Friday Follow Up

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I just finished my final business trip of the year and am looking forward to not going through airport security for another two months. An early Christmas gift to myself.

Big Tech Goes Direct

That trip included a visit to Google’s Learning the AI Era summit at the Googleplex, which provides as lovely an atmosphere as you can image in a lockdown facility (just how many security staff were involved in keeping us from straying to the free coffee and food truck?). I’ll have more to say about this visit in a separate post, but today I’ll note that the event was not really a commercial for Google’s AI initiatives for education, all brought together under Ben Gomes and coordinating YouTube, NotebookLM, LearnLM, Google for Education, etc, etc. A commercial would imply that Google is trying to sell something to someone, to convince organizations to choose Google over other options.

Instead, the event was more of an invitation for analysts, university administrators, and partners to see what Google is doing with AI for learning, and maybe to provide feedback, regardless of what happens in EdTech. We’re going this way regardless. There were university partnerships highlighted, such as Study Hall from ASU and Crash Course. What there was not was a group of EdTech executives from LMS, SIS, or CRM vendors whom Google was courting to use Gemini over ChatGPT. And only one slide that was competitive in nature (how LearnLM was better than ChatGPT) in the presentations.

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