In a study in Sierra Leone, Google DeepMind’s AI tutor, Guided Learning, helped students gain more than a year of extra schooling in just over eight weeks, according to research director Irina Jurenka. The tool is Gemini rebuilt to teach, designed to avoid acting as an assistant that does work for the student. In the trial, Gemini asked guiding questions in 76% of its messages and gave a straight answer 2% of the time. Jurenka noted that while no one can 100% guarantee a language model’s responses, the team worked to bias the distribution of answers. The project began four years ago as an educational grand challenge inside DeepMind, motivated by Jurenka’s desire for immediate social impact after the COVID lockdown.