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Comment by tripdout | Hacker News Reader

Yet Khan Academy is free.

But Khanmigo isn't, it's $4/month.

I'm willing to bet that it will be in the future. Maybe a free version that can run locally on Copilot+ level NPU's or GPU's, perhaps taking advantage of software & hardware cost reductions to get it down to a level that they can talk Gates into paying for it.

> I'm willing to bet that [Khanmigo] will be [free] in the future.

If anyone doubts this, just take a look at what Khan Academy currently offers for a fresh perspective. Make an account and click around (https://www.khanacademy.org/signup); it should be easy to see that a ton of effort went into making this and, as far as I can tell, they run purely on donations. I wouldn't be surprised if the current cost of operating Khanmigo is just being passed along by Khan Academy at no markup, or even a slight loss.

I think over the time GPUs will become cheap or some other break through will make running LLMs cheaper. Then this fee won't be required.

That's a lot cheaper than I was expecting it to be. With the comments around here I was guessing it was closer to $80 a month.

Khanmigo is free for teachers I believe

Who are not the learner which is the context of this particular writeup. Gates is talking about using LLMs to assist students as tutors, and that is not offered for free ($4/month, $44/year).

The idea is that teachers can use it with students.

For parents who want to use it with their children, $4/month (for your entire family!) is very small compared to anything out there that you want to use to supplement your kids education (other than Khan Academy itself, which is free). Is it affordable to poor families in Bangladesh? No, but the barrier to sponsorship is low: "for $50K a year you could sponsor it for 1000 families in Bangladesh" is not a difficult sell.

Also, I expect Sal to raise funding to give it for free to those who can't afford it (just as he did with Khan Academy). At least it's not some VC-backed venture that we know is going to be look for a 10~100x return, so we can be thankful for that.

> The idea is that teachers can use it with students.

https://www.khanmigo.ai/pricing

Yes, teachers can use it with students if they pay for it. One day it might be free for students, but it presently is not. Which is what I was pointing out to the person I originally replied to. This discussion is about Khanmigo, a subset of what Khan Academy provides, and it is not free for students (though, yes, that cost is not exorbitant). But it does make it difficult to claim that Khan Academy is free when the specific feature being discussed is not.

I guess we'll see what the pricing is for school districts, but I expect it to be much lower than most educational tools, again given that it's made by Khan Academy which has proven that it's not out for the money. But something's got to cover the cost of the servers--maybe school districts will find sponsors. Overall, even if only parents and teachers use it, I'd say it's a big step forward.

the bet is probably that the teachers will vouch for Khanmigo at schools but I’m sure Microsoft doesn’t mind giving away Khanmigo for students too

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