Estonia is teaming up with OpenAI and Anthropic to launch a nationwide drive to teach artificial intelligence skills to high school students, aiming to help prepare them for jobs of the future.
The initiative, known as AI Leap, draws on the Baltic country’s public digital infrastructure built over the past 30 years and its strong educational culture. Estonia is ranked top among European countries in the international Pisa education tests.
Estonia’s President Alar Karis said the initiative was not intended to replace teachers in the classroom but to develop critical thinking among students and awareness of AI. “We have to learn how to use it,” he told the Financial Times. “AI is everywhere.”
From September, 20,000 high school students, aged 16 and 17, will have free access to AI-learning tools. Some 3,000 teachers are already beginning training workshops on using AI tools in the classroom.
The initiative will be extended to vocational schools — and possibly younger pupils — next year, adding another 38,000 students and 2,000 teachers.
The government said it was in advanced talks with OpenAI and Anthropic to use their AI tools for free, but would be open to working with other companies. The extensive digitisation of Estonian society over the past few decades has provided training sets for Estonian language AI models even though the country has a population of just 1.3mn.
Students’ data, which is subject to EU data protection rules, will be firewalled and not included in the training sets of the technology companies’ AI models. The US tech companies have said they are keen to support the Estonian initiative to strengthen their own expertise in education.
Education minister Kristina Kallas said that education had been tightly bound up with Estonia’s national identity since the 17th century as the country fought to preserve its language and culture under foreign occupation.
“Headmasters and teachers were the founding fathers of the state,” she said. “Education has been the social lift for Estonia to become a nation.”
The AI Leap initiative will be run by a public-private foundation, which has had input from Estonian entrepreneurs, including Taavet Hinrikus, the co-founder of Wise, and Jaan Tallinn, an early developer at Skype. The initial budget for AI Leap is €3.2mn, rising to €6mn next year.
Kallas said schools needed to innovate to take account of AI capabilities. The scheme aims to emphasise schools serving poorer communities — with free computers given to students where necessary — to help close the digital divide.
Teachers will decide how to incorporate AI into their lessons, Kallas said.
“It’s not the apps, or iPads, or laptops, or ChatGPT that’s crucial here. It’s the teacher,” she said. “We need to trust the teachers to know what they’re doing.”
Given the capabilities of generative AI models, asking students to write essays has become a “useless” exercise, she said.
But that made it all the more important for pupils to develop their own critical thinking skills and know how to evaluate the outputs of AI models, she added.
That would also help to inoculate the former Soviet state against disinformation coming from neighbouring Russia at a time of heightened international tension over the war in Ukraine.
Education systems around the world have been struggling to deal with AI, with many schools looking to ban the use of mobile phones in the classroom to prevent students from using it.
But Hinrikus, the Wise co-founder, said schools had to be prepared to experiment more with technology. “It’s clear that AI is coming and people who are better at using AI will have an enormous advantage,” he said.
Karis brushed aside concerns that Estonia would depend on the US for technology just as some experts worry about its dependence on Washington for security against the threat of neighbouring Russia.
“We have several allies also where security is concerned, it’s not just the US. The transatlantic bond is important for Europe,” he said.
“We have to rely on big [companies] because even with the new tools, we can’t develop everything by ourselves. We need to have allies, we need to collaborate and so forth.”
