For many, many years, humans were the top species, the most capable things on this planet. Soon it will not be that case. The creativity in the AI can probably surpass what we can do too. The AI is advancing so fast with my own kids, I have three kids. I'm a math professor at Carnegie Mellon University. I'm not even sure what's going to happen to university. In fact, actually, I'm going to say as a parent, I don't really even care too much if all of my children go to university. Because I think that at this point, by the time they go to university, boy, the world will be so different that the most important skill that you could have is that ability to synthesize your own idea.
I interview lots and lots of high school students who want to work with me. And during the interview, the way that I interview is I ask them questions until it's very clear from their body language that they have never seen this question before. I wait until it's really clear that they have never seen this before. And then I want to see how you think. The expectation is that you won't solve it. And so then I start to give hints. And then I want to see how quickly can you synthesize them into a solution for a problem we have never seen before. Actually, that's also creativity. We really need this skill now.
I'm Po Shen Lowe. I'm a mathematician who likes to solve real world problems. In real life, I'm a math professor at Carnegie Mellon University. But I'm also a social entrepreneur where I've been running my own educational solution, which tries to make the world a more thoughtful place. My biggest surprise was last year the International Math Olympiad problems. Four of them were solved by Google's artificial intelligence. The International Math Olympiad has six questions. And all six of the questions are very, very original. They are so original that when the national coaches meet, they all look at the problems. And they all try to make sure nothing too similar to those problems has ever appeared in any contest or anywhere in the world before.
The questions are supposed to be really original. But nevertheless, the artificial intelligence was able to come up with solutions to four out of six, which is more than I can do. The only unique thing about human intelligence is that we hopefully care that humans still exist. The creativity in the AI can probably surpass what we can do too. In schools, one of the biggest places where students are using AI to treat under homework is for their writing. This, unfortunately, could make a huge problem for human civilization. Because you just have to think, what is that AI anyway? It's a large language model. How is that AI so good? It's because it's good at language.
It's good at looking at the patterns of words that often appear. If many kids lose this ability, we'll get many kids who grow up and aren't able to think logically. All they're able to do is just take whatever anyone else gives them. They'll just be dependent. If you're already grown up and you already have that skill and you're using the AI to achieve that task because that's for your job. Great. Okay, you're using it to do a job. But if you're in school, why are you doing that writing? It's not because the writing you make is going to make money directly. No, no. That writing is actually part of your own learning.
Using AI to do your writing homework in school is like saying, I'm not going to run a mile for exercise. I'm going to drive my car one mile for exercise. How much exercise you get? You get none. You're going to grow up and you're not going to be able to be as physically fit. Similar thing here was mentally fit. And just this observation that the power of the large language model is the L, the language. That's why we need to really make sure that all of our kids, and if you're watching this and your students, this is why you need to be really, really good with language.
For the next generation, all of these skills like reading and writing, communication, logic, these are all going to be very important because these are how you develop a good way to think. People used to go to school to learn how to do the homework and do the exams. Today, everyone needs to learn how to grade the homework. This is the huge difference. I've done lots of different kinds of teaching. I teach people all the way from their international Math Olympiad team. I will also go to schools and teach sixth grade in schools where unfortunately there might not even be any math teacher for the whole seventh grade.
So I go and cover the entire range of education. I find this to be very interesting because that helps me to learn what the challenges are. The whole point of a school Math test is to see whether or not you listened and you practiced. In fact, all the Math competition problems in the US and also in many parts of the world are of this type, which is why today the way that I approach education and training is to try to help as many people as possible learn how to do those questions which they won't have seen before. But I want to emphasize the reason I've been doing a lot of work on this nowadays is because when I was doing Math competitions in the 1980s, the way you got good at it was by thinking.
Every problem which was new was a chance to practice mental flexibility. Today, unfortunately, there's a huge industry around test preparation and cramming, where people try to help students get high scores on these strange math questions by showing you all of the strange math questions that you might possibly see and that involves studying for many, many, many, many hours. So that the hope of the parents is that when the students see the test questions, they are never surprised that they have done everything many, many, many times. This causes students to have to go to school and after school and so many hours are actually very bad for the student. But even worse, it takes away the students' chance to invent.
So that's why what the world needs now is a large-scale way for everyone to learn how to grade homework, for everyone to learn how to come up with their own way of thinking. Not just how to do the problems. A long time ago when I started with education, I was actually just thinking about how to help people do math problems. Today, when I think back to that time, I think I was probably a solution looking for a problem. In the sense that somehow I thought it would be very important for people to be good at math. But then things that happened later in my life as I became the national coach of the US Olympic math team, I saw situations where there were so many clever, so capable people who were still so depressed and furthermore, after they graduated from high school, they even didn't really know what to do next because they thought that the point of life was to find ways to prove you're better than other people.
That's when I realized we actually will do much better if we think about the philosophy to start with. Right? The philosophy in life should not be how do I do everyone else? If you do that, you will, you'll probably never be satisfied. But if your philosophy in life is, hey, it is actually addictive to make a bunch of other people happy. Oh, now I can do it for five people. Oh, now I can do it for five hundred people. Oh wow, now I can get thousand people that come to this thing. The more that you do, the more you want to do. And the fun part is that correlates also with traditional success. Then I realized, ah, I should be trying to push this worldwide. And if I don't do it, who will?
With the things I've done in my life, I know I have an opportunity to go and say, you know, I've seen what happens if you go all the way in pure competition. I've seen what happens if you go all the way and just practice problems to do the best on tests. Actually, that's not the right target. And I realized that because of my background, I would be able to shift mindsets. Then I said, okay, this is what I have to do. Money doesn't buy you happiness, but money is important for impact and influence. So in fact, it's very important that the things that we build are capable of generating enough money to create the impact. This just happens to be what drives me.
10 years ago, I had this crazy idea that maybe if we made a website that would collect people's ways of explaining math and science topics, then maybe people would explain the math and science topics, and it would be free and everyone would be able to learn math and science. And I remember thinking, oh, that can't be very hard. We'll be done with that in a few months. I'm glad I thought that, because I'm still working. So I had this whole thing called XP. We were making a website with free explanations, but that didn't actually have a business model of its own. It wasn't generating money.
So I had to find some way to support all of that. In 2019 and April, we started creating our own version of that in the United States of America, where we took charge of filming me teaching, and then we had a product which consisted of me teaching math that people could watch recordings of, and they would pay for it. And this made some amount of money. But then this one we still found there were pain points. And finally, about two years ago, I realized, you know what? What people really want is to have a live human experience with somebody else who's an expert. The only problem is that's quite rare and hard to find. And there's also another challenge, which is that ideally that person you're talking to is friendly. If the person knows a lot, but it's not friendly, that's actually not useful either, right?
This is the hardest thing to deliver in education, because it's the least scalable. Of course, in entrepreneurship world, we always think about scalability. And yes, you can find one brilliant coach who teaches 10 students, or maybe even 20, or maybe even even 100. That's a small scale compared to the size of the world. And then that's when I suddenly realized I can make a giant win-win-win situation. So the main thing that I do now is an ecosystem. It's actually an ecosystem that I invented, which unites many different types of people to all contribute in ways where everyone is winning. One pain point, which was for the people learning math. Then the second pain point was for the people who are very, very strong at math already, from which building the EQ would be even better. Although I do want to emphasize, this is helping finish up to become extraordinary.
And the thing that made me realize, the key that maybe realized I could put everything together, was an experience that I had about five, six years ago, which is that I also took improvisational comedy classes myself. Improvisational comedy classes are acting classes. And I was doing that because I was trying to learn how to communicate better, to get more people interested in math. But I realized that even a math nerd like me can take those classes and then become able to talk to a few more people. So then I realized, let me add that. And then I walked over to our drama department. And I found out that actually there are lots of people who have extraordinary drama skills who are actually indeed very interested in paid part-time jobs to help to coach the high school students.
So that's the third pain point. The third pain point is there are people who absolutely love what they're passionate about what they're doing into acting and drama world. But there's a practical need, which as well, how to find a stable part-time job flexible hours that they can use to support their passions. So suddenly win-win-win. We have all three lined up and that's why this thing scales. Actually, everyone winning is very important because I work with high school students. And so in our company, any time anyone wants to ask high school students to do anything, my answer to my employees is always that thing you want to ask that high schooler to do.
Can we explain to their parent why for a very busy high school student, that thing is the best thing they can do with their time? If I cannot explain that, they're not doing it. So this is the discipline that we run it to. This is how strongly we make it a win-win situation. We will never have a high school student doing something unless I could explain myself to their parent. We suggest it for your daughter to do this because it's really good for her to do this. The thing is, beforehand, it was hard to imagine there would be a way to do that until the answer became, oh yeah, because while doing this, they will get to learn from a broad way or Hollywood quality actor or actress that's going to help them become extraordinarily successful.
Now win. But you see this took eight years to come up with two more years to scale. The speed at which we grow is purely just based on how long it takes for people who have middle school children to realize that oh, there are these classes here where the class looks as good as a twitch gaming stream and it's taught by math geniuses who are smiling. You know, these are things that people could not imagine that you put all together at the same time. And as people discover this, they actually switch over, they start joining our classes, then we can bring more high school students and the scaling power this can go to is we estimate that this easily can grow to 100,000 high school students in the US.
That's 1% of the US high school students. Teaching about a million middle school students. If you look at our live program, it looks a little strange because you will see that the only subjects that we teach is a pretty small number. Algebra, geometry, combinatorics, number theory. Why do we cover these? We cover these because these are a curriculum that teaches you how to think. The only way to do that is by giving them questions that they have never seen in school before. So I need to find a source of problems that you will not see in school. Actually, that turns out to be the middle school math competition curriculum because the people making those problems were trying to make problems that you don't see in school.
But the difference between the way we do it and the way that lots of the training centers do it is that we are trying to use those as opportunities to make you able to practice the thinking instead of just showing you doing the question that way enough times. So the answer is the topics that we cover, specifically chosen because that will be enough to teach your student how to generate their own idea. Our philosophy is if you finish all of that, you will discover that you can learn anything. Our goal is not to make it so that we have classes for you for every year of your life.
Our goal is to make it so that as fast as possible, you don't need any classes from anyone ever again. Right, so that's one particular piece. But going forward, I think that one of the skills that people will really need is that aspect of actually wanting to create value and delight in other people. Why do I say this? I say this because for many, many years, humans were the top species, the most capable things on this planet. Soon it will not be that case. Soon, you're going to have to work together to survive.
The only way to get other people to want to team up with you is for you to authentically and deeply be a person who is motivated by creating value in the other. If you are not that way, you are a bad partner and people will not want to go in team with you. If they don't team with you, you will die. You will lose opportunity. Because eventually, all of these kinds of jobs you can use AIs to do, then why would anyone want to employ you? Why would anyone want to have you as someone on their team? Presumably only because they somehow felt like you are going to create some value on the day.
They like that vibe. They like you. I think what we really need is to get more and more people who are figuring out what the real problem they solve is. But unfortunately, sometimes when kids just think about problems, they don't realize the way that you solve a problem is through empathy and through relating to other people. Why? Because you can't solve a problem unless you can visualize it through their eyes. I do spend a significant amount of my life working towards the goal of being better at simulating the world. I also use AI for that.
I think I'll give one exact example. I was just a Nashville Tennessee last week. I just saw a really. I thought very, very talented singer in one of the bars there. Wow, she's good. I just got curious, how hard is it to be able to get a performing spot on Broadway in Nashville? So I asked AI. I was actually not just interested in AI telling me about the days. I want to see the links. Tell me more. What is the background of this particular place that she's performing at?
I will make my own conclusions based on knowing, oh, I see. So there's all of these different people who would want to do this thing, right? So if you're one of the people who got picked to do it at this prime time, oh, this makes logical sense. See, I'm using the AI to build the logic inside my brain for understanding country music performance. And why was I trying to understand? Honestly, it's because these days I also work with professional entertainers. So I'm also myself, all this scouting.
The big heart of this is I wasn't using the AI to write the report for me. I was using AI to make myself better at that particular goal. Being able to simulate the world is the superpower that makes someone able to be a successful entrepreneur. Simulating the world allows you to imagine a product or imagine a strategy and then play it forward in your head. What would happen if I did this?
The work I do is really focused on building up autonomous human thinking. That's why the core word I use for the philosophy is thoughtful. I've watched over many years as people are becoming less and less interested in thinking. I think that actually happened because people found out that they can entertain themselves with iPads. And this unfortunately makes people also not have as much interest in concentrating and thinking about something. AI could make that much worse.
The fun part of life is having your own contribution to the life that you live. Actually, I think that's why people actually like creativity. It's fun. People like to draw. People like to put their own flavor. People like to wear their own fashion. It expresses themselves. This expression of yourself, it would be un-lost if everything you do is efficient but just reliant on the AI which told you how to dress today. That's why I want more and more people to discover. It's fun to think. It's fun to have your own twist on things. Your own idea that you inject inside.
The other dangerous thing that happens if people lose the ability to think and reason is that it makes it far easier to deceive people. The world is so complicated that if you look at any situation in the world, sometimes depending on how you tell the story of what happened, you can say statements that are all true, which make you come up with a different feeling. I think it's really important for people to be critical and for people to be able to understand what's really going on. Because sometimes when someone's talking to you, they have an agenda.
Like I'll be frank, I have an agenda. I'm trying to build a more thoughtful world. I'm going to be very, very upfront with you on that. Anyone who's watching this video, I think it's really important that we have as many people as possible find out how much fun it is to delight other people and to have the ability to think and figure that out. That's my agenda. But you see, everyone has an agenda. And if you can't think for yourself and you just listen to some authority, what if that agenda is actually to your detriment? You have no way of knowing.
The technology revolution really made all of us start to realize how much of an impact bias has. In the sense that whoever makes some technology tool has some bias, what does bias really mean? Well, I guess there's a mathematician. The way I'd say it is 2 plus 2 is always 4. That's right. What's the point of life? Oh, I don't know. Like there's no clear definition. What's the point of life? I think the point of life is to delight as many other people as you can. But I know that you might not necessarily agree and it's not a problem.
I think it's healthy that we may have different starting points. The part that becomes unhealthy is where there is only a very short menu of options, each of which is followed by a huge number of people. That's actually where bias comes in because we just mentioned so far in this video a couple of different sources of AI providers, right? We have Claude, we have OpenAI, there's also Gemini, if you're in China, there's DeepSeek, there are all of these. But that's relatively few.
If you think about it, that would be sort of like saying, well, the world has lots of different viewpoints. It has five of them, really? No, no. The world has seven and a half billion different viewpoints. There's seven and a half billion people. One of the beautiful things about, I guess, humanity is the fact that there are so many different ideas all out there. And let's be frank, some of the ideas are bad. Some of the people are unfortunately in prison because they decided to kill someone else. Hopefully, we all understand that.
There's a bad idea. But the point is, there are lots of different people who are trying different kinds of ideas, lots of different philosophies. And in this great big marketplace of ideas that is the world, we see some ideas come out and the variety also allows us to have more creativity, perhaps. And when I look at the different AI tools, well, it's actually well known that they have certain biases.
This is also why for me, when I try to get the news, I don't only go to CNN.com. I also go to Fox News. I tune my social media so that my ex is all tracking Republican right-leaning viewpoints. And my Facebook is all tracking left-leaning viewpoints. And I look at both of them every day because I want to see what's going on. And my expectation is, yes, you're going to be biased. You have a certain view on the world and you think you're right. And you're biased too.
You have a way of thinking of the world. And my job, as I simulate the world, is to try to figure out where do you disagree? Ah, you disagree, perhaps on a few values of how people should live their life. And then that causes you to have different ways of reporting on the story. I think it's all the more important now that there's AI out here, which sounds like a very convincing, reasonable person.
It's even more important that people look at things and say, all right, is that really the story? Because I think that the AI is going to be so good at looking complete that you may think you have the entire story on a controversial situation, but you don't. What I do for fun is I like to meet and try to understand people whose backgrounds I don't fully understand yet. This is actually what I do for fun. This is also why we're talking right now, I happen to be talking to you in New York City. The way I got here overnight is I took the bus, the overnight bus. You know, some people don't take the overnight bus because who knows who you're taking the bus with. But for me, I'm actually not scared by that. That's just called real world.
You can't understand the real world unless you actually start going into various parts of the real world. I think my message of how to create value is you cannot create value if you don't interact with people. You cannot just theoretically think about the value. And the more people, the more you can understand people of different backgrounds, understand means have some idea of how they tick, what are their needs, what are the limiting factors, what do they want to do? The better you are at modeling this, the more effective you will be at coming up with a solution. I started going to city after city after city, giving math talks in public parks. I actually set a schedule.
I put the schedule on my website and I said I'm going to go to all these cities and people could just sign up to show up for the talks. And at the beginning, people were wondering, well, anyone's show up, but actually there would be like 50 to 100 people showing up at these talks in parks. And by the way, that was a fun journey because in order to do that, I was traveling around from park to park with all the AV equipment speakers and everything to be able to have a stage in park shelters all around the US. But while doing that inadvertently, that was customer discovery. Because I was able to suddenly interact with and talk to thousands of parents and students, which started to make me realize what kind of challenges people had.
And that's why just a probably about one to two months after that, the big idea came. The big idea of, oh, we can actually have all these middle school students who I've met. They can all learn how to think all at the same time while these people who are brilliant become extremely polished so that someday later in their careers, they can be really successful. So that was the idea. It was like somehow you cannot really find the pain points if you're not seeing people. That's also why with a lot of the work that I do, I will go into schools. I love to work on education and I do it in a way where even just last night, I was writing to somebody who is involved with a large network of schools and their schools, I believe, serve students who are also disadvantaged.
Now, instead of just putting money or putting resources from my side, what I said is, I'm very interested. Can we arrange for me to go into some of your schools and teach sixth grade? What I'm explaining is that with the way I do anything, if I want to work in a sector, I go and myself step in and start doing the work and see what happens. And this is actually how I came up with all these ideas because actually the ideas that I'm doing are all things I've personally experienced myself. I've experienced being a math person taking acting classes.
I've experienced being a person learning how to think taught by somebody who knows a lot of things and also smiles. So all the different parts give me these ideas. And the other story I'll share is, I don't only go to rural America, I go all over the world. In fact, as I started running around rural areas, do I walk into the elementary school? I walked into the fourth grade classroom and I was just going to do my usual thing, Mr. Poe, the substitute teacher, so I wrote on the blackboard. What is one plus three plus five plus seven plus nine equals? As soon as I wrote equals, behind me I heard a bunch of kids yelling 25.
I've actually never experienced before a classroom. The kids were all suggesting ideas. They were also very respectful of each other's ideas. This was one of the best classrooms I have ever taught. Those are wonderful kids. And I just told you the profile of the area was high poverty. I asked the person who took me around afterwards. These kids are amazing. Do they play games on their phones? And the lady told me they don't have phones. It's because of the money. In fact, they might not even have the internet access. So that's an interesting commentary. Then I said, what do they do for fun? And she said, well, they just figure out how to make their own games.
So then I realized actually that huge pool of authentically interested and curious kids throughout rural America who already have the widths and the creativity which they've built from the way of life that they have very smart kids.