Two summers ago, I sat down to build a presentation about AI in education. I called it…
The Next Wave. It's still online — frozen right where I left it.
And on one page, I tried to map the entire landscape of artificial intelligence.
Two columns. What was real… and what was still theory.
The real column held narrow AI — brilliant at one task, helpless one step outside it.
The theory column held the big ideas: artificial general intelligence…
superintelligence… and something called Artificial Capable Intelligence. ACI.
Mustafa Suleyman's name for an AI that could take a goal… and finish it.
With minimal oversight. My slide granted them, quote, "significant progress" —
but filed all three as "theoretical and developmental." As of mid-2024.
Then… the wave arrived.
Today, an agent can take a goal. Not a prompt — a goal. It plans.
It opens a browser and reads. It writes code, runs it, watches it fail — and fixes it.
It works for hours. It hands pieces of the job to other agents…
and checks their work before you ever see it.
They have names now. Claude Code. Codex. OpenClaw. They don't live in a chat window —
they live in the computer. And you don't need an engineering team anymore.
A teacher with a weekend… can build what used to take one.
Which means this card… is in the wrong column.
Now — honestly — the frontier is jagged.
When Stanford measured them this spring, agents still failed one everyday computer task
in three. Today's live leaderboards say one in six — nudging past the human baseline.
And long, multi-day jobs? Still four fails in five. They work inside permissions, too —
drafting an email is not permission to send it. But barely a few years in…
already this good — and getting better. "Theoretical"? … That word doesn't fit anymore.
So what does this mean for your classroom? When AI can produce the essay —
and act on the plan — the artifact tells us less about the learning.
The questions get more human. What did they notice? Where did they struggle?
What did they choose?
And my old map never showed this: your students may be the generation that decides how
the world treats these systems. They'll draw that line.
One last thing. This little robot began as a single still picture —
AI agents taught it to move. These animations? Agents. The score? Agents.
And this voice… is my voice clone —
built with my consent, disclosed right there on the screen. My voice. My choice —
said out loud, because that's the deal. All of it… in about a weekend.
Back in 2024, I filed this under "theoretical." The question this morning isn't whether
capable machines are coming — they're here. It's… what is learning —
when AI can do the work? … Let's find out together.