Einstein: How a "cheating bot" started the conversation we needed with developer Advait Paliwal

In EP 42, John and Jason talk with Advait Paliwal, the young entrepreneur behind "Einstein, "an (OpenClaw) AI agent that went viral for claiming to autonomously complete college coursework. Together, they unpack the intentional provocation behind the product, the legal fallout that followed, and what it all reveals about the urgent need for higher education to rethink assessment, relevance, and the human role in learning as agentic AI reshapes the world.

See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com

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Guest Bio:

Advait Paliwal is a a 22 year old founder who is passionate about building technology that makes a meaningful impact on people's lives. He recently created the Einstein bot at companion.ai

Connect with Advait https://www.advaitpaliwal.com/ and https://www.linkedin.com/in/advaitpaliwal/

Resources:

Michael G Wagner: The Einstein AI Panic
- https://www.theaugmentededucator.com/p/the-einstein-ai-panic
USDE Meta study on Online Learning:
- https://www.ed.gov/media/document/evaluation-of-evidence-based-practices-online-learning-meta-analysis-and-review-of-online-learning-studies-revised-september-2010-107159.pdf

Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Transcript

We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections!

[00:00:00] Jason: So, tell us who are you and why are you single-handedly trying to destroy education?

[00:00:07] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston.

[00:00:09] Jason: Hey John. Hey everyone. And this is Online Learning in the second half, the online learning podcast.

[00:00:14] John Nash: We're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last three years about online education. Look, online learning has had its chance to be great, and some of it is, and a lot of it still isn't.

[00:00:27] Jason: Mm-hmm.

[00:00:27] John Nash: Jason, how are we going to get to the next stage?

[00:00:31] Jason: That's a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it?

[00:00:34] John Nash: I think that's a great idea. And what do you want to talk about today?

[00:00:39] Jason: Well, today we have a guest, and we'll introduce our guest in a moment. Maybe we'll have Advait say hello. Just so people know that we're not just making up this guest advent's actually with us. Hey, Advait, how are things today?

[00:00:55] Advait: Thanks for Great. Went on a run had some food, did some work, and yeah, ready to have this conversation.

[00:01:01] Jason: Alright. Yeah, that sounds like a good day so far. And John, it's good to see you again. You know, any day I get to have a conversation with John is a good day. We had a lot of conversations this last weekend because we were working on a writing project together. The deadline happened to be yesterday, and we were working on it quite a bit yesterday, so, so, but it's nice to see you again as well.

so, tell us a little bit about you.

It sounds like you have an interesting educational background. Just love to hear more about it.

[00:01:26] Advait: I'm Advait Paliwal, I've been in many schools throughout my life and I've transferred. In and out of many schools as well. I was born in India ended up moving to Japan when I was two. That's where I did my kindergarten.

And I moved back to India in a different city in Mumbai where I did my first through seventh grade. And in the middle of seventh grade, I ended up moving to Texas and where I did my eighth grade to a bit of ninth two different schools and. the middle of my ninth grade, I moved to Michigan where I completed my high school. Then I went to Wayne State for my first year of college. Then I transferred to Michigan State for my, last two years where I graduated early and I started at Brown for master’s from where I ended up dropping out. But between my graduation and my start date at Brown, I spent a lot of time at Stanford.

For a month crashing at my friend's place. Then I spent a lot of time at Harvard and MIT, just spending a lot of time around teachers, students, educators, researchers, and just trying to understand what separates the best and the like the most high, highest caliber educational institutions from what we perceive as not to be and what can they offer that we can learn from and can AI democratized the the learning experiences between different institutions. 'Cause every place I went to it was a completely different experience. I had to transfer credits. People just wouldn't understand me. I had different ways of speaking, and it really caused lot of harm and. And I think that I was okay because I ended up coming out on the brighter side, but most people don't get that chance to. I still have friends from Wayne State, for example, which is not a great college, I would argue, but they asked me like, hey, do you have a job opening or do you have any other people that can offer me jobs? But the issue is that just weren't told to create projects. They weren't told to use ai. So now they're kind of stuck with like a very specialized skillset. Now they're banking on their degree, whereas Stanford, they have a pretty high pedigree. So, anyone can get any opportunity in the world, but just a Stanford pedigree. So how do we create the same learning expectations or experiences that Stanford has but give it to every single institution in the world? is the ideal future. And I really want to that, but the issue is people just don't understand. The change in progress in technology. So, creating some sort of way for people to hear about it and create emotion is the best way to incite change.

[00:04:06] Jason: That's great.

[00:04:07] John Nash: Yeah.

[00:04:07] Jason: \ And Advait, we connected on LinkedIn and feel free to confirm or deny any of the facts that I put out here right now. And just bringing people up to speed that maybe are listening in and maybe they didn't follow this story, but it was just less than a week ago. I saw in an email somebody was talking about this bot.

Called Einstein. That was, and this is a quote off of the page. It says, Einstein is an AI with a computer. He logs into Canvas every day, watches lectures, reads essays, writes papers, participates in discussions, and submits your homework automatically. Okay. So, I saw that. I saw that in an email that somebody sent to me and I was like, oh wow.

So, I checked it out to make sure it was actually true, that it was there. I looked at it, started reading a little bit more about Einstein. I went ahead, I made a post on LinkedIn as sometimes I do just kind of trigger finger, I just did a screenshot and posted something. What I posted was, it's certainly unethical, it's real, maybe it should be illegal or at least blocked question mark.

Plans start at $40 a month with a link.

[00:05:17] John Nash: You didn't hold back.

[00:05:18] Jason: I know. It was just a, it was a knee jerk, right? It was a knee jerk. I'm going to admit to this. And it was before I'd had any connection with Advait at all. Right? So, it was just this kind of random Einstein bot that was out there.

All right. But then I looked you up. And asked to connect on LinkedIn, and I was so happy, and this is true. I, this is out of my heart Advent, is that I was so happy to then to get a message from you and you messaged me and you said, hey, I saw your post. I'd be happy to discuss the underlying tech, what schools can do about it, and how it'll affect the future of education.

And I thought, this is wonderful. This is a, this is exactly the kind of conversation I love to have with people. And to be honest, you're reaching out completely. Flipped my feeling about things. And we can get into talking about the ins and outs and the ethical approaches of Einstein, but not that my feelings necessarily changed about that, but all of a sudden there was a person behind it, right?

And it was like, hey, this is somebody. We could have a conversation. I would be really curious and all of a sudden flipped me from being defensive to actually being really curious about what you were thinking. So, this was like Tuesday last week.

By Wednesday there was a new description up, and then by Thursday I visited and there was a 4 0 4, which for those non-techies means it, this website does not exist anymore. It's permanent. And I messaged you and you told me there was a cease and desist. So, I was like. Wow. Fascinating. Let's chat about this.

You agreed to come on the podcast, and so, thank you for joining us. I know there's lots of details to fill...