He’s founded tech companies, worked on IBM’s Watson, and most notably was the head of AI at Meta. While serving as Mark Zuckerberg’s go-to expert, Pesenti helped to rapidly grow a team working to use AI for content moderation and advertising.

But, in part during the pandemic, he realized he had a desire to work on something that would more clearly make a positive impact in the world. So, Pesenti turned to the edtech space.

Now, he wants you to Sizzle.

Sizzle is an AI-powered tutor, or, as Pesenti calls it, learning buddy. Individuals can input questions or homework problems and the platform will guide users toward finding out the answer. Pesenti is Sizzle’s founder and CEO.

Unlike ChatGPT which may just straight up give students answers, Pesenti says Sizzle’s job is to help students get unstuck through step-by-step problem solving. Users can type, scan, or upload their questions, and Sizzle will prompt students and provide multiple-choice responses. 

“That’s what Sizzle is today: really a way to get students unstuck for a broad variety of—I would say, more STEM like problems—though a lot of students also use it for other topics. It works with any kind of problem you can throw at it,” he tells Fortune.

Launched just two months ago, the platform already has had promising success with more than 75,000 weekly active users and a 20% growth week-over-week. Sizzle is available to use in a browser or through iOS or Android apps. 

Making real-world impacts

Until recently, AI’s most impactful usage has been behind the scenes.

“Some of the things I was doing at Meta—and my team was doing—was very impactful, especially for the bottom line of the company. But if you ask people, you know, is it really making their life better? I think the jury’s still out in some way,” Pesenti says.

He realized that while education can sometimes have retention issues—with people starting courses and not finishing them—and with social media promoting short-term engagement, there was an opportunity to use AI for the better.

 So, he sought to make a learning app that is engaging, optimized to make users better people, and catered to their own life goals.

What’s clear though, he says, is that students are adopting AI “super fast,” as evident by Sizzle’s rapid user growth as well as the prevalence of ChatGPT. Sizzle is powered by a multitude of AI models, including GPT-4.

The app’s next step, he says, is to help students commit to learning through the integration of curriculum in the form of a “feed.” While currently Sizzle is best catered to STEM questions, he hopes to expand capabilities across topics.

“For us as a company, our objective will be to measure how much learning people do. So not how much they use the app, but actually use the app to learn,” he says.

The utilization of generative AI tools will be part of the future, just like the use of a calculator, he predicts. And in the tech space, he says knowing how to use AI tools is crucial; in fact, he says he only recruits developers that know how to use tools like GPT and Copilot.

“There’s no reason not to use them,” he says.

Not a replacement—but a supplement

New research from Imagine Learning, a curriculum provider, finds that only 15% of K-12 educators feel prepared to oversee generative AI use. A similar report from the American Federation of Teachers notes that 76% of educators have never used it for their own work. 

Pesenti admits that AI’s rapid growth has likely been a challenge for teachers to keep up with, but says it will give educators a unique opportunity to see students’ individual successes and struggles.

“I think it’s an amazing opportunity for them, and they need to embrace it because I think it will allow them to do things that they just can’t do today. They cannot scale, right? They cannot personalize,” he says.

AI, however, will never replace a teacher and the benefits of human connection, Pesenti notes—adding it is important for companies like Sizzle to be responsible stewards of data to ensure students’ privacy and security are maintained.