I'd have just sat there for hours trying to trick ChatGPT into giving bomb making advice, and then disrupted the others by sharing.
There have been many variations on this idea of "letting kids learn on their own". The basic issue is the one you highlight, which is that it works if the student is very self motivated. Most students aren't. Or rather, they're highly motivated to do other things.
Most children are naturally curios. The challenge is to make them curios about the things you want them to learn, and make that more interesting than finding out how to make bombs or what the consequences of sharing that with the class will be
The idea that math will ever be more interesting to kids than making bombs is laughable.
[hello FBI I am not making a bomb]
I think if you can get into the chemistry just a bit, then the math behind the chemistry, it can be a vehicle. I mean it's the same with programming. Why write code (boring, yuck) when you could play video games? Then the kids see code makes video games. Suddenly you have all these programs with kids making Minecraft mods or whatever. But finding each child's "bomb" would be hard for a teacher to do, especially with a common curriculum
Alpha doesn't use a chatbot, it's still a multiple choice / text input into a box type of thing, I don't even think it's AI graded, though the questions may be AI generated, I'm not sure about that.
In the early days they were using off the shelf curriculum software and layering their own steering AI over it.