First, I’m excited to share my new title at Reach Capital: Head of Platform!
It captures the essence of the many things I love doing, with 60% fewer syllables than my last title. Succinctness is a virtue, after all, especially for someone prone to verbal stumbles like me.
Naturally, you’ll ask: What’s a platform? It includes:
- helping our founders get what they need to succeed;
- organizing events that deepen connections and relationships;
- growing our extended community of entrepreneurs, educators and fellow investors who share our mission;
- fine-tuning internal operations to support our work across the board; and
- continuing to share what we’re seeing and learning from our work.
In short, it’s about helping good people solve meaningful problems in education.
Many people know me from my journalist days at EdSurge. Less known is that before that, I co-founded an edtech startup that was building a math game. Though short-lived, it was a formative experience that led me to cover edtech startups as my beat. And it is why I feel at home supporting education entrepreneurs at Reach.
Stories are what makes us human, and writing remains at the heart of what I do. Our RemaginED trends deck, yearly edtech funding recap and, most recently, our K-12 impact report are among the many resources that we’ll continue to share with the world. Our newly redesigned website further reflects the importance and impact of our work.
I’ll be honest: as a new parent, writing has been frustratingly difficult at times! But in my quest to overcome writer’s block, I’ve been diving into the next frontier of AI in education: GPT-3. Already kids use it for homework and college essays, and copywriters rely on it for social media and blog posts. Not long ago, I was unimpressed by the quality of AI writing. Now I am humbled.
There’s so much to learn. The best way to describe the paradigm shift is this: In previous generations of writing AI tools, humans were the writer, and AI the editor. But GPT-3 flips the script: AI writes, and humans edit.
This will unlock new possibilities, much like what DALL-E has unleashed for art. It will remove barriers to creative output and expression, much like what calculators have done for math, and what Replit is doing for code. I find all this delightfully subversive.
It will also raise plenty of ethical concerns, and force us to ask hard questions about writing and how we teach it. In short, GPT-3 will be the next flashpoint in education. If you’re building in this space, I’d love to chat! Reach out at tony@reachcapital.com.
No GPT-3 was used in the writing of this post!
