Arvind Nagarajan

Founder, GT Anywhere

[Arvind Nagarajan @arvindnaga]

@gkamstra Thanks man! The future belongs to those who build :)

[Arvind Nagarajan @arvindnaga]

I’d say even more valuable. He should really try to carve out some time to guest lecture on AI to the brightest middle schoolers in the country :)

[Lulu Cheng Meservey @lulumeservey]

While Andrej is a great technical mind, I actually think he’s just as valuable as a teacher

Building AI is hard, but getting the rest of society to adopt, govern, & use it well is even harder

That takes trusted people who can explain complex things in clear, reassuring ways

[Arvind Nagarajan @arvindnaga]

@AlenaShterenbrg Yes, working on it. No dedicated program for professor families yet, but we're exploring university partnerships where there could be mutual benefit. DM me.

[Arvind Nagarajan @arvindnaga]

This is what we built GT. Not in theory, but a daily reality for hundreds of kids.

But the thread is missing the hard part. Personalization isn't the bottleneck. Motivation is. Content has been free for 15 years. The reason every kid isn't learning 3x faster isn't access... it's that no one's solved why kids should care.

Technology is 10% of the solution. The other 90% is the reason most edtech fails.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk thinks the entire education system is built on a broken assumption.

That every student should learn the same thing. At the same speed. In the same order. At the same time.

Musk: “Everyone goes through from like 5th grade to 6th grade to 7th grade like it’s an assembly line. But people are not objects on an assembly line.”

The model was designed for a factory economy. Standardized inputs. Predictable outputs.

That economy is gone. The assembly line is gone.

But the education system still runs on its logic.

A student who masters algebra in two weeks sits through eight more weeks because the calendar says so. A student who struggles gets dragged forward because the schedule doesn’t wait.

Neither is being served. Both are being processed.

Musk: “Allow people to progress at the fastest pace that they can or are interested in, in each subject.”

AI doesn’t teach a classroom. It teaches a student.

One at a time. Every time.

It skips what a student already knows. It finds where they’re stuck and approaches it from a different angle.

It adjusts in real time. Not at the end of a semester when the damage is already done.

A student obsessed with basketball learns fractions through shooting percentages. A student who builds in Minecraft learns geometry through architecture.

The subject doesn’t change. The entry point does.

No teacher with thirty students can do this. Not because they lack skill.

Because the math doesn’t work.

AI doesn’t have that constraint.

Musk: “You do not need to tell your kid to play video games. They will play video games on autopilot all day. So if you can make it interactive and engaging, then you can make education far more compelling.”

The brain isn’t broken. The format is.

Kids learn complex systems and strategic thinking for hours voluntarily. Then walk into a classroom and can’t focus for twenty minutes.

That’s not a discipline problem. That’s a design problem.

Musk: “A university education is often unnecessary. You probably learn the vast majority of what you’re going to learn there in the first two years. And most of it is from your classmates.”

Four years. Six figures of debt.

And the real value comes from the people sitting next to you. Not the institution charging you.

The degree doesn’t certify knowledge. It certifies endurance.

Musk: “If the goal is to start a company, I would say no point in finishing college.”

The system was built to train employees. If you’re not trying to be one, it has nothing left to offer you.

Every lecture. Every textbook. Every curriculum. Now available instantly. Personalized to any learner. Adapted to any pace.

The question isn’t whether the old model survives.

It’s how long we keep forcing students through it while the replacement already exists.

[Arvind Nagarajan @arvindnaga]

@mackenzieprice @AlenaShterenbrg Confirming - CHOOSE Act approval in Alabama is on our roadmap and we're working on it. DM me in the meantime so we don't lose you to the timing gap.

[Pamela Hobart @gtmom]

At the GT School talent show yesterday, one of our students actually recited *200* digits of pi 🏆

[Pamela Hobart @gtmom]

🚨 help me hire my boss! (come be my boss??)

GT Anywhere seeks a Head of Marketing. Our mission is scalable gifted education - the most overlooked niche in education.

[Alex Smith @ninja_maths]

Students who learn advanced math early have an early advantage because they can

- open doors
- take harder classes
- do more interesting projects
- meet stronger mentors
- start meaningful work

much earlier than most.

Those differences compound, & can be life-changing

[Alex Smith @ninja_maths]

Acceleration is about removing unnecessary delay for students who are genuinely ready, so they can keep building their knowledge while the foundations are strong and the momentum is high.

The alternative is often presented as “deeper learning.” But often, it's just slower pacing, imposed for reasons that have little to do with the student's best interests.

[Arvind Nagarajan @arvindnaga]

Couldn't agree more. Our middle schoolers have shown they can take on high school and even college level chemistry.

[Michael Strong @flowidealism]

Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth has been taking bright students through AP science courses for decades. I created a school for gifted students where we did the same. For a reasonably bright kid, middle school science is entirely unnecessary. They spend three years spinning their wheels before they are allowed to start real science.

[Arvind Nagarajan @arvindnaga]

At GT Anywhere, Everest was able to go to Spain, the State of the Union, and the Jennifer Hudson show without missing out on her academics!

[liemandt @jliemandt]

At Alpha School, my daughters would dive deep into history - researching heroes, dressing up, and fielding questions from classmates in character.

Everest is 10 years old, and she just brought this method to the Jennifer Hudson Show.

Check out the clip in the article below 👇

[Arvind Nagarajan @arvindnaga]

@zakboca Welcome! Its going to be awesome.

[Pamela Hobart @gtmom]

I spent more than a few hours last week tinkering with OpenClaw and declined to tweet through it because the AI-induced hypomania came on almost immediately...

the first time I saw the indicator that my bot was "typing" in Telegram sent legit chills up my spine, like watching the moon landing or something but the pivotal event was only mine, happening solipsistically in a less-used room of GT school while all my coworkers were going about their regular business.

OpenClaw broke several times almost immediately and I had to keep fixing it just by asking regular Claude. however this actually suffices as long as you have enough time.

Rescue value notwithstanding, my mind quickly deprecated regular Claude in a big way. I suspect that even just the act of naming the thing yourself confers huge "personified assistant" advantage to the OpenClaw.

This week I'll be trying to figure out how to keep onboarding myself onto OpenClaw while doing all the regular substantive work too, not so obvious how to balance working on the job vs. in the job elegantly.

In the relatively recent past, it was easy enough to tell how much to invest in a productivity improvement such as creating a new spreadsheet and populating it with historical info or switching to a new task management system. Most of these things were either pretty marginal from an ROI perspective or absolutely critical.

Now, like everyone's saying, the AI is as bad as it will ever be. Huge frontiers of new projects are becoming viable by the day, ROI changes by the day... I want to keep rapidly acquiring both the basic skills to respond to this reality and the higher-level strategic thinking to juice the tinkering time for all it's worth.

Meanwhile, meatspace still beckons: my toddler is home sick with conjunctivitis to boot, he is drooling on me as I type this. What a time for both of us to be alive.

[liemandt @jliemandt]

@zeldapoem GT school is Alpha’s version.
https://t.co/KgaBuah0uO

[Arvind Nagarajan @arvindnaga]

Now imagine if you didn’t just use a LLM wrapper but rather an AI designed with learning science embedded at every level 🤯

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

AI really can help education: Randomized controlled experiment on high school students found a GPT-4o powered tutor that personalized problems for students raised final test scores by .15 SD, "equivalent to as much as six to nine months of additional schooling by some estimates"

[Arvind Nagarajan @arvindnaga]

One GT Anywhere parent..."My kids are mastering material 3 times faster than their peers. The platform is gifting them years of childhood back."

Free, from home, covered by TEFA. Great time to be the parent of a bright 3rd–8th grader.

[Austen Allred @Austen]

I moved to Austin in part so that my kids could go to Alpha School (despite tuition being $40k/year/kid).

Now kids in Texas get the exact same academics for free, even from home, with GT School Anywhere.

[Arvind Nagarajan @arvindnaga]

@rhettjoneslore @jliemandt Rhett, I run GT and spent years on a similar path, starting with malaria programs in Africa. DM me if you want to brainstorm plans!

[Arvind Nagarajan @arvindnaga]

Can't wait for more kids to take part in our competition lab! Where the best and brightest earn their stripes.

[Pamela Hobart @gtmom]

Yesterday I was honored to witness the ribbon cutting for GT School's new Competition Lab - basically the container for the future of competitive academics at GT School.

Students earn the privilege of participating in Competition Lab by meeting their daily XP goals on Timeback and staying up to speed on their standard afternoon workshops.

We will provision eligible students with time, materials, and support to achieve new heights in their specialties: math, robotics/engineering, creative writing, quiz bowl, etc. But we can't do it for them, and we won't let them coast.

Competition Lab's GM, guide Matt Starolis, challenged our kids to formally sign the Competition Lab pledge and initiate their responsibilities as members.

That's my daughter, Claudia (age 10), accepting. She heads to quiz bowl nationals in Chicago in May, and she meets her new writing coach on Thursday.

[Arvind Nagarajan @arvindnaga]

@gtmom The Competition Lab is such an amazing place for GT kids!

[Sam Barton @samhbarton]

In a few years we’re going to realise how we’ve been dramatically underestimating what kids and teens are capable of, and how much our education system has been holding them back

[Arvind Nagarajan @arvindnaga]

@nateliason @CameronSorsby @AlphaSchoolATX That’s awesome! We are totally going to steal *ahem* borrow your stuff for GT middle school!