“We truly sensed that AI would change education—as soon as OpenAI launched ChatGPT, we started work on our own company. With our vision, we launched our product just a month after.”
In the beginning, AnswerAI wasn’t the company we know of today. Headed by Zhou (Ric) Li and Leo Zhang, it had been developing a social media app called Livein back in 2022. However, when OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched in December 2022, blowing everyone away with its human-like capabilities, Ric and Leo set out to reinvent their business on the surge of AI.
“Most of us saw ChatGPT launch, but we didn’t see a lot of companies fully trusting it,” Leo said. Ric and Leo were part of the group who saw the potential of AI. Instantly pivoting development, they decided to particularly focus on the development of AI for education in a project called AnswerAI. If AnswerAI worked out, it would be at the vanguard of this new AI revolution.
Later, when giving details about the history of AnswerAI at a business conference, Mr. Li specified why he decided to head into education: “Not everyone in America can get access to high quality education. Especially in the Midwest, there are so many students who wish to learn, but don’t have the resources or guidance needed to. Our company can fill that hole by providing students with access to an AI that doesn’t just give them answers, but can also help them learn.” AnswerAI profits by requiring a subscription from students after they run out of their daily free uses.
Though Leo doesn’t believe AnswerAI will totally replace teachers or tutors, he stated that there are advantages for using AI to learn in comparison to a traditional classroom setting. “There are people who are ashamed to ask questions in a classroom. However, it’s okay for them to ask an AI. [...] When you talk to a robot, you won’t be judged. You won’t feel pressured, and you’ll also know that the AI will be gentle and patient.”
However, there were others with similar thoughts as Ric and Leo. They were aware of the competitors in Silicon Valley. Besides, AnswerAI was a small company at the time, in comparison to well-established behemoths in the industry such as Google, who had done search and development in AI for over a decade. However, AnswerAI was able to work around these difficulties and outpace its competitors through efficiency and a clear vision of their goal of changing the world through AI education.
“The key is speed,” Leo said. “In big companies, you have to attend a lot of meetings. You have to report again and again to your boss. But in a startup, you can do it all very fast. You go launch, you test it, and if there’s any issues, you repeat. That’s the advantage of being a small company.”
Through this philosophy, AnswerAI was able to become a leader in the field of AI education. AnswerAI launched just one month after ChatGPT, quickly gaining popularity and usage. Their LinkedIn claims AnswerAI has over 1.5 million users, and the app now sits as the seventh most popular under “Education” in the app store, above companies such as Google Classroom, Quizlet, and Brainly. AnswerAI can help students in subjects ranging from mathematics to geography to business.
However, to Leo, AnswerAI is more than just a company. Artificial intelligence was conceived of as and created to be a tool for humanity—a tool that aids human creativity, human emotions, and most of all, human passions; a tool for aiding humanity’s innate desire for education, to learn, and to think.
“The users do more than just get an answer to their question and leave,” Leo said. “They are trying to get more answers, explanations, and they want to know how to get the answers and how to get the steps. [...] [AnswerAI] helps you find out why you should learn something, not just push you to get a final answer.” In their eyes, this is a big success, even beyond revenue.
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