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Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees
NYC Grand Jury Hearing Evidence in CEO Killing Case; Weeks of Unexplained Drone Sightings in New Jersey Prompt Security Concerns; Syrians Search Morgue For Missing Loved Ones; AI-Powered Tutor, Teaching Assistant Tested As A Way To Help Educators And Students; Amazon Plans To Donate $1M To Trump Inauguration, Matching Meta. Aired 8-9p ET
Aired December 12, 2024 - 20:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
WILL RIPLEY, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: ... military partnership.
Will Ripley, CNN, Taipei.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ERIN BURNETT, CNN HOST: Its fascinating -- just a list of the animals, the 400 goats. All right, thanks so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.
See you back here same time tomorrow. "Anderson Cooper: 360" begins right now.
[20:00:21]
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST, "ANDERSON COOPER: 360": Tonight on 360, all we know, and it's a lot about the case against alleged CEO killer, Luigi Mangione. Plus, the mysteries, a lot of those too that remain.
Also ahead, new developments in another mystery, drones spotted over New York, New Jersey prompting action from the FAA and the intelligence community.
And later, what I found for "60 Minutes" on the new frontier between artificial intelligence and education. How AI could one day change the way every child in every school in America is taught.
Good evening, thanks for joining us.
A week and a day since the execution style killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Midtown Manhattan sidewalk. Prosecutors have reportedly taken a key step. According to ABC News, prosecutors for the Manhattan District Attorney's Office have begun presenting evidence to a grand jury against the suspect, Luigi Mangione.
He remains in Pennsylvania, where he was arrested on Monday. Determined, according to his lawyer, to fight extradition back to New York. Now, the District Attorney's Office, citing grand jury secrecy, had no comment on ABC's reporting, separately, CNN has learned that New York authorities have executed as many as three search warrants in the investigation so far, including two that deal with the backpack found in Central Park and that burner phone discovered in what was believed to be the first part of the killer's getaway route.
Now, as we reported, police say forensic evidence ties the gun Mangione was caught with to three shell casings found at the scene. Then there's the fingerprint evidence.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JESSICA TISCH, NYPD COMMISSIONER: Our crime lab to match the person of interest's fingerprints with fingerprints that we found on both the water bottle and the kind bar near the scene of --
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: Well, in other words, what would seem to be two kinds of hard physical evidence tying Luigi Mangione to the gun used to kill Brian Thompson and connecting him to the crime scene. Not surprisingly, Mangione defense attorney has a different view.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
THOMAS DICKEY, MANGIONE'S ATTORNEY: Those two sciences, in and of themselves, have come under some criticism in the past relative to their credibility, their truthfulness, their accuracy. However, you want to do it.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: He says, he wants to see the evidence himself. We don't know whether a grand jury has seen it, but last night on the program, it was already enough for Jeffrey Toobin, who joins us shortly to proclaim the case against Mangione, in his words, open and shut. Manhattan's DA Alvin Bragg said he is confident they have their man.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ALVIN BRAGG, MANHATTAN DISTRICT ATTORNEY: Obviously, this is a profoundly disturbing, as we've alleged murder and we would not charge the person. We didn't think it was the person and we're prepared to go forward.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: Well, that said, the prosecutors, our CNN's John Miller had said, making a movie, that film is, to borrow the analogy, still something missing a ton of footage. We know, for example, that he had a lot of cash on him when he was caught $8,000.00 plus another $2,000.00 worth in foreign currency. We don't know how he planned to use it.
We know he had a laptop open at McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where he was apprehended. We don't know what he was looking at on it.
And to the point of the foreign currency. Was he looking at escape route to non-extradition countries, researching a target or something else? We know from San Francisco Police that his mother reported him missing last month, but had not heard from him since July, and we know less about what he was doing over that period in the months leading up to it.
But, there's new reporting tonight in the. "The New York Times" about some of that time period. According to them, on April 27th, he left a phone message from Japan with someone he had met traveling. "I need some time to Zen out," he reportedly said in that phone message.
The story continued in "The Times." "It would be one of his last communications before he abruptly cut ties with a wide range of friends and family, who eventually set out on a desperate hunt to track him down." We know from his own social media posting, he railed against modern Japanese society, calling it, "An evolutionary mismatch for the human animal."
Now, we don't know whether this was part of some process of him becoming disillusioned with humanity, but "The New York Times" reporting is suggestive in general, "The Times" piece mentions members of his book club in Hawaii had become upset at his choice of reading material, quoting now, they "drifted away after a discussion about whether to read the writings of Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, who had carried out a series of bombings over a period of 17 years beginning in 1978, with the goal of calling attention to the cost to humanity of a world built around technology."
As to his views on the healthcare industry, we know he spoke of back problems and brain fog and other ailments, and according to police writings on him, when captured, railed against the system and saying, "Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming."
As for the killing itself, police say Mangione asked in another passage, what could be better than, "to kill the CEO at his own bean- counting conference?" Now, what we don't know is why he chose Brian Thompson in particular.
Late today, New York Police Department chief and detective Joseph Kenny had this to say.
[20:05:07]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOSEPH KENNY, NYPD CHIEF OF DETECTIVES: We have no indication that he was ever a client of UnitedHealthcare, but he does make mention that it is the fifth largest corporation in America, which would make it the largest healthcare corporation in America, so that's possibly why he targeted that company.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: Mangione, will be back in court first on December 23rd for a preliminary hearing, then on the 30th to demand the court show cause for detaining him and to argue for bail.
Joining us now, the aforementioned Jeffrey Toobin, also CNN chief law enforcement intelligence analyst, John Miller, former deputy commissioner with the NYPD and former FBI deputy director, Andrew McCabe.
COOPER: So, John, what else can you tell us about these search warrants?
JOHN MILLER, CNN CHIEF LAW ENFORCEMENT AND INTELLIGENCE ANALYST: Well, I think what they're looking at in terms of search warrants is when he was arrested in Pennsylvania, they've got a laptop computer he was looking at, as you mentioned. He's got a phone with him, and then there's the burner phone in New York. To seize them, you know, they have them in the --
COOPER: They need a search warrant.
MILLER: But to get into that room, you get their contents, that's where you need the search warrant for. And you know, they're going to be really curious to see, as he was on the run, what was he looking at?
COOPER: He had also referenced in the so-called manifesto or in this writing that he addressed to Feds as you pointed out last night, that his devices were essentially locked down.
MILLER: He said, my technology is pretty locked down. But, you know, if you look in the spiral notebook or here, you know, you can see most of my planning. And he said lockdown because, you know, I'm an engineer, so there's not much in there for you.
That's kind of cryptic but what does he mean? Locked down like you're going to have a lot of trouble getting into them or locked down meaning there's just engineering stuff in there and not the clues you're looking for? The only way to find out is to get in.
COOPER: And Jeff, so prosecutors, according to ABC News, have convened a grand jury. They've been presenting evidence. What does that look like?
JEFFRY TOOBIN, FORMER FEDERAL PROSECUTOR: This is an extraordinary case, but that's an ordinary procedure for a murder case. The way a case works in state court is in order to bring a serious charge like this, you have to have a grand jury issue an indictment.
And they -- and evidence is presented, and it looks sort of like a trial, except there's only one side represented. There's no cross- examination. In a grand jury, the prosecution puts forth evidence, they don't put forth all their evidence. And then the grand jury votes to issue an indictment or not. Then it moves to a trial, which is, of course, public and more familiar and it's an adversary proceeding.
COOPER: Andrew, I mean, as someone who worked for the FBI for a long time, what stands out to you still about what we don't know. I mean, according to the NYPD official told NBC, there's no indication he was a client of UnitedHealthcare. I mean, is that significant from an investigative standpoint?
ANDREW MCCABE, CNN SENIOR LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: I think it is. I think many of us kind of jumped to these potential narratives in the immediate aftermath of the crime, that this was likely, you know, a disgruntled, insured person or customer of the company who maybe had suffered or had a family member who had suffered because of the company's decisions about denying coverage or something like that. That doesn't appear to be the case here at all.
He certainly seems to have had his eye on the healthcare sector to some degree. His comments about the earnings of UnitedHealthcare may be making them a target, but it doesn't seem that he had any specific animus for Brian Thompson specifically. But maybe he was drawn to him more because of his role in this large, profitable health insurance company.
As for the rest of the picture, there's really a lot we don't know about his motive. Now, a lot of that isn't' necessary for the prosecution. You don't have to prove motive as an element of this crime of murder. You just have to prove that he did it intentionally. The video goes a long way to proving that in and of itself.
But I think to adequately assess the threat of this sort of violence targeting people like Brian Thompson or other CEOs or other corporate representatives, I think it's important that we understand as much as we can about this person's progression towards this very distinctive act of political violence, essentially, is what this was, even though we don't think of it as like traditionally Democrat-Republican politics.
This was clearly an act of violence meant to change the policies and practices of, and in this case, of this industry and this company.
COOPER: John, was his biggest mistake, spending ten days in New York City that allowed all these photographs to be taken? I mean, in the cab, in the hostel. I mean, if he had just come to the city last minute, would he have had more of a chance to get away, do you think?
MILLER: You know, he wasn't from New York. He wasn't familiar with the target zone. He had to do his reconnaissance. I would say he was pretty careful.
If he has a biggest mistake, it was in the encounter with the woman at the counter where he was checking into the youth hostel. Youth hostel where you could pass with a fake driver's license, pay in cash, very disciplined.
When he pulled down the mask and they got those two pictures where you could see his face, that's the reason somebody in Pennsylvania said, I think that's the guy.
[20:10:21]
COOPER: Do you think -- a lot of people were thinking he would toss away the gun, nobody wants to be caught with a gun. Do you think he was planning something else? Do you think he was planning to kill himself? Do you think he just wanted to keep his options open?
MILLER: So, one of the reasons that it's important to get into that computer is to find out what was he looking at that moment in that place? You know, he'd been to Philadelphia, he'd been to Pittsburgh. But there he was in Altoona, staying in a motel, eating in a McDonald's and with his head buried in a laptop computer.
Was he, researching the next target. Is the other healthcare executive on there? Was he saying, which countries don't have extradition treaties with the United States? Where could I go where they couldn't get me?
COOPER: Or was he following the investigation and the coverage?
MILLER: Or was he reading the newspapers about himself?
TOOBIN: I think there's another thing that's really important about this investigation, which is how did he know that Brian Thompson was going to be at that side entrance, not the main entrance to the New York Hilton, the side entrance to the New York Hilton at 6:45 in the morning, and that's important because there are a lot of executives in this country and a lot of people in this country who are now afraid that they're going to be stalked like this. And how he found out where Brian Thompson was going to be at this --
COOPER: Which is also based on the knowledge that he wasn't staying at the hotel.
TOOBIN: Not at the hotel, all that bad, like how easy it is or how difficult it is to locate the whereabouts and schedules of prominent people. That's really important.
COOPER: Andrew, what do you make of the new details from "The New York Times" about his travels, his posts earlier this year, and the going silent on his family, you know, since last July.
MCCABE: It's really interesting. I mean, I think if you look more broadly at where he comes from, his family background, his kind of life of privilege and higher education and all of that stuff to where he ended up, assassinating someone on the streets of New York City, like massive gulf there, right?
And I think that if you -- within that context, if you look at the trip to Asia and the kind of dropping off the map, to me that identifies the period in which somehow this young man slipped, right? He parted from his upbringing, his education, his friend group, his job, and he went down this path that led him to brutally taking the life of someone he didn't even know in a very public way.
And so, I do think it's important to drill down on that period, to understand what was it. You know, in investigating terrorism cases, we used to call this the path to radicalization, even after somebody had been convicted or jailed or whatever, we wanted to understand how they got to that point where they had become a radicalized terrorist. It's kind of the same thing with him. He's not a terrorist. But you want to know what got him to this point, so far away from where he came from. COOPER: And we should point out all of this is these are alleged crimes. At this point, he has been convicted as we said, but based on the reporting from ABC, a grand jury has been convened.
Jeff Toobin, Andrew McCabe, John Miller is going to stick around. Thank you guys, appreciate it.
Next, we're going to talk about the lights in night skies lately over New Jersey, including sensitive military installations. You can see them, some of the drones up there. The latest on these rather quite large drones, some of them what the government is saying about them and what it isn't.
And later, another remarkable piece of reporting from CNN's Clarissa Ward in Syria, what she uncovered in a military hospital with people searching for missing loved ones.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:18:20]
COOPER: Well, let's talk about these drones.
That black blob in the night sky is a drone, a good-sized one, though it's hard to tell without other objects close in the frame to compare it to.
It's one of dozens that have been spotted recently in the skies over New Jersey and the New York area, including a military research facility, around the Trump property in Bedminster as well. Today, the White House sought to downplay rumors.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ADM. JOHN KIRBY (RET), COORDINATOR FOR STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS AT THE NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL: We have no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a National Security or a public safety threat, or have a foreign nexus.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: Security officials held a private briefing today for members of Congress. Some of whom are demanding more in the way of answers.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. CORY BOOKER (D-NJ): I've been a little frustrated. There hasn't been enough transparency letting people know what's happening. Its allowing a lot of potentially misinformation to spread, or at least fear. We should know what's going on over our skies and I've asked for a lot more information.
SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL (D-CT): They should be shot down if necessary because they're flying over sensitive areas. Whether it's planes that may be jeopardized or security at military bases, we ought to do a much better job, the Biden administration ought to be acting more aggressively against these drones.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: Well, Senator Booker, who you heard there a moment ago, along with his New Jersey in New York Senate colleagues, sent a letter today to the heads of DHS, FBI, and FAA requesting a briefing on the matter.
More on this all now from CNN's Omar Jimenez.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
OMAR JIMENEZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT (on camera): So people have been seeing drones. Don't worry, this is one of ours. But we've been going around talking to people in this Northern New Jersey area. And really, almost everyone you talk to has either seen one or knows someone who's seen one.
[20:20:02]
LISA ROSSETTO, WITNESSED DRONES: What are they? Who's sending them up there? What are they doing there? Why doesn't anybody know what they are? You know, and why New Jersey? It didn't sound like an airplane, which is why I went out and looked at it.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It was loud, but not any louder than the airplanes, because the airplanes are loud.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, the jet is loud.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And there were jets flying over at the same time.
They actually flew in a circle around our building both of them and then it crossed and then disappeared. It still could be somebody playing a trick, but which is unlikely because they are so big.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's not a ten-year-old flying it, you know.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes, I'll just let the people that are trying to figure it out, figure it out.
JIMENEZ (voice over): But to this point, no one has, at least publicly.
The FBI is now investigating weeks of reported drone sightings over New Jersey. That's according to a document given to state and local officials.
As a growing number of people report seeing drones, some described as six feet in diameter, flying in the skies, and there have been questions about when they first started popping up. Reports seem to vary, but the Picatinny Arsenal, which is a military installation in Northern New Jersey, has confirmed sightings in the area going back to November 13th, and countrywide, this isn't the first time mysterious drones or something like it have been spotted around military installations. SABRINA SINGH, DEPUTY PENTAGON PRESS SECRETARY: So specifically Langley Air Force Base did experience incursions of unauthorized unmanned aerial systems last year in December 2023.
The number of those UAS incursions did fluctuate on any given day, but they didn't appear to exhibit any hostile intent.
JIMENEZ (voice over): And while with the New Jersey reported sightings, the White House says many have actually been manned aircraft some witnesses disagree.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They'll just change direction like go from like 90 to like 270 degrees, just like fly in different directions and planes obviously can't do that. Nothing during the day, just completely at night. It's very -- it's odd.
JIMENEZ (voice over): And public officials are starting to get frustrated.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They're creating so much fear and uneasiness in the public.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's no excuse for us not to know at this point.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now is not the time to mess around. It is a time for action. We're past the point of let's pretend it's not a big deal and try to keep everybody calm while we figure it out. It's really concerning, and quite frankly, it's not acceptable.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
JIMENEZ (on camera): Now, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are throwing a little bit of cold water on this. They said in a joint statement that based on what they've seen so far, they don't see any National Security threat or anything like that, but also that they are investigating whether these reported drone sightings are actually drones or whether they're being mistakenly identified for manned aircraft.
And they did say many of the cases that they've investigated have actually turned out to be manned aircraft.
That said, they are continuing to investigate. And without a definitive answer to this point, especially over reported sightings that span back to mid-point of last month. It has left this vacuum where a lot of questions have come up and a lot of questions from people who are upset that there is not a definitive answer at this point, Anderson.
COOPER: All right, Omar Jimenez, thanks very much.
John Miller is back. Also joining us is CNN senior national security analyst Juliette Kayyem. She's a former assistant secretary for Homeland Security, currently a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School.
So, I've been skeptical of this whole thing. How do we know this isn't just some people, you know, flying around drones? And once people get upset about it, they just continue.
MILLER: I think it's a couple of things. One, it's because of the size. I mean, people have described these things as being the size of a small automobile.
So, as Omar pointed out in his piece, that's not the drone we bought for our kids or a hobbyists necessarily. It looks expensive.
The second thing is that when they've been encountered and, you know, the idea is like, where are they coming from? And they're flying in groups. And if they're coming from offshore, the New Jersey State Police had helicopters literally laying offshore waiting for this because it was night after night after night. And when they chased them, they shut off their lights. The drones shut off their lights and increased speed and disappeared.
So, it sounds like, it feels like, whoever it is, is definitely not looking to be encountered, detected, seen or explained.
COOPER: Juliette, I mean, does it surprise you we don't have a definitive answer yet on the origin of these things, considering all the money that's invested in National Security and protecting US airspace?
JULIETTE KAYYEM, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Yes, and particularly airspace, I mean, an entire system of control from NORTHCOM to NORAD, to the FAA, to regulations regarding drones and the ability to fly certain unmanned vehicles depending on their size, their capacity and everything else.
There's a whole regulatory system exists, and the answer we've gotten back is, well, it's likely not drones. And so, that's what the government is now saying, is that most of them are manned aircraft.
But what John is saying is then that that would suggest that all of these eyewitness accounts and all of these videos that are showing multiple drones of large size that are moving in ways that an airplane doesn't move and that go try to avoid detection, we're still not getting a great explanation around that.
And look, some of these videos, we have to, you know, people are probably putting online now. Some of them may be -- may look like a drone, but it's actually an aircraft. But there's too many eyewitness accounts.
[20:25:35]
COOPER: John, I mean, have we seen this before, were there other incidents in other places?
MILLER: I mean, in Norfolk, Virginia in late 2023, you had 17 days of this over military locations, naval locations by the shore.
COOPER: And was that ever figured out?
MILLER: No, not figured out. And I mean, to Juliette's point, you talked -- there's 110 mayors, you know, that were at this conference where they did the briefing and their residents are angry about the government response, saying, well, they were fixed-wing aircraft. It's like fixed-winged aircraft don't stop and hover and then go dark and take off. They're a little insulted about the idea that they're not being believed.
COOPER: Do we even know how to -- obviously drones have been a huge part of the war in Ukraine. Has anti-drone technology -- I mean, do we know how to fight against drones?
MILLER: So we do and that's an issue here, which is under the current conundrum of laws between the FAA, Federal Aeronautics Administration, DHS, which is in charge of infrastructure security, the FBI, which has drone interdiction and detection capability and authority, and then all of local law enforcement, only the FBI is authorized to use that.
So, when you hear people saying, well, they should shoot them down, first of all, the complication is it's not illegal to fly a drone at night in New Jersey. So, why are you shooting them down for? And second of all, the police aren't allowed to do that because the federal government, even at events like New Year's Eve in Times Square and other things where you'd say if something with a payload came in, you'd want to take it out. They don't have that authority.
COOPER: John Miller, thank you, Juliette Kayyem, as well.
Coming up next, our Clarissa Ward takes us inside a Syrian military hospital where families are desperately hoping for news of their missing loved ones after the collapse of the Assad regime.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:31:52]
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: A missing American named Travis Timmerman was found in Syria today, across Syria this week. Thousands of detained people have been released from the notorious prisons operated by the Assad regime.
Timmerman was in prison for months, apparently. He says he entered the country for what he called spiritual purposes. He entered the country illegally, crossing the border from Lebanon. Here's what he told CBS News about his time in captivity.
(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)
TRAVIS TIMMERMAN, DETAINED IN A SYRIAN PRISON: It wasn't bad. I was never beaten. The only really bad part was that I couldn't go to the bathroom when I wanted to.
(END VIDEOCLIP)
COOPER: American journalist Austin Tice is still missing. You're looking at a video of him from 2012. He was detained at a checkpoint near Damascus after traveling to Syria to report on the civil war. Members of the Biden administration have said they believe that Austin Tice is still alive.
CNN's Clarissa Ward has been going to prisons looking for any sign of Tice and others. Tonight she reports on Syrian families desperate to locate loved ones who disappeared during the Assad regime. We want to warn you her report contains some graphic images.
(BEGIN VIDEO TAPE)
CLARISSA WARD, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A woman wails on the floor of the Mujtahid hospital.
My mother, she's been missing for 14 years, she says. Where is she? Where's my brother? Where's my husband? Where are they?
Dr. Ahmed Abdullah (ph) shows us into the morgue where about 35 bodies have been brought in. Discovered in a military hospital days after the regime fell, they are believed to be some of the last victims of Bashar al-Assad.
Take a look. This is the crime of the regime, he says. Even in the Middle Ages they didn't torture people like this.
Another man points to their tattered clothing. Evidence, he says, that most were detainees at the much feared Sednaya prison. Even in death they are still only identified by numbers.
Everyone here heard about the horrors that took place in Assad's notorious prisons. But to see it up close is something entirely different.
WARD: A lot of them have bruises, have horrible wounds that seem to be consistent with torture. I just saw one woman retching as she came out of the other room. Families are now going through trying to see if their loved ones are here.
WARD (voice-over): There's not enough room for all of them in the morgue, so a makeshift area has been set up outside. More and more families stream in, the light from their cell phones the only way of identifying the dead.
My only son, I don't have another. They took him for 12 years now just because he said no. 12 years my only son, this woman shouts. I don't know anything about him. I ask Allah to burn him, she says of Assad. Burn him and his sons like he burned my heart.
A crowd swarms when they see our camera. Everyone here has lost someone.
WARD: All of these people are asking us to take the names of their loved ones to help them try to find them.
[20:35:03]
WARD (voice-over): It is a mark of desperation. Such is the need for answers. But finding those answers will not be easy. At the military intelligence facility known as the Palestine Branch, officers burned documents and destroyed hard drives before fleeing. But their terror was on an industrial scale. Troves and troves of prisoner files remain. It will take investigators years to go through them.
Below ground, more clues etched on the walls of cells that look more like dungeons.
WARD: So you can see this list of names of it looks like 93 prisoners here. There's also a schedule for keeping the cell tidy. And just graffiti everywhere, people trying to leave marks for someone to find.
WARD (voice-over): Down here, insects are the only life form that thrives. It's clear that anyone who could survive this will never be the same again.
The cells are empty, but the doors are finally open. And the quest for answers is just beginning.
(END VIDEO TAPE)
COOPER: Clarissa, what do we know about the current status of Americans, Austin Tice, Travis Timmerman?
WARD (on-camera): So everyone woke up this morning ablaze. Syrian social media talking about how someone was claiming that Austin Tice had been found south of Damascus wandering the streets barefoot. It actually wasn't Austin Tice as we now know. It was Travis Timmerman from Missouri.
We know that he told some journalists and people who went to the scene that he had been held in a prison for seven months. He said that he did not experience any bad treatment during that time, which is very different, obviously, from the accounts that we saw in this piece that we just watched now.
The U.S. government has said that it is now trying to get him out of the country. They're not giving any details as to how they are doing that or what route they are taking. But still, clearly, a lot of people, particularly the family of Austin Tice, waiting desperately for some more news as to his whereabouts.
He was taken in 2012, captured by the regime. The interim government here in Syria has come out and told the U.S. government that they will do whatever they can to try to help locate missing Americans and get them back home as soon as possible, Anderson.
COOPER: Yes. Let's hope they find him.
Clarissa Ward, thank you.
Up next, how an online artificial intelligence tutor developed by a well-known educator, Sal Khan, could one day transform how our kids learn and how teachers teach. Our report for 60 Minutes ahead.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:42:12]
COOPER: We're about to show you a technological innovation that could one day change the way every child in every school in America is taught. It's an online tutor powered by artificial intelligence designed to help teachers be more efficient and students learn more effectively. It's called Khanmigo.
Khanmigo means "with me" in Spanish, and Khan refers to its creator, Sal Khan, the well-known founder of Khan Academy, whose lectures and educational software have been used for years by tens of millions of students and teachers in the U.S. and around the world.
Khanmigo was built with the help of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and its potential is staggering, but it's still very much a work in progress. It's being piloted in 266 school districts in the U.S. in grades 3 through 12.
In 60 minutes, I went to Hobart High School in Indiana to see how it works.
(BEGIN VIDEO TAPE)
MELISSA HIGGASON, TEACHER, HOBART HIGH SCHOOL, INDIANA: Good morning. Just a normal day in Chem, right?
COOPER (voice-over): At 8:00 in the morning, Melissa Higgason knows it's not always easy to get 30 high schoolers excited about chemistry.
HIGGASON: Are you ready? Are you ready?
ALL: Yes.
HIGGASON: All right. That's what I want to hear.
COOPER (voice-over): But these days, she has help.
HIGGASON: This is acetic acid. The pipette's not going to fill all the way.
COOPER (voice-over): That lesson Higgason has displayed behind her and is explaining to her ninth and tenth graders was created with the assistance of Khanmigo. She told the AI tutor she wanted a four-day course in which her students would investigate the physical and chemical properties of matter.
HIGGASON: This next section is your research section.
COOPER (voice-over): It took Khanmigo minutes to come up with a detailed lesson plan that would have taken Higgason a week to create.
HIGGASON: You pull that computer back out. You're going to go back to Khanmigo research.
COOPER (voice-over): And the students have Khanmigo on their laptops, too, ready to help them with their questions.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We have a couple of questions that we need to ask Khanmigo. So, for example, I asked it, what are three examples of acids? And if I wanted to know more --
COOPER: So it gave you three examples of acids --
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes --
COOPER: -- like hydrochloric acid --
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.
COOPER: -- citric, and sulfuric.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Like can you gave me more examples. And if I wanted to know even more, I could ask it, like, what specifically some of the acids do. Like --
COOPER: So it's giving you acids, and then it's asking you a question.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.
COOPER: Can you think of any other household items that might contain acid?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Ye. So, like, it wants to help you understand, like, what it's telling you, and not just, like, give you the information.
SAL KHAN, CEO OF KHAN ACADEMY: This school used to be --
COOPER (voice-over): Finding creative ways to help kids learn is something Sal Khan has been doing since 2005. He'd gotten degrees in math, computer science, and engineering from MIT, and an MBA from Harvard, and was working as a hedge fund analyst.
KHAN: It's a build to themselves.
COOPER (voice-over): When he started recording math tutorial videos in his closet for his young cousins.
KHAN: So if I were to multiply this equation --
COOPER (voice-over): Not long after, with the help of donors, including Bill Gates, he quit his career in finance and started the nonprofit Khan Academy.
KHAN: From the beginning of Khan Academy, the true north was, how do you give more students at least approximations of the type of personalization they would get if they had a personal tutor?
[20:45:07]
COOPER: A wealthy family can afford a tutor for their child if every kid could have a private tutor that would level the playing field. KHAN: Yes, that's the dream.
COOPER (voice-over): Co-founders of OpenAI, Greg Brockman and Sam Altman, were fans of Khan Academy and hoped to evaluate their AI using Khan's database of test questions and content.
So they gave Sal Khan early access to an advanced AI technology that today underpins ChatGPT.
COOPER: What did you immediately think?
KHAN: It was pretty obvious this technology was going to transform society, so it was pretty heady stuff. But on the education side, I was like, wow, people are going to be able to use this for doing deepfakes and fraud and cheat.
But if used well with the right guardrails, et cetera, it could also be used to support students, to give them more feedback, to support teachers for all this lesson planning and progress report writing that they spend hours a week doing.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Item level analysis.
COOPER (voice-over): Educators and engineers at Khan Academy used OpenAI's technology to build Khanmigo.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We're going to be using Khanmigo for this.
COOPER (voice-over): And for the last year and a half, the teachers and kids at Hobart High School and others have been testing it out.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'll ask it a question.
COOPER (voice-over): We sat down with two students from that morning chemistry class, Austin and Abigail, as well as Leighton and Maddie, who use Khanmigo in business class, and Lou and Lily, who use it in English and for SAT preparation.
COOPER: I heard people at Khan Academy came and asked students to break it.
ALL: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That was the fun part.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It was.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Some students would try and trick it into just giving you the answer.
COOPER: The superintendent I talked to said that some students were bullying Khanmigo.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. For the answer. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes. I think that was elementary school kids.
COOPER: Oh yes. OK, blame it on the elementary school kids.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's very helpful for those students who maybe don't feel comfortable asking questions within class.
COOPER: Does it have a personality?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's very much there for you. Like, it's very positive. It's very reassuring.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's getting me thinking, and it's not just giving me an answer.
COOPER: Do you ever just want to be like, can you just give me the answer?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes. That was the hardest part for, I know, like, me and a lot of other students. Like, why isn't it giving me answers? At the end of the day, that's where your better answer is going to be. It's not going to be whatever the AI gives you. It's going to be whatever you create.
HIGGASON: So your hypothesis going into the last test is.
COOPER (voice-over): Teachers at Hobart High don't just use Khanmigo to help plan lessons and save dozens of hours a week. They also monitor their students' understanding of subjects in ways they never could before.
COOPER: You can track how a student is actually using Khanmigo.
HIGGASON: Yes. I'm going to click Usage. And then if I wanted to pick a specific student, I could come down here and really dive into what that student's been looking at Khanmigo. And this is real time because you saw Abigail this morning looking at acids and bases.
COOPER: So wait a minute. These are the footprints of Abigail's work.
HIGGASON: These are the footprints of Abigail's work.
COOPER: At 8:00 a.m., she was asking about acids and chemical reactions. So even though you may not be hovering over the student at any given moment, you're somewhere else in the classroom --
HIGGASON: Right.
COOPER: You can later check, oh, this is what Abigail was looking at. I understand her thought process --
HIGGASON: Yes. COOPER: -- on why she got these answers.
HIGGASON: So literally. So it gives me a lot of insight as a teacher in terms of who I need to spend that one-on-one time with.
KHAN: And maybe Khanmigo throws in a mastery challenge or something.
COOPER (voice-over): Sal Khan says they won't sell the data they collect through Khanmigo or give it to other tech companies. They do use it, however, to improve Khanmigo's memory and personalization.
SARAH ROBERTSON, KHANMIGO PRODUCT MANAGER: It'll guide them to sort of what to do first.
COOPER (voice-over): Sarah Robertson, a former English teacher who's now a Khanmigo product manager, showed us a new feature they've developed to help kids write better and think more critically.
COOPER: I found this essay that I wrote --
COOPER (voice-over): To test it, I gave Khanmigo a paper I wrote in sixth grade about my mom, Gloria Vanderbilt.
ROBERTSON: So go ahead and click Next Start Revising.
COOPER (voice-over): After just 90 seconds, Khanmigo delivered a very detailed evaluation of my essay.
ROBERTSON: OK.
COOPER (voice-over): It liked some of what I wrote.
COOPER: The use of a quote to start the essay is effective and sets the tone for the rest of the biography.
COOPER (voice-over): But suggested I should revise several paragraphs in my topic sentence.
COOPER: So I'm going to rewrite my sixth grade paper.
COOPER (voice-over): After a few minutes of tweaking.
ROBERTSON: Ask it what it thinks.
COOPER: What do you think? It says, connecting childhood events to her later life will make her essay more cohesive and insightful. I mean, yes, it's good advice.
ROBERTSON: Yes. I can tell you, as a former seventh grade English teacher, when I assigned an essay, I would limit myself to 10 minutes per essay. I had 100 students.
So it would take me 17 hours to give feedback on every single student's first draft. The burden that we place on teachers to give that specific, timely, actionable feedback is just so great that it's not possible. COOPER: So I've now plugged in --
[20:50:04]
COOPER (voice-over): To see if Khanmigo could catch me cheating, I asked ChatGPT to write a paragraph about my mom. So I've now plugged in. To see if Khanmigo could catch me cheating, I asked ChatGPT to write a paragraph about my mom and pasted it into my essay.
ROBERTSON: I now see that there's a critical flag.
COOPER (voice-over): Khanmigo immediately sent an alert to Sarah Robertson.
ROBERTSON: It says that you pasted 66 words while revising from an unknown source. So if I click on that now, it's going to load your essay and it's going to show me exactly what you just did.
COOPER: I'm so busted.
ROBERTSON: You're busted.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Do you want to work with a three-digit or a four- digit number?
COOPER (voice-over): Khanmigo is free for all teachers in the U.S., but school districts have to pay up. $15 per student per year to cover computation costs. And it's still being improved.
GREG BROCKMAN, PRESIDENT OF OPENAI: Any other ideas that can show the --
COOPER (voice-over): We got a hint of how Khanmigo might evolve when Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, stopped by Sal Khan's office to show us their new vision technology. That will be available to ChatGPT paid subscribers soon.
BROCKMAN: We're preparing a demo for 60 minutes to show people what ChatGPT can do with voice mode with vision.
COOPER (voice-over): It can actually see what someone is doing through live video and interact with them in real time. Brockman was talking with it on his phone.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Got it. How about an anatomy lesson?
BROCKMAN: You're going to quiz him and ask him to draw whatever body part you want to quiz him on and have him label it. How does that sound?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That sounds like a fantastic plan.
COOPER (voice-over): When Brockman pointed his phone's camera at the blackboard, the AI started to quiz me.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Let's start with the heart. Anderson, can you draw and label where the heart is in the body?
COOPER (voice-over): It understood what I was doing, even though my drawing was pretty crude.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The location is spot on. The brain is right there in the head. As for the shape, it's a good start. The brain is more --
COOPER: Don't patronize me.
COOPER (voice-over): It also seemed to pick up on my anxiety.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Anderson, how about the liver? Give it a shot and show us where you think it's located in the body.
COOPER: OK, this is a little tough.
BROCKMAN (?): This is how we learn.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Absolutely. No pressure, Anderson.
COOPER (voice-over): I put the liver on the wrong side of the body. ChatGPT corrected me, politely.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Anderson's placement is close, but it's primarily on the right side, just below the diaphragm.
BROCKMAN: So can you critique this diagram overall?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Anderson's diagram is a solid effort, especially for an impromptu drawing.
COOPER (voice-over): The AI caught my mistake, but it's not foolproof.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The formula is simple. One half times the base times the height.
COOPER (voice-over): Watch what happened when Khan asked it to calculate the area of a triangle and intentionally misidentified the height.
KHAN: Is this the height over here, this four? Is that right?
COOPER (voice-over): The AI said he was right.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, that's correct.
COOPER (voice-over): It didn't catch the error. However, this technology improves quickly, and it is fun to interact with.
BROCKMAN: So I really, really --
COOPER (voice-over): Greg Brockman asked it to write a song about the formula for the area of a triangle to make it rhyme and sing it using a British accent.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Absolutely. Let's give it a try. To find a triangle space, here's what you do. Multiply the base by the height, it's true. Then take that product and divide by two. Now you've got the area of formula to pursue. How was that?
BROCKMAN: That was really fantastic.
COOPER: That's incredible.
KHAN: It is. It feels like we're in a science fiction book, really.
COOPER: Yes. I mean, it just feels like, to actually see it, you are -- I mean, I'm sort of speechless.
BROCKMAN: The first time you see this stuff, it really does just feel like this magic and almost incomprehensible. And then after a week, then you start to realize like how you can use it. That's been one of the really important things about working with Sal and his team has been to really figure out what's the right way to sort of bring this to parents and to teachers and to classrooms and to do that in a way so that the students really learn and aren't just, you know, asking for the answers. And that the parents can have oversight and the teachers can be involved in that process.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You can ask a follow-up question.
COOPER (voice-over): Sal Khan hopes this new vision technology can be incorporated into Khanmigo and available to students and teachers in two to three years. But he wants it to undergo more robust testing and meet strict guidelines for privacy and data security.
COOPER: I can imagine a lot of teachers watching this and thinking, OK, well, this is just going to replace me. Why would I want this in my classroom? It's like a Trojan horse.
KHAN: I'm pretty confident that teaching any job that is -- has a very human-centric element of it is, as long as it adapts reasonably well in this AI world, they're going to be some of the safest jobs out there.
COOPER: Do you think there will always be a need for teachers in the classroom talking with the student, looking the student in the eye?
KHAN: Oh, yes. I mean, that's what I'll always want for my own children and, frankly, for anyone's children. And the hope here is that we can use artificial intelligence and other technologies to amplify what a teacher can do so they can spend more time --
HIGGASON: Good job.
KHAN: -- standing next to a student, figuring them out, having a person-to-person connection.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Two tens.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Two tens. You got it. Good work, Kayla (ph).
(END VIDEO TAPE) [20:55:06]
COOPER: Amazing. Coming up, how Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is joining the growing list of business leaders reaching out to President-elect Trump.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
COOPER: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is expected to meet with President- elect Trump in the coming days. A source tells CNN that Amazon is poised to donate $1 million to Trump's inauguration. It's the latest example of a tech leader looking for a closer relationship with the President-elect.
CNN previously reported that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg met privately with Trump at Mar-a-Lago last month. Meta has also confirmed that it donated $1 million to the inaugural fund.
That's it for us. The news continues. The Source with Kaitlin Collins starts now.
