The biggest opportunity in AI + education isn’t tutoring or study aids—it’s building end-to-end machines that transform people. Institutions like Stanford, TKS, and Buildspace are machines: you feed in someone at a 2/10 capability, the system applies structure and mentorship, and a 6/10 walks out. Tools give access; machines build capability.
I was in his Buildspace program and it was just completely original and changed how I looked at what schools could be. The curriculum was all organized around a person appearing with an idea for a thing they wanted to work on. Build is like work on your own projects for the way you make your living—that was the dream everyone wanted there. You arrived with that, and then you learned how to do it. I think that’s a powerful model for a lot of people.
The other thing that was really exciting was that they used Twitter and other social media as the place to promote what was being worked on instead of a closed system like Slack or Discord. It was all done publicly. I liked that a lot.
The human capital factory framing—I think it’s just one lens among several. The utility of it is that we need to get out of the rigid way of seeing education that we have. An imperfect lens, if it’s seen as imperfect or as temporary, is useful because it gets us out of our stodgy way of thinking. Which we absolutely have to do.
But a lot of Farza’s framing is purely vocational—how to make everyone Steve Jobs. But what about teaching Steve Jobs classics? I’m curious about how liberal arts fit in. I’m particularly excited by worldbuilding, by Ada Palmer’s ExoTerra experiments in sci-fi worldbuilding as a way of learning curriculum. There are a lot of different hats to put on. But I think this model is the start of at least fresh thinking.
“You feed Stanford an 18-year-old who’s a 3/10 in their ability to impact the world, and four years later, a 6/10 walks out.”
“With AI, people have the tools to become anything, but tools on their own won’t lead to mass change.”
“The companies that figure this out won’t be ‘education companies’—they’ll be human capital factories.”