Azeem Azhar

And it was really interesting to see that scale.

And that scale is enabled, of course, because there's a public health system in China, the public health insurance.

I'm going to absolutely brutalize the pronunciation.

I think it's

through that, Yidutech serves more than 34 million people in a dozen cities.

So you get this point where actually you do see all of the benefits of a large population which you can serve and then start to get the data and the interactions from all of this.

Another founder I spoke to, I mean, I spoke to many, was a really impressive guy called Derek Lee.

And Derek is the founder of something called Squirrel AI, which is an education platform.

Now, we've got these ideas, right, that AI can adaptively deliver kids' education, keep them in that flow state where questions are,

Hard, but not too hard.

Progress can be very quickly tested, and the difficulty of the lessons can be adapted appropriately to maximize learning rates.

Derek was a winner of the International Maths Olympiad.

He was an absolutely superb, superb high-energy person.

And, you know, as he started to talk to me about this app, you know, as a product person, I was genuinely pretty impressed with the way he thinks it through.

So the way they think through delivering curricula through an AI teacher where there's no human teacher involved is to think through how do you deliver a degree of metacognitive cognitive capability that might vary from subject to subject.

So the art of metacognition, if you're doing maths, is quite different if you're doing perhaps a social science.

What that required then was a very, very granular breakout of a series of skills and sub-skills that then become pathways that are adaptive pathways that students get through.

They've served 24 million students.

They also give this service away for free.

to millions of students in the poorest areas of China.