52:33
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Ai, while it's very complex, you don't need to be a deep, deep expert in artificial intelligence to start having smarter conversations and talking to the right people.
• 52:43
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): You almost need someone um, like a version of me, right, like I'm not a deep expert in ai, I know exactly who I should talk to right to answer any question that would come up right.
• 52:51
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Um, that took like eight to ten years for me to build that.
• 52:55
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): That's not something you can just sort of like figure out and wing, and I think your experience the white has kind of similar um.
• 53:00
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): But the challenge is I don't think that we you know the, the, the pace of foundations.
• 53:05
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): You know this is a very slow moving ship that turned.
• 53:09
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): You know the tanker ship that turns very slowly and we need to figure out how do we, how do we, like, sort of adjust tack for this moment and at the speed that that's required I think it's a great question.
• 53:20
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I think think first let's just put the problem and then we can think about the solution.
• 53:26
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I think the problem is that it's a people flow problem is the way to think about it, which is that.
• 53:34
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And the people flow problem has a couple of different levels.
• 53:38
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): One is every sector has its own biases about who they consider like people who can speak with authority about that sector.
• 53:48
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So in biology, there's an ageism bias.
• 53:53
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So there's like, if you're going to say smart things about the future of biology, you should have a PhD and and you should be.
• 54:02
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know, have had a lab and be this far along in your career.
• 54:06
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So there's like a you know, like one of the things you will often learn when you get into biology is like there are people who are 30 who have incredible ideas, but they're like no one takes me seriously, right?
• 54:19
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): they're like growing out their facial hair like there's just.
• 54:21
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's just like a.
• 54:22
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You have to check a lot of boxes before people say, okay, like you're in, you know, like I want to hear what your, what your idea is.
• 54:31
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Computer science doesn't have that bias.
• 54:34
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Computer science has, like a young guns by here's gonna say, right, that's a different bias, definitely right, but it's like it doesn't have that bias.
• 54:40
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Computer science has a bias for generalizability.
• 54:44
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Everybody in computer science wants to build something that does everything.
• 54:47
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And if you said, well, do you want to specialize and actually think about what this computer science application means in weather, they're like that's someone else's job.
• 54:56
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I want to build the world's baddest, most amazing model that will solve everything.
• 55:02
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Computer science has a.
• 55:03
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's like you're trained to be like go as wide as possible, build the thing that does the widest amount of things, because you want to be at the bottom of the stack of the widest capability curve possible.
• 55:17
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's the instincts of the sector.
• 55:20
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): So they're looking for people who kind of have the, because these are young guns.
• 55:25
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): So, ultimately, if someone's young, what you're actually indexing on is ambition.
• 55:31
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Well, yes, but I guess what I'm saying is every sector has the things that they point to, but then that also creates the blind spot.
• 55:39
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So often computer science, it tilts towards platform.
• 55:44
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Right, I want to build the thing that everyone else will use.
• 55:47
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They will figure out how to use it.
• 55:49
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I just want to make it.
• 55:51
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So this is what's happening with the models.
• 55:52
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): We just need to make the models more and more powerful.
• 55:55
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Oh, do you have anybody on your team that's building out the applied use case?
• 55:59
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Well, that's for the field.
• 56:01
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): We will build it, they will use it Right.
• 56:09
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Similarly, in education, often the bias is like school systems are complicated, learning and school and education is hard.
• 56:16
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So to really do it well, you need people who are deep experts about the institutions themselves.
• 56:22
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Like you've taught, you've been in school systems, you're an expert about how the systems work.
• 56:28
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So for lots of very normal reasons, if you are a funder who funds into education, you staff yourself with education experts, people who spend a lot of time in the sector.
• 56:43
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The other side of that coin is that they are not native to the technology.
• 56:48
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They're not coming out of the tech sector or out of cutting-edge research labs with an intuitive sense of where the technology is going.
• 56:59
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Of where the technology is going.
• 57:00
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They're like you know, like you tell me, you know they're like, educate me about the technology and I will then develop a first principles view on it.
• 57:09
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So what that means is that.
• 57:12
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So that's one challenge, which is, every sector has its like what it has its biases.
• 57:17
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The second problem is that, as you said, when things move fast, there's always like, how do you actually stay on the like where the capability is, versus like you're saying something that is just like a refactored version of other people's smart thinking, like you don't know it well enough to actually say, like where things are?
• 57:38
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): When things move slowly, like, a lot of people actually have pretty good ground truth expertise about where things are.
• 57:45
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): When things are moving fast, the people who actually have an understanding of where things are and where things are going get small.
• 57:53
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): That's, I think, a second problem, like in a fast-moving area.
• 57:57
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But then a third problem is that when something is moving fast, it's illegible, right?
• 58:06
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So I often find that if I talk to technical people who are smart about a particular space, they will have intuitions around.
• 58:14
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know, like what would be really useful is if we had a tool that did this.
• 58:18
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And you're like well, why is that tool useful?
• 58:21
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And they're like well, there's just like a lot of interest in going in that direction and right now it's hard.
• 58:27
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So if that tool and if you tried to like write it up as a proposal, it would just sound arcane.
• 58:32
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But they have a like.
• 58:35
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So you know there's a legibility bias.
• 58:39
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You have to be able to explain your idea to people who are not in your domain.
• 58:43
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): A lot of edge ideas don't do well.
• 58:46
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They make sense to the person.
• 58:50
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They feel it Like.
• 58:51
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know.
• 58:51
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So like I was telling you about these amazing program officers, the ones who are really good, like sense that a space is ripe.
• 58:59
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): If you actually had them try to explain it to you, they would kind of, but it wouldn't like sound like the most compelling pitch.
• 59:07
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They just haven't.
• 59:08
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Because they're keeping up with the technology, they have a technical intuition that pushing in this area is like a promising area to go.
• 59:17
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You put all these three things together.
• 59:19
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It means that if you don't have good people flow, you don't have a way of bringing people who are on the edge into the decision-making process of how you deploy money.
• 59:33
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You always have the legibility gap, which is they have to explain to you why it makes sense.
• 59:39
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You have all your biases, for what is the right speech act?
• 59:44
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): What do you have to show me?
• 59:46
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And so I have this happen.
• 59:48
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Every year we run this annual tools competition, the Learning Engineering Tools Competition.
• 59:51
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So I'm on the judging panels, so I watch.
• 59:54
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): We have lots of funders who judge and you can just tell.
• 59:58
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): There's like this interesting sense where we have a bunch of technical people who join those review panels and then we have, you know, funders who join and the technical people will be like, no, that project is super interesting.
• 1:00:12
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And then somebody else will say, but how is it going to matter to teachers?
• 1:00:16
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And they'll be like I don't know, but it's super interesting.
• 1:00:20
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They'll be like I don't know, but it's super interesting.
• 1:00:22
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): If they can keep extending that voice technology, that could become the next big standard.
• 1:00:27
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's like they're talking past each other, because of course you need to eventually figure out how it matters in schools, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the technical next edge is not true.
• 1:00:40
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): That might actually be really useful.
• 1:00:41
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So one of the reasons I'm attracted to this funds model is that it solves the people flow problem.
• 1:00:49
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's like what DARPA does.
• 1:00:50
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Why does DARPA say the day you walk in on, your badge is printed your last day.
• 1:00:56
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So a DARPA program officer is a five-year sprint, no-transcript, like an awkward conversation around.
• 1:01:26
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I know you came in because you had that crazy idea about we're going to solve, we're going to build.
• 1:01:32
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know, like when Dan Wattendorf pitches DARPA in 2011, the idea of, hey, my program idea is what if there was a global pandemic and we did not have 12 years to design a vaccine?
• 1:01:46
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): What would we do?
• 1:01:49
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Current vaccine technology takes 12 years.
• 1:01:51
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): What if the world shut down?
• 1:01:53
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I want to be able to develop a vaccine in six to 12 months.
• 1:01:56
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): That was his pitch.
• 1:01:56
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): That was Dan Wattendorff's pitch in 2011.
• 1:02:00
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Harper was like that's an interesting pitch.
• 1:02:02
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Like we wouldn't like how would the military function if people we were too scared of letting them go outside?
• 1:02:08
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): This is a military need, like go work on it.
• 1:02:12
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But then when Dan like finished that program and handed it off right and which became, you know, like a bunch of the mRNA technology that we then had, he went off and did something else.
• 1:02:23
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): He didn't say I should become an expert in AI and stick around.
• 1:02:28
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): He's got his focus area.
• 1:02:32
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): He had his clear conviction, he made his mark and then he went on.
• 1:02:37
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): If you can build institutions that have good people flow.
• 1:02:43
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): People come in, they're on the technical edge, they deploy.
• 1:02:46
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You just give yourself more shots on goal, because otherwise you have the risk which sometimes happens where you hired this person because they were an expert in this thing.
• 1:02:59
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Then the organization said we also need to get smart about AI, you know.
• 1:03:03
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Then, like the organization said, you know, we also need to get smart about AI, and everyone is like kind of like reading up on like AI textbooks, try to get up to speed, like you know, you can definitely get smarter on it, but are you going to have the same technical edge in you know being able to come up with really interesting ideas to bet on edge in you know being able to come up with really interesting ideas to bet on that someone who like, like is obsessively been working on it and sort of sits at that, and so my view is that it's not an either or.
• 1:03:31
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But when you're doing stuff at the on the technology side, on the science technology side, and giving the ball, the actual technical expert and saying what would you bet on, actually changes what gets bet on, Because they bet on things that are a little bit hard to describe.
• 1:03:51
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So what happened to Dan, which is a clear example.
• 1:03:55
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So he pitches this idea that we should have fast vaccine.
• 1:03:59
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): He has a bunch of different targets.
• 1:04:02
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): One of them is mRNA.
• 1:04:04
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Ebola happens in 2015.
• 1:04:08
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): So I missed that.
• 1:04:09
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): So mRNA actually was used to develop the Ebola vaccine.
• 1:04:12
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Well.
• 1:04:12
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So here's the story.
• 1:04:13
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So he's been working on it, right Sitting in DARPA.
• 1:04:16
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Ebola happens.
• 1:04:18
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So I'm sitting in the office, this, like you know, tom Cleal, who's the deputy director, gets this.
• 1:04:25
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Like you know, he's like oh, ebola is happening.
• 1:04:29
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Like there's a supplemental package moving through Congress, around R&D for Ebola, darpa, to say, are you working on anything relevant?
• 1:04:42
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Darpa says, actually we have a program.
• 1:04:44
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So Tom talks to Dan.
• 1:04:45
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): He's like oh, this is interesting mRNA.
• 1:04:46
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So he sends that idea into the policy process for what should go into the supplemental.
• 1:04:59
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And everyone says you know all the other science agencies.
• 1:05:00
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And you know Tom has this joke where he's like you know, if they ever do a FOIA they can see.
• 1:05:03
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They all say no, they all say like the problem is it's like too speculative and Ebola is raging right now.
• 1:05:12
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Who knows.
• 1:05:13
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Like it probably won't matter to this crisis.
• 1:05:17
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Like we shouldn't do it.
• 1:05:19
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So they like work over the weekend and convince everybody.
• 1:05:22
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So it eventually does make it into the supplemental.
• 1:05:24
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So mRNA gets funded.
• 1:05:27
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Now, on one level they were correct.
• 1:05:28
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The mRNA technology did not help us resolve the Ebola crisis.
• 1:05:33
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): We figured out it didn't run for many years.
• 1:05:36
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Within eight months they were able to just put it down, but that investment then ends up making a huge difference in 2020.
• 1:05:49
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So the intuition of edge experts that are like there's something here we should push is a powerful thing, even when, like any given moment, you're going to have people who are going to be like well, is this ready to deploy, like is this really going to solve the problem right now, and like it might not, but you know, it's just a question of timescales.
• 1:06:13
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): That same bet then pays off in this like massive way a few years later.
• 1:06:18
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So the question is is like, who's right?
• 1:06:20
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Right, they were right that it didn't pay off for Ebola, but Dan was right that it was an important portfolio bet, and so that's the part that I was on your question around how do we actually keep people betting in science and tech?
• 1:06:38
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I think the biggest advice I give donors is that this is not about learning.
• 1:06:44
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): This is about recruiting.
• 1:06:49
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I think my modification to what you're saying is I don't think what you're describing is actually an answer to how does institutional philanthropy adjust tech.
• 1:07:03
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): To me this makes sense and I think you've gotten I think Walton was one of the funders that was part of the big announcement that you made.
• 1:07:09
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Walton does a lot of institutional philanthropy and it's not that they have changed the course and said, oh, we're only going to invest now in deep tech.
• 1:07:17
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): It does make sense to me that philanthropy should should have, you know, at least some of your capital you want to like you should be spreading it out in the same way.
• 1:07:26
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): That right that investors do.
• 1:07:27
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): yeah, so it's a it's a portfolio bet for them, right?
• 1:07:30
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They're doing a bunch of other things.
• 1:07:31
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I guess all I'm saying is at a portfolio level, it's useful to almost think of it as like you're betting on not just a theme.
• 1:07:42
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You're actually betting on technical experts with views and that they sort of push ahead.
• 1:07:49
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I guess yeah.
• 1:07:50
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): So I 100% agree.
• 1:07:51
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I'm interested as well as beyond sort of betting on the technical experts who are on that part of the portfolio.
• 1:07:58
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I think the other challenge that I'm seeing is in the year following.
• 1:08:03
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I'm going to talk about ChatGPT as sort of like the stand-in for basically all LLMs.
• 1:08:08
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Most of the time when people come to us and they just use ChatGPT right to talk about language models, generative AI and this isn't just funders, almost any organization, especially the big ones they'll come to us and say, oh, can you do training for our staff?
• 1:08:23
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Can you talk to us?
• 1:08:24
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): We want to begin the process of leveling up, and they generally will say, oh, here's what we want.
• 1:08:34
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): We want you to show us how we can use prompt engineering to do grant making or to do XYZ, because there's this assumption that the challenge they need to solve is like how do we implement this specific technology right now?
• 1:08:46
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): And I mean I I've been invited back enough times that I think even even when I ignore that request, it's, it's, it's gone over.
• 1:08:55
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Well, I almost always ignore the request and I go and I say I really want to zoom out and sort of talk about sort of the arc that we're on, because really what matters here is not how to prompt engineer and to do grant review and, candidly, I don't even know that I would replace the review process with too much LLMs.
• 1:09:13
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I mean, I think it could be helpful and we could talk about that, but that's actually really almost a sideshow.
• 1:09:18
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): What you should be thinking about is we are now on a very high velocity trajectory and you need to basically answer the question for yourself, or try to answer the question.
• 1:09:27
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): You know, are we on a straight line trajectory?
• 1:09:31
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): There's a lot of reasons why we might not be, but you can't just hope that things slow down and that this is a 10 or 15 year problem, because it very well could be a five-year problem.
• 1:09:44
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): And, um, and when they sort of see that and and what I usually do is I go through sort of a lot of the tentpole, um applications of not just language models, but really sort of this convergence of llms, gen, ai and like sort of robotics, machine learning where you see like, okay, you know, now we have, um, you, you know, sora is a great example of this where you have this emerging capability of simulating physical environments and it's like, and now, and within a matter of weeks, there were labs showing, oh, we would just now, you know, first shot, have these quadruped robots that are balancing on an exercise ball.
• 1:10:21
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): First shot, have these quadruped robots that are balancing on an exercise ball.
• 1:10:24
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Like, never, like that was, that would take a year in a lab, right, training this robot.
• 1:10:27
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): And so it's like, well, this clearly doesn't have anything to do with education, you know, on the face of it, but what this really means is that all this other stuff that is sort of now bottlenecked by sort of the lack of, you know, dexterity of different robotics, um, it's pretty plausible that's going to start to accelerate and what that means is the, the jobs landscape, this whole, this whole thing about, oh, gen ai is, you know, the knowledge workers the ones they really have to worry about this?
• 1:10:53
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I don't know.
• 1:10:54
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I don't even know if I agree with that, because actually, you know, maybe, yes, over the next three or four years, right, maybe, specifically coders, I don't even know if I'd say old knowledge workers, um, but if we're talking 10, which is really the, the time scale, if you're in middle school, you're thinking about a 10-year time scale as your first job, potentially 10 years away.
• 1:11:10
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Um, you know a lot of the uh low skilled, you know, uh, high complexity service jobs, um, start to become a lot more plausibly replaceable, and I guess the challenge that I have is AIEDU is not, we're not a solve for all of this.
• 1:11:31
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): There is really no one organization, one technology, one approach that's going to address this.
• 1:11:36
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): This is actually like we really need every single institution to be starting to map out, like, what is about what is going to happen, right, um, and I think what's also hard is and I think this does dovetail with what you're talking about in terms of, like, where do we find these centers not necessarily of just expertise to tell us what's happening, but it's like the smartest people will not answer the question of what are the jobs of the future, because the smartest people know that we really can't predict exactly what those jobs are right, we can, we can try to take a best guess and say, oh, it's going to be, you know things, where there's, you know that's a human communication and empathy and creativity.
• 1:12:13
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): But you know, I've talked to folks.
• 1:12:14
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Um, we're like, actually that's also right on the table and that's not that far off, that, you know.
• 1:12:19
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Know, ai could even start to, you know, augment or even replace, you know some of those sort of durable or soft skills, and so I guess the question is, in addition to sort of like the frontier work, in science.
• 1:12:30
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): how do institutions that are doing the work in schools and at the systems level start to build that intuitive ability so that they are, you know, making smart decisions?
• 1:12:42
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): And I think AI readiness, ai literacy, is a great example of this, because there's a lot of bets now being made that are very focused on prompt engineering, focused on AI literacy, and we've now been pushing very hard to say it's not really AI literacy, it's like mobile phone literacy sounds ridiculous, like Google search literacy.
• 1:13:02
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Ai literacy it's like mobile phone literacy sounds ridiculous like google search.
• 1:13:04
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Right, literacy like nobody.
• 1:13:05
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): There is no class where you learn these skills.
• 1:13:07
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): They're ubiquitous and seamless, um, and we should expect I mean, I think it's a very reasonable assumption to make that ai is sort of following that path and so sure, ai literacy is a component.
• 1:13:17
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): We teach kids to use google search and we probably talk about their phones less than we should.
• 1:13:21
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): We probably need to do a little bit more education in terms of like digital, you know digital citizenship, citizenship and you know online safety.
• 1:13:29
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): But there's there's a lot more to what how schools need to evolve that is touched by AI, but not necessarily a problem of how do we implement AI, and so it's like, yeah, that's a very hard and complex conversation to have and so oftentimes I'll get into it with you know different organizations and you know they might be very compelled by it, but they're just like they don't have the capability to now go back to their stakeholders and translate Right.
• 1:14:00
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): And you just talked about talked about a very similar challenge on the deep tech side To me the big challenge of AI.
• 1:14:09
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Right now, everybody's obsessed with deep seek.
• 1:14:12
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I do want to talk about that a little bit if we have a chance.
• 1:14:15
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): A lot of the experts that I've talked to have said, yes, this is a big deal for standard capital and these big models and we have to figure out how cheap it actually was and is this really a paradigm shift in the training?
• 1:14:26
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): But even if it was radically cheaper, the question was is this going to accelerate implementation and education?
• 1:14:32
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): And most of the people I talked to said probably not, because the affordability of models has not really been the limiting factor.
• 1:14:39
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Organizations have been struggling because these are huge bureaucracies that just don't have the muscle memory or the capability to like adapt their workforce capabilities and really think about what does it look like to sort of adapt or retrain or sort of like, adjust hierarchies or and.
• 1:15:00
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Yeah, I think it's two different things, so I think one.
• 1:15:03
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So when I joined back in 2009 so part of the reason the first first portfolio I got was, um, president obama had just given a speech at the national academy of sciences.
• 1:15:17
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): This is coming in from the bush administration.
• 1:15:20
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The big theme of that speech is putting science in its rightful place.
• 1:15:24
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But then the president put half of that speech was actually about math and science education.
• 1:15:29
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The president had this line, which is we need more engineers and less financial engineers financial crisis, right.
• 1:15:35
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So part of his sort of view was that, like, what is the economy we're trying to build and what is it that our children deserve to be ready for?
• 1:15:46
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): That economy that's going, and this is in the midst of a financial crisis, where part of the big conversation was are we too financialized?
• 1:15:52
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know, coming out of the great financial crisis, there was a lot of question around what is this?
• 1:15:57
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know, I mean, it was tough, right.
• 1:15:59
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Like, what are we building towards?
• 1:16:01
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But what was interesting was I took that portfolio and STEM as an acronym was not really used.
• 1:16:10
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It was kind of an obscure academic idea.
• 1:16:13
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But science, technology and your math we would always have the president say it out loud rather than use the acronym but we started to work on it, but at the time we did some polling that we came across, which basically boiled down to a headline important but not for me where they interviewed parents and they said what do you think about, like, your kid getting trained on this stuff, you know, getting access to advanced science courses and math courses and you know all this stuff?
• 1:16:41
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And they said, well, you know all this stuff.
• 1:16:42
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And they said, well, you know my kid's more of a reading kid, my kid's more of a writing kid, more of an english kid this kind of thing.
• 1:16:47
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's like, important, I think it's important, but maybe it's not right.
• 1:16:51
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So that's 2009.
• 1:16:53
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You basically fast forward three years.
• 1:16:57
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But 2011, 2012, gallup does a survey and Google gave them some support A couple of different people but Gallup does a survey and basically starts to ask do you think that it's okay that only 25% you know somewhere between 10 to 25% of high schools offer computer science?
• 1:17:16
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Like, would you want computer science to offer your kid's school?
• 1:17:19
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): 90% of parents say I want it offered at my kid's school.
• 1:17:24
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): There's no difference between African-American parents versus Hispanic parents, right?
• 1:17:27
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So suddenly you're starting to see this like cultural shift.
• 1:17:30
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Like I started to just bump into STEM camps, stem programs at schools.
• 1:17:37
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's like so we went through this like cultural shift.
• 1:17:40
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The number of students who then get to college and express interest in computer science as a major like first quadruples and then goes up 10x.
• 1:17:47
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Right, you're starting to have schools that don't offer computer science.
• 1:17:50
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's maxed out.
• 1:17:51
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): We go from economics and psychology as the baseline most common degree to CS.
• 1:17:58
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The interesting thing is we somewhat won the culture war, which is like there's a huge surge of demand by students and by parents.
• 1:18:11
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But then the question was did the system actually then?
• 1:18:15
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): This is way before the most recent wave on the AI side.
• 1:18:19
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Parents were already like this is kind of the future, I want my kids to have access to it.
• 1:18:24
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Students wanted to get access to it, but the system hasn't really caught up.
• 1:18:30
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): We still have shortages at the college level for people being able to get a computer science undergraduate, and that's criminal.
• 1:18:40
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): How is it that you could enroll somebody in a university they want to be a computer science major and you're like oh, we just don't have enough faculty to let you be a computer science major.
• 1:18:50
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You have to pick some other major.
• 1:18:51
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Like that's the future, right?
• 1:18:53
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So I think that there's ongoing work that we need to do to explain to people how important it is, but I think parents are already there.
• 1:19:04
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I think a lot of students are already there.
• 1:19:06
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They want to be there.
• 1:19:09
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The question is are the institutions actually making the investments so that if you want to be able to learn about this stuff, you want to actually not just be a consumer of it but be a maker of it, you want to be able to keep progressing, right?
• 1:19:23
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So one of the things I always say is like, why don't we have an AP engineering?
• 1:19:27
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Yeah, why don't we?
• 1:19:30
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Right?
• 1:19:30
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Like we haven't actually added STEM APs in all these things that we value for a long time?
• 1:19:37
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Right, we have, like, an art history AP.
• 1:19:39
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): We don't have an engineering AP.
• 1:19:41
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): We have an art history AP, we don't have an engineering AP.
• 1:19:44
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So if you wanted to say I'm progressing and I want to show that I'm actually doing cutting-edge engineering work, what are the summative courses that exist in high school, and have we created any flagship new ones in the past 10 years?
• 1:19:57
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): And there's also even lower-hanging fruit.
• 1:19:59
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): You know, as Eric draws to data science for everyone and I mean what he's described when he describes, you know, his vision of not just like a course called data science in every school, but like just providing data sets so that social studies teachers or English teachers can have kids go through.
• 1:20:14
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): You know he was like, oh, we can give kids access to, like you know, spotify data sets.
• 1:20:19
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): And I was like I want to.
• 1:20:20
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): That sounds so freaking cool.
• 1:20:21
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Right to Spotify data sets, and I was like that sounds so freaking cool and just the idea that some of this obvious stuff has been.
• 1:20:28
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): But to me, this is a really exciting place where philanthropy should feel incredibly empowered, because there is no other mechanism.
• 1:20:36
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): In my view, I think the private sector, I think ed tech really burned a lot of bridges and I think the tech really burned a lot of bridges where it's and I think the productization of AI is sort of is going to is definitely going to lead to sort of a repeat heartburn where, you know, schools right now they're having like literally thousands of vendors coming in like pitching all of these AI tools and, and so I think this is where philanthropy can actually come in and sort of like think more holistically and there's obviously work that's being done and yet it seems like what my and maybe you can validate this I was talking to somebody at I don't know if I should say one of the big education philanthropy consultancies and they were saying that the K funders, who've been doing the work for a long time, are sort of exasperated at the, just the lack of progress and it's just so complicated and multi-dimensional.
• 1:21:31
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Um, they feel like we just haven't seen the return on investment.
• 1:21:34
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Um, I am curious if ai is sort of this sort of opportunity to reinvigorate that, because it's, it is this new shiny object, and the question is, how do we make sure that to reinvigorate that?
• 1:21:40
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Because it's it is this new shiny object, and the question is, how do we make sure that it doesn't become so shiny that it?
• 1:21:47
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): You know, computer science comes to mind, right Like the that there are a lot of folks who are saying, well, do we even need to teach computer science anymore, now that AI is obviously really good at coding?
• 1:21:55
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): And I'm like, yes, we need more, we need more CS.
• 1:21:58
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): We're not even close to done with that work.
• 1:22:08
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So I mean, I've always been sort of adjacent to the education community because it's like I've always had my foot in, always working on science and technology and variety of fields.
• 1:22:14
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But one thing that I've sort of observed being like adjacent but working in education for 15 years is that I think the field overall is at a you know, it's not, it's at a low confidence point as to what does it strongly believe, right?
• 1:22:32
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So when I came in to this world back in you know, 2009, you know I guess I was the lawsuit we were doing was before that.
• 1:22:39
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know, the leaders in the field have, I mean, in some instances potentially incorrect, but strong opinions.
• 1:22:48
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They said you know, we need to have internationally benchmarked standards that we are teaching kids to a high standard so they're actually ready for college and career.
• 1:22:57
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): We need to have performance benchmarks for teachers.
• 1:23:00
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): We need to have high quality assessments that are actually touching you on a range of skills.
• 1:23:05
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): We need data systems to track.
• 1:23:07
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): We need to be closing down low performing schools.
• 1:23:11
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Like there was like a huge kind of agenda for what the school reform looked like, right, and it was controversial, but it was like it had folks working on it, you know, step by step.
• 1:23:24
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The political coalition that spanned left and right for we can do more and do better slowly fell apart.
• 1:23:32
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Right, it fell apart on standards, then it fell apart on teachers, then it fell apart on assessments and then it fell so it like it just kept losing legs of the stool.
• 1:23:42
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And so part of the question, I think, is that people ultimately said well, it can have many goals, you can pick which goal, but we don't have some strong opinion about where we're trying to take the sector.
• 1:24:02
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I think part of my goal for why I sort of talk a lot about education, r&d that one of the roles the federal government can play is actually funding the R&D of it is that, in a world in which people don't have, you know, we're in this place where different districts, different states, everyone is sort of going in different directions One place where you can make a meaningful contribution is at least trying to make the R&D better.
• 1:24:26
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But I think this idea of like, can we be doing more at a coalitional level to make sure our kids are ready?
• 1:24:35
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Is something that you can do even in this political environment, because if you say, look, we don't want just our kids to be AI ready, we want, you know, we want them to actually be like, feel confident and building with AI.
• 1:24:49
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Well, that actually can involve churches.
• 1:24:51
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): That actually can involve a whole bunch of cultural institutions.
• 1:24:54
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It can involve schools.
• 1:24:55
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It can involve like it can actually feel all hands on deck where everyone is like well, what is my part?
• 1:25:02
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I'm building the data sets I'm providing.
• 1:25:04
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): This is the way the after school community can be part of it.
• 1:25:07
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So, even in a world in which it's not like we're going to like do this one big thing and then it will like education will be on a better pedestal, you know, you could still build what I sometimes consider these coalitions of the willing, and I actually think on this sort of like how will AI integrate and how will we be ready, the coalition approach can actually be quite powerful.
• 1:25:31
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So that's the thing that I think on the optimistic side, the work you do is actually more possible and just as possible in this current political environment.
• 1:25:41
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): If you told me, well, you know, the only way I make progress on whether kids are ready for AI is if I get this one big, important policy win.
• 1:25:49
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And if we get it, we win.
• 1:25:51
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): If we don't get it, we don't win.
• 1:25:53
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I'd be like, you know, I don't know if that's going to work out.
• 1:25:57
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Yeah, but we, I mean our biggest success story to date is still the state of Ohio, which people you know, when I was growing up, it was a purple state.
• 1:26:08
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): It is now red, maybe even deep red, and it's our messaging was exactly the same, like we did not have a separate set of talking points, so like we literally were talking about um, and I think what?
• 1:26:22
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): What resonates is, you know, a lot of parts of the country that Republicans, um, you know, associate with these communities that are sort of like left out of this conversation around sort of like equity and sort of like economic access and empowerment.
• 1:26:36
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Um are are communities that resonate with the story about, know, the changing workforce, right, and in ohio they had, you know, they had the industrial revolution and I mean this was sort of mechanistic automation and also like offshoring, um, and and the experience of becoming, you know, a member of the rust belt, uh, is still very visceral to them, and so there was an intense desire to say, okay, how do we get ahead of this?
• 1:27:01
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): And the same it's that same vantage point is is in michigan, purple, bluish state, um, and both states are interesting because they have local control, and so the reason we were so successful in ohio was also because we were going in and saying we're not trying, like our success for us is not ohio, the governor or the department of education, like launching this big initiative, it's like we've what we're going to.
• 1:27:27
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Our role is we're going to identify this coalition of community based organizations.
• 1:27:32
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Um, and I think what's, and I think what's what's maybe unique about, maybe not unique about our approach, but, um, I see echoes of our approach in certain other very what I would consider to be highly successful nonprofits like Data Science for Everyone, where our goal is not to get really big and to become the Teach for America with thousands of core members in every single state, sort of like doing the work and success for us is actually staying relatively small and that allows us to now go into these communities and say we're not here to just be, you know, we're not here to ask you for help bringing AIEDU into Youngstown, ohio.
• 1:28:11
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): We're here to figure out how can you become the like, the organization or that superintendent that brings your community into the future, and we'll give you the tools, we'll help you, We'll help you do that I am interested in.
• 1:28:22
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): You know.
• 1:28:22
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I think this model really works.
• 1:28:24
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): We were just in Washington State this week for a series of statewide summits where we were pulling in money from Googleorg bringing in rural educators.
• 1:28:33
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): A lot of the AI summits don't necessarily happen in places that are accessible to rural educators, so a lot of the work we've been doing is getting them scholarships so they can go and attend the Obama campaign neighborhood precinct model.
• 1:28:45
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): It's like you build a platform.
• 1:28:47
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): You give the resources to this person you don't have to pay them if they feel like they are change makers for their community.
• 1:28:54
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Um, you end up seeing like incredible amounts of work and drive, and I think that's been replicated in education.
• 1:28:59
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I'm curious outside of the work, do there's like all these other components that you have visibility into in terms of like the cutting edge of science?
• 1:29:09
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But what I like about your approach is it feels messier, but the bottom up approach, I think, has more durability, more durability.
• 1:29:25
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So I think that one of the things I, one of the things I always encountered when I worked on education was, you know, I was, for example, very I was fascinated by the maker movement.
• 1:29:30
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Right, it's like idea that oh, there's all this interest around making, allowing students to have the tools of production.
• 1:29:39
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know, like what's the 21st century shop class?
• 1:29:42
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And you know, we were like, we were like culturally interested in how do we bring back shop class as like a 21st century concept.
• 1:29:50
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So we hosted the White House Maker Faire.
• 1:29:52
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): We did a lot of things to sort of celebrate this idea that we should have more dedicated spaces where you do long-term engineering projects, that sit, that they don't comfortably sit with art or engineering or you know, like they sit somewhere in the middle and they allow students to be ambitious in what they're building.
• 1:30:10
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): What's interesting for me is that, like whenever I go anywhere, there'll be like tons of maker spaces, like people will talk, oh do you want to visit our school?
• 1:30:20
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And they'll show me their maker space.
• 1:30:22
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They'll have like pictures from sometimes they'll have pictures from White House, maker Fair there and all this stuff, and we were not setting a lot of policy, but we were celebrating this bottom-up movement where people said these classes feel too rigid.
• 1:30:37
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): We need to give students the space to set ambitious projects that they own, that they're going to build, that they're coached on.
• 1:30:46
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So what I like about your approach is that you're saying like, look, there's a lot of people that want to like lead.
• 1:30:53
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They don't want to be like, oh, chat, GPT or AI is this thing that will happen to me?
• 1:30:58
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Like they want to be part of the story.
• 1:31:01
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They want to make sure the students are part of the story.
• 1:31:02
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Like they want to be part of the story.
• 1:31:03
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They want to make sure the students are part of the story.
• 1:31:04
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They want to be part of the story.
• 1:31:04
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They want to be part of how this will roll out.
• 1:31:07
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And you're actually giving them like a format, a voice, a structure to do that and saying to them, the political leaders well, this is actually what leading will feel, like you know.
• 1:31:19
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So I guess I mean, obviously you believe this, but I think the reason why I think it's useful is often this is considered the kind of fuzzy part of education.
• 1:31:32
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Like it's like oh, that's the feel good part of education, like, oh, we're doing stuff and getting people together.
• 1:31:38
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): And then there's the serious part of education and I think what people sometimes misunderstand is the bottom-up stuff ends up often being the stuff that you come back 10 years later and it's the stuff that's like now continuing to grow, whereas lots of stuff that's like sort of the hot idea just kind of burns off.
• 1:32:00
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You don't encounter it as you sort of visit schools in the future.
• 1:32:06
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So I think one potential thing that I always try to remind people is what has staying power, what have been ideas, what have been products, tools, movements that have a lasting impact on how education works, versus not?
• 1:32:23
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): So you talked about the importance of having folks that are really engrossed in these frontier technologies.
• 1:32:32
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): That may not be able to know exactly where we're going, but they have this very potentially powerful intuition, as I was going into 2025 and people would ask me sort of like what are you expecting, for you know AI this year and I was you know I think, like I was preparing for this sort of plateau moment where, you know, all these new models start coming out and we're starting to see incremental but maybe, like you know, decreasingly interesting capabilities and sort of.
• 1:33:02
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): We sort of at at this place where it's like, oh, a lot of the cynics who were telling us that at some point we're going to hit these walls, where you know we've already run out of.
• 1:33:12
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): You know, essentially high quality data, synthetic data is polluting, the models and sort of basically useless, and you know, either the more chips won't actually do anything, we'll sort of like there's no rule that I mean.
• 1:33:23
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): So far the scaling law said that like the more gpus you throw at ai, the better the the models will be.
• 1:33:29
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): But there's we don't necessarily know that that will continue sort of indefinitely.
• 1:33:33
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Um, or maybe the chips just get really hard right to build um, and then dc comes out and and also you know, uh, oh one, and from OpenAI that you know, are, and I know benchmarks are kind of fuzzy, but we're seeing.
• 1:33:48
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): We are seeing increasingly interesting capabilities.
• 1:33:51
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): It really does not feel like we're slowing down, and one of the biggest challenges I guess the other hurdle that I didn't mention is cost.
• 1:33:58
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): You know, if these models remain wildly expensive or energy hungry, then they will just never be useful enough at scale.
• 1:34:05
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): So now we have this model that perhaps to some degree is more efficient, and whether or not that approach itself is going to be the game changer, it does feel like all the people in the AI community that I talk to they're talking a lot more seriously about there is this increasing confidence that we're on this trajectory.
• 1:34:33
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): So this is a two-part question.
• 1:34:35
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): One, where are you on that?
• 1:34:38
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Are we accelerating, decelerating or just steady state, which has been quite fast, obviously from 22?
• 1:34:45
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): And then, however far out you're willing to portend what's in store over the next and I don't want to go too far out, but let's say five years, a meaningful amount of time, but near-term that it's like, worth people paying attention to and actually preparing for.
• 1:35:04
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Yeah, I think one way to think about AI is to compare AI to crypto.
• 1:35:12
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Which is one thing I always say to people is what is the?
• 1:35:18
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): What is the Delta between what?
• 1:35:21
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): How much public enthusiasm there is about something versus what do technical experts think?
• 1:35:26
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): People who kind of understand the core tech do they think it's a big deal versus kind of just broader enthusiasm of people who are trying to monetize the technology.
• 1:35:38
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know, I would say like crypto has always been something where the people who actually understand it technically are like thisize the technology.
• 1:35:42
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know, I would say like crypto has always been something where the people who actually understand it technically are like this is good technology, like a base, you know, having a ledger technology that is.
• 1:35:51
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Like the blockchain, maybe more specifically, yeah is like powerful, but they're like you know it's ledger technology.
• 1:35:58
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's like useful, but there's like you know it's not, like they're not spending all their time being like, oh my God, things are happening that are blowing their mind.
• 1:36:10
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Ai is an area where, when you talk to technical experts who follow it closely, they are more worked up about the pace of change than people who are watching from afar.
• 1:36:28
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So it is like a it's, it is inverted.
• 1:36:33
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): It's in.
• 1:36:34
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So I think one of the things that is not that I'm like in the prediction game, but I think one, one sort of mental model you should have is like what do people who are closest to a technology on the technical level think?
• 1:36:46
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Do they think like, oh, this thing is happening slower than we expected.
• 1:36:50
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): That's interesting, it's happening faster than we expected.
• 1:36:52
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): People who are close up to it are startled by the pace.
• 1:36:57
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Including people who aren't incentivized to fuel the hype Exactly.
• 1:37:04
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's not just the company speaking in their corporate voice, people who are in settings where they're doing it on a personal level.
• 1:37:11
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They've left these companies.
• 1:37:13
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They're tracking a lot of different sort of.
• 1:37:17
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): And the researchers that have been in this field for in some cases, like 20 to 50 years.
• 1:37:22
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I was just talking to peter norvig um like who, like like he was, like I'm like the the ai hipster right right, and you know I mean it's.
• 1:37:31
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I think he's a little bit more circumspect than others.
• 1:37:34
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): He's not uh, you know, I don't know if elated or sort of like, sort of brimming with excitement is how I would describe Peter, but he's definitely not skeptical.
• 1:37:45
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): You know, I think folks like that are who I would turn to to kind of get a sense of like.
• 1:37:48
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Is this around?
• 1:37:50
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): the hype train.
• 1:37:50
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So I think so.
• 1:37:51
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I think one thing is just that Technical folks are genuinely think that this is something important and progressing quite quickly.
• 1:37:59
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Now how quickly is open question, but you know, I think's.
• 1:38:03
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I think one thing.
• 1:38:04
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I think the second thing is that I think it's sometimes hard for folks who are not watching it closely to keep track of the pace of change.
• 1:38:15
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The one data point I sometimes give people is just take something simple like cost for a million tokens, where you know maybe 18 months ago it's like $36 for a million tokens.
• 1:38:30
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know today that might be 18 cents.
• 1:38:34
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So you know that's a you know 500 X right Sort of improvement where you you have a reduction in cost that is like quite substantial for an 18-month period and you know like new things are coming out all the time, like DeepSeek that might be, like that might knock it another on the cost curve.
• 1:38:57
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So the way I try to think about it is, at least in the short term, like next couple years.
• 1:39:08
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): We are living through what one could describe as a massive capability overhang, which is, for lots of economic reasons and the way the field is structured, everyone is racing to build more capability.
• 1:39:22
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Let's make the models better and the way the field is structured.
• 1:39:24
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Everyone is racing to build more capability.
• 1:39:26
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Let's make the models better.
• 1:39:26
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Let's deploy more compute to keep advancing the state of the art.
• 1:39:30
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): If you then just look at the other side of the coin, for how much investment, talent and everything else is going to exploit the models, then to use this capability curve for real-world use cases Education, health, you know, social uses, like can we detect wildfire out of the sky by pairing these models with satellites?
• 1:39:54
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It is minuscule.
• 1:39:57
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So, like somebody was describing to me this project that basically, given the potential of Starship, would launch a set of microsatellites, pair them with advanced AI models and basically try to catch the signature of fire around the world with the goal that you could detect a new fire start within five minutes of anywhere in the world.
• 1:40:19
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I was like, how much would that cost?
• 1:40:21
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Start within five minutes of anywhere in the world?
• 1:40:23
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I was like how much would that cost?
• 1:40:24
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They're like, well, you know, if launch costs are where they are and cost of AI models all in $40 million, right.
• 1:40:30
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So like $40 million on the capability side wouldn't like get anybody out of bed.
• 1:40:35
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You can like they're like, oh well, to train one of these models in the open source.
• 1:40:40
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): So these, you know, like 40 million is like the latest models are now nearing a billion, right?
• 1:40:46
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I know the GPT-4 was like 100 million, Right?
• 1:40:48
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): so there's an expectation that, like you know, if it was 100 million, that, like this next model, if they just the scaling costs continue, could end up being in those ranges.
• 1:40:58
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Certainly the compute costs of, like you know, the cluster that Elon's building.
• 1:41:05
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's just not the compute costs, it's a lot.
• 1:41:07
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Then you can impute it towards whatever model they're building.
• 1:41:10
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But the point just being is the idea that you could detect wildfires within minutes.
• 1:41:16
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): The all-in cost is $40 million.
• 1:41:20
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): People are like oh how do we put the funding together?
• 1:41:22
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): How do we go after it?
• 1:41:24
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So I think we're living in an era where one piece of this is racing ahead while everything else is still in the slow lane, where it's hard to find the money.
• 1:41:36
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It's hard to find the talent.
• 1:41:37
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You have to find talent that can bridge those divides and we're slowly coming across.
• 1:41:42
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So I think if you were to find talent that can bridge those divides and we're, like, slowly coming across.
• 1:41:43
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So I think if you were to look at that, I would say, like there's.
• 1:41:48
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Obviously, if you have something you can contribute to improving the capability of the models, go at it.
• 1:41:53
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But there's a lot of gold in the hills around the exploit side of the curve, because the amount of money and the amount of talent that's chasing that is still quite limited compared to its potential and you get to be the beneficiary of the capability curve.
• 1:42:12
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So that's the like when I sort of look at the space, looking back, I say, well, are they spending the same 100 million on building the next generation bio model?
• 1:42:24
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They're not right.
• 1:42:25
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So that's where the next value.
• 1:42:27
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): If once you start to see that, then you'll start to say, oh, you're now starting to see the pathway for how this core capability is going to spread into the economy.
• 1:42:39
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Um, I mean, that was perfect.
• 1:42:41
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): And I think it leads me to my last question.
• 1:42:44
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): And before we get into that, I just want to thank you so much for coming on and nerding out with me.
• 1:42:50
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I learned a lot.
• 1:42:52
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I didn't realize makerspaces were originated in the Obama administration.
• 1:42:58
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Or the.
• 1:42:58
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Maker Faire the White House Maker Faire.
• 1:42:59
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Yeah, because it was.
• 1:43:00
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I mean I think it was like a brain they predated.
• 1:43:01
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Yeah, because it well it was.
• 1:43:01
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I mean.
• 1:43:02
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I think it was like a brain it predated.
• 1:43:03
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Yeah, it was a brain, it was a concept.
• 1:43:04
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Yeah, it was a brainchild of this guy, dale Doherty, who used to write this publication called Make Magazine, and there was like this mini cultural movement that started around Maker Faires, which were these like kind of hobbyists that you're like making stuff in your backyard and then you'd come to a Maker Faire and you would show other people what you had made.
• 1:43:25
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): What was interesting was kids started to show up with the stuff they were making, and so this idea started to bubble up with this idea that, like you know, it's like the old World's Fair, Like why not just show up with like you know, like, if you think about the early days of the computer industry, you know where does Steve Jobs and Woz show up to show their first Apple computer?
• 1:43:50
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): They show up at the Homebrew Computer Club.
• 1:43:52
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): What is the Homebrew Computer Club?
• 1:43:55
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): It is a hobbyist club where people who used to build their own PCs you know they would get a panel, they would get the keyboard and they would like build their own PCs you know they would get a panel, they would get the keyboard and they would like build their own personal computer which show off their own designs right.
• 1:44:08
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So one of the ideas that you always have to remember is, like hobbyist communities, especially hobbyist technical communities, sometimes just front-run the next technical breakthrough.
• 1:44:19
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Look to where the hobbyists are, and so one of the ideas behind the maker movement was is like well, you know, like there's learning going on here, like we should think about this as an educational movement, just like anything else.
• 1:44:32
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So I found that very interesting, you know, but like we used to do stuff with it.
• 1:44:37
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But people used to be like, how does that fit, like education, like policy, and I would say, well, this is actually what makes America right the backyard, the garage, the builder, like why not make that into something every kid can see?
• 1:44:54
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Yeah, and I see parallels with.
• 1:44:56
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): We just had Isabel Howan from the Learning Accelerator at Stanford and they've had amazing success with these hackathons where people with no background in software engineering are showing up and building these incredible tools, fruits of all this sort of like frontier.
• 1:45:23
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): You know AI development and identify, like the use cases and sort of play this role of the sort of like ambassador of bringing AI to sort of like these you know big, maybe institutional.
• 1:45:30
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): You know components or sort of corners of our economy and society.
• 1:45:34
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): What are, how do they stay current, I mean, and maybe be as specific as possible, like are there any specific researchers or blogs or podcasts that you can share?
• 1:45:43
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): We'll drop the links in, but yeah where do you re-digiticate to stay?
• 1:45:47
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): up to date?
• 1:45:48
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Great question.
• 1:45:48
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I mean there's a couple of different things I'll point to.
• 1:45:51
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So we actually run a listserv called the Learning Engineering Listserv, which I'll send you a link.
• 1:45:56
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): But if folks I mean it's relatively nerdy for folks who want to keep up on what are the you know what is the kind of AI and education community up to, on technical papers, new tools, who's building their next you know company and everything else, it's an interesting way to sort of be involved.
• 1:46:15
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So if you're like a PhD student or you're coming up in this space and you're early and you're like what's the water cooler for people who are kind of building at the intersection of AI and education, that's.
• 1:46:26
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): That's, I think, one.
• 1:46:26
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I think you know we run every year a learning engineering tools competition where you know we say, at least at the entry track, it can be an idea on a napkin, right.
• 1:46:38
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So we have teachers and students and others apply with ideas.
• 1:46:41
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So the next round of that will open this fall.
• 1:46:43
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So that might be an interesting one and we can I can include a link to that.
• 1:46:46
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I think the other place is that you know there are, I think, the place where, if you're motivated on this, you can get to being on the bleeding edge really quickly is pick some domain you really care about.
• 1:47:01
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You really care about early learning.
• 1:47:02
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You really care about dyslexia.
• 1:47:04
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You really care about some very you know you really care about, like some very precise problem in education.
• 1:47:11
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): If you can think really hard about unsolved problems in that sub area that are prediction problems, things that like nobody gets to because we just don't have the people to do it, try to think about what is the intersection between the thing I care about a lot and AI who's doing work on it?
• 1:47:33
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): What would be the to-do list I actually think you can get from.
• 1:47:37
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Hey, I'm outside this space.
• 1:47:40
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): I'm actually one of the three people thinking about the intersection between this, between AI and this particular sub area of education or sub area of science, like faster than people think, because the people who are cross domain experts are actually shockingly small.
• 1:47:58
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So like if you said, oh, who's doing the best work on road safety and AI, it's actually not that many people you would think.
• 1:48:06
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Or using satellite imagery and AI to spot wildfires, that's actually you could fit them in this room.
• 1:48:13
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): And they're all busy and don't necessarily have the time and they have ideas that you can talk to and you can actually.
• 1:48:20
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): So people often want want to.
• 1:48:22
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know advance to like I want to figure out where there's like the open space.
• 1:48:26
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): You know like pick something you care about and be like I'm going to try to figure out who's actually doing stuff at that intersection.
• 1:48:35
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Yeah, I mean, I feel like in accessibility, it's almost like you know, real time transcription and translation.
• 1:48:40
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): It's like the capabilities are now quite incredible.
• 1:48:41
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): And you know real-time transcription and translation.
• 1:48:42
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): It's like the capabilities are now quite incredible.
• 1:48:45
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): And you know we're working with a couple of organizations Dyslexic Edge and CAST and you know it's still very early days, right, and I was actually a friend of mine was asking me like oh, is there a tool where you can, you know, basically use AI to sort of like speak to someone who's uh, deaf or hearing impaired?
• 1:49:04
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): And it was sort of like use generative ai to create the signs?
• 1:49:07
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Um, there's I, maybe, if someone can comment, if they actually are aware of one.
• 1:49:12
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): I was surprised that, like how, how little I could find online, even though it's just such a straightforward use case and it probably wouldn't take very much money or very much.
• 1:49:21
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Right, you know a bit a very big team to figure this out.
• 1:49:24
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Um, I, but I think, in part because the capabilities are are literally eight, you know, 18 months old, maybe even less, for something that's like truly like usable enough that you know you could actually go and put it out into the wild.
• 1:49:37
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Um, well, um well, that's a great way to end it.
• 1:49:43
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Um, there's a lot more that we could discuss but uh we'll have to save that for another time.
• 1:49:45
  Alex Kotan (aiEDU): Yeah, Um, yeah, Thank you again for for joining and, um, good luck on uh, Renaissance and all of the stuff that you're hopefully going to be successful in building and funding.
• 1:49:54
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Yeah, thank you so much.
• 1:49:55
  Kumar Garg (Renaissance Philanthropy): Thanks for having me.