Using AI to Generate Intelligent Textbooks

Overview
Inspired by Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age and its vision of an AI tutor that adapts to every learner, this talk shares Dan McCreary's journey to build that device for real using Claude Code Skills. You'll see how a learning-graph foundation, interactive MicroSims, and roughly 30 specialized skills combine to generate consistent, hyper-personalized textbooks at scale — already producing 88 books, 1,200+ MicroSims, and a growing library of mini graphic novels. We'll walk through the five levels of intelligent textbooks, the pipeline from course description to finished chapters with quizzes and teacher guides, and the engineering challenges of getting LLMs to produce reliably interactive content. The closing question is the one that started the quest: if a 12-year-old anywhere on Earth could have the same quality of personalized education as a student at MIT, shouldn't we build it?

Agenda
6:00pm - 6:30pm: Networking - food & drinks
6:30pm - 8:00pm: Presentation & discussion
8:00pm: Networking at Lake Monster Brewing

Meet Our Featured Speaker
Dan McCreary is a semi-retired AI researcher with a background in knowledge representation. His career began at Bell Labs as a chip designer and worked with Steve Job at NeXT Computer. He was an entrepreneur for many years and wrote a book on database selection. He was a distinguished engineer at Optum where he built the world's largest healthcare knowledge graph. Dan believes that AI technologies will make high-quality education accessible to everyone on the planet.

Sponsors
This event is sponsored by Lab651 & Recursive Awesome