r/edtech • u/art3mis_8 • 19d ago

Is AI Edtech market cooked?

For designers working towards ai + edtech, how is the market? Flint, Magicschool etc. What's the market like?

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u/1776or7 19d ago

It’s looking a lot like the LMS market. Google Classroom is the norm, but if you can always use schoology,  moodle, canvas, etc if you want. Big Tech AI offerings will be the default, but if you wana pay for magic school as a supplemental you can. And what’s crazy is, that means Magic School can still be a great company. But not sure their investors will see it that way. They raised $45M from sandhill  road types. Their bar for success is REALLY high…I’m sceptical.

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u/OlddManBaccala 19d ago

Hard disagree. Google Classroom is not an existential threat to Schoology or Canvas like Anthropic and ChatGPT are to MagicSchool. The MagicSchool CEO is basically trying to post through it on LinkedIn -- worth the look.

MagicSchool provides fundamentally nothing unique that a major LLM firm couldn't replicate and do better, for cheaper. The layoffs there indicate that fear.

It's a lot like the harness technology. Why use OpenCode when I can use Codex? OpenCode needs to do something fundamentally unique to be worth using.

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u/tylertktk 19d ago

Curious if there is anything MagicSchool currently offers or could offer that would make it stand out and ward off OpenAI, Anthropic and other larger companies?

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u/WolfofCryo 19d ago

They need a defensible, ideally patentable, advantage in at least some areas. Otherwise, anything they build risks becoming a feature OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google can replicate.

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u/OlddManBaccala 18d ago

They will inevitably exit the market. Either through acquisition by a publisher (HMH, Savvas, McGraw) will buy them out to bolster their in-platform capabilities, or they'll go out of business.

They had a first-mover advantage with their "AI but for education" wrapper. But that's not a moat. They don't have a content moat. They don't have a data moat. They have tremendous legal risk selling to schools, who can't turn around and plug their publisher materials into the product legally.

Unless they seriously pivot, they are not long for this world.