Thrun's criticism was pretty general--it went beyond his product. Thrun was sufficiently critical of his own vision of education for the masses as to cast doubt on Friedman's sweeping implicature that, among all the approaches to poverty that have been and that might be tried, this technology has the greatest potential. Given the 1% retention rate, MOOCs might "unlock a billion more brains" if there were 100 billion of them to unlock.
With one billion brain interested, he can still train 50 million (actual retention numbers are closer to 5%) new people every semester. That’s still a lot more than the Ivy league.
As to Friedman… Well, this is HN, a polite society, so let me skip that part.
