I Tried Google’s Latest AI ‘Experiment’

• Google launched Learn About, an AI tool for exploring educational topics.
• It offers interactive guides, overarching summaries, and links to relevant videos about a topic.
• Learn About uses Google’s LearnLM AI model, which is built for educational purposes.

Google just launched a new experimental AI tool called “Learn About.”

The AI, which is accessible via a website, acts as your conversational learning companion as you explore a wide range of topics or ask specific questions.

Unlike Google’s AI chatbot Gemini or AI Overviews in Google Search, this tool is geared more toward learning. It uses research-based information in its answers.

The responses are also presented in a more engaging format than your typical chatbot. There are interactive guides, multiple-choice tests, or a selection of photos and videos on the topics you’re learning about.

When you visit the tool’s website, you’ll have the option to type in your own question or select from a curated set of prompt suggestions, ranging from scientific queries about what causes earthquakes to psychological explorations into whether money buys happiness.

I tried out the latter, and it displayed a summarized overview of the topic at the top, with educational articles linked under it.

Below that, the AI tool offered a nuanced conclusion on the topic and a purple “Why it matters” box to explain the context behind interest in the correlation between money and happiness.

It also included related videos and articles to dive as well as suggested prompts to explore other related topics. The sidebar on the left also has suggestions of similar topics to dig into and a list of corresponding links for each.

Different queries prompt different visuals. For example, when I selected a curated prompt about the history of the Oxford comma, it generated an interactive timeline about the punctuation mark’s establishment.

I was pleasantly surprised by the engaging nature of a topic I would have otherwise considered a bit dull.

A Google spokesperson told Business Insider that the Learn About tool is built with LearnLM, an AI model “fine-tuned for learning” released in May, and helps create lessons personalized to an individual’s learning style.

The tool combines Google Search’s knowledge and up-to-date information with Gemini’s conversational nature, the spokesperson said. Learn About expands access to these kinds of individualized lessons and the personalized content encourages deeper learning, the spokesperson said.

You can prompt Learn About the way you would with Gemini, like by asking it to help you write a work email. However, it will stick to the interactive response format by providing a box with a sample email and other educational information about best practices for time-off requests below it.

If you prompt Gemini with the same question, it will respond with a draft of an email.

You also can’t pick up where you left off with past chats like you can with other Google AI tools like Gemini or NotebookLM, which recently went viral for its AI podcast-generating Audio Overview feature. When you close a Learn About tab, your conversation is gone.

You can try the new Google AI tool here.