Binance co-founder Changpeng 'CZ' Zhao aims to provide free education to one billion children around the world through his Giggle Academy project, he shared with the audience at Token2049 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE).
"I think in a few years, I want to teach for free to 100 million or 1 billion children," Zhao told the audience. Giggle is a free online platform that provides elementary education through game-based lessons.
"With today's technologies, it's not too hard to create an educational app that still attracts children," said the cryptocurrency entrepreneur.
Giggle's concept document outlines the project's goal to provide free K-12 education globally by offering non-traditional educational courses on topics such as negotiation, finance, entrepreneurship, sales, legal, accounting, blockchain, and AI at each stage.
In April 2024, the Binance co-founder announced he would leave the company and focus on educational initiatives as he prepared to serve a four-month prison sentence for violating U.S. money laundering laws, a sentence he completed in September 2024.
The growing role of generative AI in education
Zhao also discussed the widespread use of generative AI in compiling course materials for Giggle Academy, a growing trend in online education and traditional education.
In June 2023, Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology announced it would allow limited use of generative AI in the classroom, including ChatGPT, to support discussions and classroom teaching.
The KTCT high school in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, an elementary school in India, introduced a humanoid AI teacher to one of the school's classes in February 2024 as part of an initial pilot program.
Andrej Karpathy, former executive of Tesla and OpenAI, founded Eureka Labs, a startup specializing in creating AI-supported teaching assistants, in July 2024.
The goal of this startup is to bring expert-level education to students worldwide and overcome language barriers.
"This symbiosis between teachers and AI could run the entire curriculum of courses on a common platform. If we succeed, anyone could easily learn anything," Karpathy wrote in July 2024.
