What in the world is Sal Khan up to?

Sal Khan, founder and CEO of Khan Academy in his Opinion piece for the NYT on AI and the workforce (gift link):

Because of this, my friend has decided to commit 1 percent of his firm’s profits to help people learn new skills for jobs, demonstrating what leadership looks like in the A.I. age. I believe that every company benefiting from automation — which is most American companies — should follow this lead and dedicate 1 percent of its profits to help retrain the people who are being displaced.

And you'll never guess what platform would provide this job training...

This is not to diminish Khan's attempt to pursue a noble cause, and one that may somehow prove true in the coming decades. But there's no denying much of the hype around AI is predicated upon grandiose visions of a future, which at present have little to support the premise of unprecedented job loss. And it is curious that the only people that generate this effervescent frenzy around AI are the ones who materially gain from these predictions. But Khan intentionally created his company as an non-profit (unlike it's freemium, for-profit peer, Duolingo). This structure should act as a defensive barrier against the perverse incentives that push companies to echo these verbose claims. Planting his flag on the spurious nonsense of AI as an ideology seems juxtaposed with the supposed goals that Kahn puts forth. While Khanmigo, he asserts, is not designed to replace a teacher, Khan is more than confident that AI will replace "80 percent of [the] work force."

Admittedly perplexed, I descended a touch deeper and found some more confounding examples of strange moves KA and it's creator have engaged in that raise red flags. Peter Greene wrote a great piece examining how KA's own research is fudged, and John Warner wrote a scathing review Khan's 2024 book about AI and education, which compares more to a barking charlatan to peddle his AI projects than that of an educational expert. But to what end? It is not as if the organization was in dire need of cash prior to the introduction of Khanmigo in 2023. Just look at the CEO's previous salaries or KA's own supporters page to see for yourself.

The situation raises all of my internal alarms, warning me of a large-scale grift, but I cannot seem to spot it.

This very public display of amity between Khan and OpenAI over the last few years is suspicious at best and at worst threatens to undermine the conceptions of what the public believes a quality education necessitates. The discourse online about KA seems overwhelmingly positive by educators, students, and autodidacts alike, but there are many vocal detractors of the traditional education systems as well who use KA as rhetorical ammo to show the uselessness of contemporary schooling. There is a troubled history of those who wish to rid us of one of the greatest pillars of democratic society that is socialized education. The advent of GenAI is just one more stage in this fraught war.

I'll leave you with this 2 year old aged-like-milk comment from a deleted account on r/OpenAI on Khan's partnership with the company, which really speaks for itself:

Education as wel know is obsolete. I expected a subscription model first to come into play, like onlyfans for teachers. But seeying this, I reckon that step can be skipped. Give it a year and you have your personal ai teacher that know how to work with you, knows what buttons to push to make you understand new concepts. Same for musical teachers.