Playlab empowers educators, schools, and nonprofits to harness the power of AI to transform teaching and learning. Along the way, we democratize who gets to shape how AI is used in education.
Playlab is a technology platform that enables individuals and organizations to create, use, and share AI-powered education tools and experiences.
Our technology is intended for educators, students, schools, and education nonprofits, and solves a few related challenges that they face. They can:
We work closely with our global community to support them in using AI responsibly and in ways that actually advance teaching and learning. This includes supporting school and nonprofit partners in building better, evidence-based tools that are tailored to their needs, contexts, and values. As part of this support, we collaborate with researchers who both study what our community is building and helps improve what and how they build. The results of this research shape what tools we highlight in our library of community created apps. It also shapes how we support tool creation within Playlab.
As our community creates on Playlab, they generate vast amounts of data. We responsibly use this data to accelerate open source AI, enabling low-cost, private, secure AI that can live on a person’s device.
We could have created Playlab as a closed platform (think Teachers Pay Teachers, Facebook, or Amazon). However, we opted to develop Playlab as public infrastructure for education.
Imagine a world where libraries weren’t public institutions. Access to books would require either buying them or subscribing to some kind of service. Learning would be much less accessible, especially to those most in need. This reality exists in much of the developing world. Public libraries, and the public ecosystem that grew up around them, changed this in the United States.
As technology has advanced, so has our public infrastructure. The information superhighway and e-rate worked to make internet connectivity accessible in places where market dynamics had no incentive to offer those services.
We’re at the start of the artificial intelligence era. If we stay on our current path, AI infrastructure – from the underlying AI models to the applications built on top of them – will be built and owned by a few. Scale and revenue will be prioritized over student outcomes and research into what actually transforms teaching and learning. Most educators and students, especially those on the margins, will have few opportunities to actually shape how AI is used in education. While actual use of AI in education will likely reinforce the most traditional aspects of teaching and learning.
In contrast, public infrastructure is accessible, democratic, and enabling. It allows anyone to create, adapt and share AI tools. It can be shaped by a greater diversity of voices. And, it enables all kinds of innovations to be built on top of it and research to be conducted on it. A non-profit governance structure can ensure that the use of AI in education is accountable for student outcomes, safety, privacy, and the democratization of future open-source AI models and tools.
The time window to create this public AI infrastructure for education is narrow. Critically, this effort doesn’t replace private efforts; rather, it adds protections for students, teachers, and families. It also accelerates responsible development of AI in education, including by those working closest to students. Just like most software is built on top of open source technologies, we envision both private and public actors using public AI infrastructure to accelerate the development of responsible AI.