Really awesome work! I've been trying to do some of this real time back and forth voice coaching myself and it's no easy feat. Congrats on the progress.
Please don't. Don't deprive children of the interaction with other human beings. 5 year olds don't need tutors. They need play, touch, sense, feel, run, breath, sky, earth.
I’m curious why it has to be an either or? Spending 30 minutes with a tutor doesn’t deprive children of interaction with humans. If we can support a child’s learning (perhaps even more efficiently) doesn’t it give them more time to do that?
Some 5 year olds could use a human tutor. Giving them AI instead is no different than plopping them in front of "Youtube Kids" instead of being a parent.
"Some 5 year olds could use a gourmet meal. Giving them a mass-produced TV dinner is no different than sedating them with opiates* and pouring garbage on them instead of being a parent."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Also, please don't use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting someone when you aren't. That's also an internet snark trope and we're trying to avoid that kind of thing here.
p.s. That's an interesting, and heartbreaking, historical link.
In your article you hit the nail on the head on why this should not be used for developing minds, especially between the ages of 5-7, though i would consider using your product after that.
This age range is a critical period for theory of mind, executive function scaffolding, pragmatic language development, and attentional regulation. This technology directly intersects with these maturing systems.
I applaud your dreams and hopes. I don't share them though, and predict this type of device will destroy countless meaningfull parent-child-teacher relationship.
We started with reading, providing patient coaching as kids learn to read out loud. We are now adding math and in some countries, English as a Second Language.
Students actually aren't as homogenous as you might think. And it's one of the big challenges teachers have with a classroom of 25+. They're forced to teach to the middle, which isn't great for kids that are slightly behind or ahead.
An AI tutor has the advantage to adapt and teach to each child's unique learning path, make sure core concepts are covered on an individual basis before moving on.
Yes! Deeply admire what Sal Khan set out to do. One of the original pioneers of how technology could transform education.
What we learnt from it: a chatbot is not enough to teach a child though. We need more to fully engage them and have the tools and context to truly teach them.
We describe this in the blog post, curious what you think.
Being frank I think its not enough to have a good looking app and have some llm calls
Think about your competition for your market. When I want my child to really excel in learning, I would force them into kumon - so they can skip a grade. If your a student who wants to learn you have khan academy.
And im just not seeing anything that screams-this is better than khan academy and kumon
All i see is an education app with good design
Sorry if it sounds harsh
P.s. if youre on the mission of educating people from developing countries-different story and different problems. Ignore what i put here then
> When I want my child to really excel in learning, I would force them into kumon - so they can skip a grade
Great - so now they're a year younger than all their peers in terms of emotional resilience. I've seen this play out time and time again, and it is disastrous for them and their ability to build relationships.
Pushing children ripe is never a good idea. If they're ahead of their peers, find other outlets for their intelligence. Teach them new skills, involve them in new hobbies. They need time to grow; education is a journey, not a race.
> Students actually aren't as homogenous as you might think. And it's one of the big challenges teachers have with a classroom of 25+
True. It's well known that some % of students do well with individual tutoring. Move faster, understand things better, etc. And another part of students don't do well with that. They need other things. Maybe help from their peers in smaller groups (like 3..8 students), some after-school extra, a fix for problems back home, whatever.
But 5y olds? They need contact with peers, play, attention from humans, run around, build stuff from Lego blocks, touch grass, etc. Learning to read, "3x4=12" math etc isn't hard enough to warrant putting 5y old kids on AI tutors.
Agree that kids benefit from more human interaction, not less. That's our goal.
The reality though is that the traditional school setting doesn't provide for that: a teacher in front of a 30 kid classroom can't cater to every child and it's not a particularly interactive experience. The current system just isn't working: 60% of US fourth-graders are behind in reading, 40% lack basic literacy. Those kids are going to move on to the next phase of school without the skills to thrive.
There are 270 mil kids out of school globally. So what are you going to do? Give every child a 1-1 human tutor? For sure, if you can, that’s amazing. But you can't pull that off. You don't have enough teachers.
Technology gives us the opportunity to catch kids up. By doing that, you can decouple teaching hard skills and free up teachers to focus on the things that are truly human and unlock a lot more people who may not have the skills to teach the full curriculum themselves to act as learning facilitators. That leads to more human interaction.
Personally I would like to see kids learn way way more in much less time, and it’s clear AI is going to make that possible. What you are saying sounds a lot like “I want kids to learn less and be dumber”
Hey HN! We've spent the good part of this past year building an AI tutor that teaches kids ages 4-9 reading, math, ESL and more. Getting an AI tutor to effectively teach a child turns out to be a really hard technical challenge, this took getting the underlying architecture right.
Our tutor steers the UX in real-time and makes complex decisions on the fly. Doing both at conversation speed required us to replace the standard tool-use loop. We built our own tutor harness that utilizes a streaming interpreter that executes actions, while an asynchronous planner model reasons ahead of the conversation and makes calls that drive the child's learning. On top of it all, we developed a safety system that checks every turn without it causing an interruption to the activity and conversation flow.
Effective teaching isn't just about answering a child's question quickly, rather making the right move at the right moment. AI is also going to be an integral part shaping how this generation of kids learn to read and think, tackling this responsibly means getting the design right.
Happy to answer questions and curious what you all think, critical feedback included, we've been working on this problem for a long time and love to hear from the HN community.
I get where you're coming from. There’s a lot of potential to misuse AI with kids.
What we do believe is that children will be living in a world where this technology will exist, and how it gets used becomes the important question.
Children are going to grow up in a world filled with AI and we have to prepare them for that world and how to thrive in it. I would never give my son raw ChatGPT the same way you wouldn’t give a 5 year old access to the raw internet. But that doesn’t mean that the internet can’t be used for learning.
We don’t have all the answers and we can’t respond for all of AI, but we’re a team of parents, teachers, and child psychologists who deeply care about getting this right and unlocking the opportunities for kids. The article goes into the technical depth of how we make it pedagogically aligned, safe, non-slop.
You've posted 4 shallow, indignant dismissals in this thread. That's excessive, so please don't.
I realize you have reason to feel strongly about this, as do many others. That's certainly fine. But once is enough to make your point. HN is for curious conversation, not attack or denunciation.
What are your thoughts about children in a Sudbury School model? These are democratic schools where children can do what they like in the day. Mostly they choose to play with other kids, games of imagination, though also doing screen time. One of the basic principles is that children figure out what they want to do and the learning comes along with it; the model views adults wanting children to learn something specific as generally counterproductive though having resources available is okay if it is not coupled with any expectations.
Are your devices likely something that they would have fun with and choose to engage with or is it likely to be ignored unless adults use some kind of persuasion to have them use it? Is it cool with a child using it for a bit and then not using it for a few months and then wandering back to it? How far up into math does it go compared to what an a randomly sampled adult could actually do mathwise? Also for reading, are you using phonics or whole word sighting? For math, to what extent is it screen manipulatives versus manipulations of digits? Also, do you have provision for an older child to start learning this stuff so the basics need not be at a 4 year old presentation level, but the concepts still need to be covered?
In Sudbury schools, the typical age of self-taught reading is 7-9 though it can range from 4 to 12. Useful arithmetic usually seems to happen much earlier than reading though reading tends to get completed by the children on their own while arithmetic does not advance further than the needs of money exchange without special effort. In the long run, Sudbury students have no problem with college level material, including mathematics, but it could be nice to have something that eases the white knuckling if it does not undermine the child's self-directedness.
Hi! I'm Elizabeth (one of the co-founders of Ello). This is an interesting question. I actually think there is more overlap than people might assume, but it's a bit more because adaptability to various approaches to learning is part of the point. While I'm not deeply familiar with the Sudbury School model, I think there are various approaches to teaching kids that are successful because different approaches serve different types of kids and learners. I can see why this approach would be successful for a certain profile of student for whom it's the right fit.
We start from the belief that children are naturally curious. Our job is to build something engaging enough that a child wants to interact with it because it is interesting and rewarding. If a child in a Sudbury environment never chose to use it, I would see that as useful feedback for us, not a problem with the child. There are opportunities for kids to explore and incorporate their interests within our app.
I also think it is completely fine if a child uses it for a while, disappears for months, and comes back. Learning is rarely linear, and technology should be able to pick up wherever the child is.
On reading, we’re firmly grounded in the science of reading, so we teach through explicit phonics rather than whole-word memorization because that is best practice.
On math, we’re much more interested in helping children build intuition and conceptual understanding than simply getting answers. AI gives us the flexibility to use conversation, visual models, stories, or symbolic math, depending on what helps a particular child understand.
One thing AI is uniquely good at is meeting learners where they are. A 10 year old who is learning to read should not have to work through material that feels like it was made for preschoolers. The underlying concepts can stay the same while the language, topics, and presentation become age appropriate.
I don’t think there is one educational model that works for every child. What excites me is that AI makes it much more feasible to adapt to individual learners instead of expecting every learner to adapt to the same experience.
>> children figure out what they want to do and the learning comes along with it; the model views adults wanting children to learn something specific as generally counterproductive
> One thing AI is uniquely good at is meeting learners where they are
What if the AI wanted children to learn something specific? Able to patiently await an opportune moment. Able to blend it invisibly into other material.
Long term, one possibility is AI enabling a massive implicit curriculum. "[A]dults wanting children to learn" about say street crossing might be counterproductive... but funny how, at opportune times, some random stories just happen to include crossing a street, and do formative assessment, and happen to, quietly and eventually, cover and reinforce the associated learning objectives.
Take How the Piloses Evolved Skinny Noses, a children's picture book inoculation against natural selection misconceptions. It could merely be a book on a shelf. Or the AI might introduce or provide the book at an opportune moment. Or the book material might be dissolved and blended into other content.
So some story is explicitly about Fido going for a walk. But implicitly, it covers some aspect of safely crossing a street, and of concrete crack propagation, and tick precautions, and natural selection, and ...
Science is a richly interwoven tapestry of stories... but we basically never teach it like that. Even if such material was gathered, which pre-AI was absurdly implausibly demanding of domain expertise, it would largely be beyond the capability of an individual tutor to compellingly and adaptively deliver. But with AI?
Thanks for replying. Glad to hear you use phonics. It sounds like it could have a lot of potential and I intend to pass it along to our community. If you would like to possibly explore its use in a Sudbury community, you can send an email to my gmail account which is the same username as listed here.
Think about what every adult absolutely needs to know: how to be an effective member of society, how to interact with people, how to self-regulate, and generally being a person other people want to be around and work with. That is what a Sudbury school supports learning while conventional school hinders it, offering an authoritarian-based lifestyle instead.
Most people going through conventional school don't get the freedom to learn to be themselves in a community until their 20s, not mastering it until often their early 30s. As for academics, Sudbury students have repeatedly demonstrated having no problem quickly learning whatever it is they want or need to learn as an adult. Many Sudbury students go to college, getting A's even in their first semester, making good bonds not only with other students but also faculty and administrators. They help form communities wherever they go. They are engaged in classes in a way that their peers are not. They are coming to academic learning fresh and eager not weighed down by 14,000 hours of conventional school tedium. Those who do not go to college often advance very quickly in whatever work they end up doing as person skills are the key to being successful.
The results speak for themselves. You can read about it in Peter Gray's book Free to Learn and other works by him.
Also keep in mind that teaching, which is what conventional school focuses on, is not the same as learning.
I suspect there are massive selection effects the are skewing the results here. I can imagine this being quite effective for intelligent, curious, and self-motivated kids and a complete and utter disaster for the average child.
Human tutor is definitely the best thing we could do, but it’s not attainable to give every child a human tutor and clearly the current system isn’t working. If you manage to build a good AI tutor, you can unlock more human interaction outside of self-directed learning time
Ai is brainrot because that’s what many people choose to produce with it, and it’s easy to produce brainrot at scale with AI.
But it’s hardly the only thing you can produce with it.
Crap content is definitely over represented. It’s an error, though, to think that is all AI is capable of. If quality is the goal, and you are willing to invest the resources to achieve it, you can easily create very high quality work. But it’s not terribly easy. And it’s not terribly fast. It is relatively cheap, maybe 1/4 to 1/10 the cost of doing it with qualified humans. But it’s not trivial and it’s not magic. It’s a force multiplier, but the quality of the idea and the performance of the model used are very important, and good models cost money to use… about $50-100 an hour if you are really leveraging it. But you can do ten hours of work in an hour or two.
Mostly what I see people doing is saying "Hey, Spicy Autocomplete, steal me some content from someone else to do <this thing>" and then post it up and ask why it doesn't work properly.
But then you've got things like the AI-based animation tools that Corridor Digital used to animate 3D scans of some of the crew's children's toys, to make a Toy Story-like video. It took damn near as long to do as it would have done by hand, because it all still had to be mo-capped and so on, but the results were incredible.
I guess it's similar to how just about anyone can pick up a cheapy flux-core welder and run a seagull-shit bead down a bit of metal, but a very skilled welder could do absolutely pristine work with the same crappy machine.
However, I still don't think it's a good idea to plonk small children down in front of a screen, and have a creepy AI voice read nonsense out to them. While I love the idea of working with the hallucinations of a dreaming computer, because I first read Neuromancer when I was 12 or so and grew up watching things like Blake's 7 with not one but two superintelligent talking computers, the reality is actually not really that good.
Yeah using ai to substitute for human attention in such a way that the child gets less interaction with people is a terrible idea.
But a digital loupe that would accurately tell you what you were looking at and do a deep dive based on your interest, things that guide interactions with the world in such away to encourage curiosity and investigation, are possible using AI and not really possible without it.
Of course you can also make ai toys that are designed to focus engagement on themselves and isolate the child from caregivers so they can spend more time on TikTok…so, there’s that.
I wish I had had this when I was a 5-year-old. Few of my teachers really understood the things I wanted to learn, my peers weren't interested in the nerdy things I was, and my parents certainly didn't have the wealth to provide me with private tutoring. There are a lot of negative comments here, but they are shallow... I'm sure those commenters wouldn't want to live without the access to the Internet, and even a brilliant five-year-old can't use the Internet effectively yet. A smart and curious 5-year-old has endless questions and a properly harnessed LLM has endless patience to provide answers at a level the kind can understand (which usually not even it's parents do).
In fact, this could be one of the most beneficial uses of AI for society yet... private tutors of the level that the mega-rich always had, now for all kids everywhere! This gives me real hope for the future generations of humanity.
>Few of my teachers really understood the things I wanted to learn, my peers weren't interested in the nerdy things I was, and my parents certainly didn't have the wealth to provide me with private tutoring.
I can understand saying that when you're in middle or high school. But as a 5 year old? This comment has to be a joke?
It wouldn't really surprise me if the average kindergarten teacher (or just adult) had no idea how e.g. an air conditioner or an elevator or one of those emergency flashlights that you can power by shaking or any number of other everyday things work.
Are you asking me to believe that the educational system underserves kindergartners because the average kindergarten teacher can't provide an education on your narrow technical interest?
The responsibilities of the average kindergarten teacher probably include 1) making sure your kids don't swallow glue, and 2) making sure little johnny doesn't throw another tantrum.
Are you just conceding the point here? The original commenter was obviously a curious child, not a tantrum throwing glue eater. That ostensible teachers are busy babysitting (or potty training now, apparently) the latter means the former are neglected, sure.
I chose those examples as things that any high schooler if not middle schooler should be able to describe the working principles of, so yeah my point is exactly that simple things around us are apparently beyond the reach of most adults to begin to explain. So if a kid wants to know about them, the computer might be their only option.
That's one interpretation: the system doesn't take of your specific needs and therefore it's neglectful or inadequate. Another interpretation is that the teacher is doing exactly what the school needs them to do because most 5 year olds aren't concerned with how air conditioners work. And perhaps it shouldn't be the responsibility of the kindergarten teacher to provide technical education?
There's a conversation to be had about the educational system underserving the intellectually curious. Trying to make that point in the context of kindergarten is a little absurd to me.
No one in this subthread said teachers aren't doing exactly what the schools need them to do; the OP you replied to said properly harnessed LLMs could be a boon for a smart, curious child. Why is that absurd for kindergartners? My oldest probably started asking me about everything she sees when she was 3. Curious, undeserved kindergartners exist.
The idea that they can be tailored to the needs and interests of every individual is the point.
Super curious to hear from the parents here: Honestly, at this point isn't not exposing our kids to AI just setting them up to fail in the future? Like not letting them learn to use the internet? I have friends who are actually teaching their kids how to use AI because they don't want them to fall behind
My school district is beginning to roll back on computer use for kids, after having gone all in on putting almost all student work on laptops (and heavily relying on learning apps) during the pandemic. They are now offering guidance to teachers and parents about when and how to limit computer usage. They also banned student cell phones a couple years ago and students are never allowed to access social media on school property. All that to say, I think my district (and other similar ones) are struggling so hard to balance good active learning against unhealthy amounts of screen time that they will reach this same place with AI fairly quickly, within a year or two I think, and start wanting to set restrictions and place guardrails.
I personally don’t know anyone who’s worried about their kids falling behind because of lack of AI knowledge. I know lots of parents worried about how screen-centered life is for kids.
No, in my opinion as a parent this is lunacy. By the time my little kids "need" AI or the Internet in a meaningful way the AI labs will have either delivered the dream of "just talk to the computer" in which case there's nothing to learn to use, or they will be smoldering Pets.com-esque craters. Either way, for us right now it's books and a little bit of "old fashioned" movies and video games; no algorithmic feeds, all human-created content, and a focus on enjoying narratives and experiences together. We can look things up together on the Internet if we need to, and if that routes to an LLM Dad may groan a little but it's OK. Mostly we learn by trying things out, making guesses and talking about them, or looking in books.
I understand the calculus may change with middle school and up, but I still think that despite the "rat race" dynamic of grades and homework, kids who learn to think the pre-2023 way will come out ahead in the long run, even if it's only in life satisfaction.
My generation did not have access to the internet until we were teenagers, yet we perfectly managed to catch up. In fact, I don't think that the following generations (the so-called 'digital natives') have overall better computer skills, on the contrary.
In general, the last thing young kids need is more screen time. My 5-year-old daughter doesn't have access to any mobile devices. She enjoys drawing, handcraft, reading books, singing and playing the piano. I'm perfectly happy with that.
Certainly my parents have considered computers important enough, so I learned all the skills for dealing with them - installing Windows 98, finding working drives, navigating eMule, debugging IDE drives... Well, what use is that now?
I thought AI was supposed to get better and easier to use as time went on, so why should we bother to teach them now when it will be so easy to learn in the future?
> Honestly, at this point isn't not exposing our kids to AI just setting them up to fail in the future?
The whole point of AI is to enable unskilled people to perform skilled tasks.
In your mind, what skill does a person actually learn from getting onboard AI usage early? It's the other way around; those who come to it late (when the models are more capable) are going to have a shorter learning curve.
Full disclosure: I worked on a small project with Ello / Catalin a few years ago.
As of this writing, a lot of the sentiment in this post is that this is a terrible idea, and that kids need human tutors. This is 100% correct. But I think it's worth knowing a few things about current nature of reality:
1. There is a literacy crisis playing out right now, and it's really bad. As of 2025, 40% of fourth graders in the United States are reading below basic levels [1].
2. There is also a massive teacher shortage. 2025 US state data shows ~400k teacher positions currently unfilled or staffed by underqualified personnel [2]. That's >10% of the workforce.
3. Bloom's 2-sigma problem [3] shows that class sizes really matter. In the limit, access to 1-1 teaching lifts performance to the 90th percentile of classroom teaching.
4. It's also impractical to say that this should be on parents. 54% of US adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level, and 20% are below 5th-grade level [3].
And this is all just in the US – the developing world is worse in many places!
My personal take: reading is so important to being a functioning democracy and society that we need this solved, by almost any practical means necessary.
At Ello, I heard stories of children figuring out they were behind at school, and when given the app, they holed themselves up in their room and used it to get themselves caught up. And then they could read! Can you imagine falling behind at school at this critical juncture, and watching your friends grow beyond you for the rest of school life? We're currently setting so many kids up for years of shame and deprivation.
It's not perfect, but from the bottom of my heart, I really do think is a life-changing technology that needs to exist.
> We're in crisis. As of 2025, 40% of fourth graders are reading below basic levels
How much of this crisis is due to the social engineering being attempted in school districts across America? Case in point: San Francisco schools decided a couple of years ago that they would no longer teach Algebra in 8th grade. Why? Because too many kids of a certain demographic were failing it. So let's just not teach it! No class, so nobody fails it, right?
It took a proposition on a ballot (i.e., an election) [1] to force the SFUSD to put Algebra back in 8th grade!
I have kids in SFUSD. It often feels like the SFUSD does not care about the average and above average kids; all they focus on is the bottom layer. And even there, they do a terrible job. There was a student who got straight F's in each and every class, and still managed to be a senior in High School! [2]
The explanation I've heard is that the national curriculum switched away from phonics and to a teaching method called "balanced literacy", and this went terribly [1]. IIRC it involved teaching kids to recognize words by their overall visual shape. I believe this is what mature readers do, but for this to work, one first needs to bootstrap a robust vocabulary via being able to sound out words, i.e. phonics.
(I'm not sure whether Cato is generally reliable, but FYI there are lots of other writeups online on the same topic. It was just the first non-paywalled and reasonably complete one I found)
I've heard a lot of people argue that phonics are vastly superior to "whole word" techniques, and maybe that's true -- I'm definitely not an expert, though it is how I was taught English in Australia ~30 years ago.
However, I find it quite hard to believe that it is the most important cause of the modern literacy rate issues in the US. Why? Because "whole word" teaching was the conventional wisdom since at least the 1950s[1,2]! Most articles on the topic reference the book Why Johnny Can't Read (1955) which was written to argue in favour of phonics as a response to (perceived?) child illiteracy at the time and claims (page 1):
> Since the 1920s, most American schoolchildren have been taught to memorize the "appearance" of words, one after another, like Chinese characters, without reference to the sounds of the individual letters that make up each word.
The reintroduction of phonics in the US first started as "balanced literacy" (phonics and "whole word", ideally tailored to students) in the 1990s and "science-based reading" (basically just phonics) properly started in the 2000s[1,2], which means that the argument that phonics would improve reading scores is on quite shaky ground (most children in the US today get taught phonics and most people >40 were probably taught with "whole word" teaching).
Go back to the 18th and 19th centuries and you land back in phonics-land. The fad of whole-word and three-queuing lasted a generation and has produced terrible results. Those techniques even induce dyslexia in some cases.
I am aware of that (the articles I linked even mention it), my point was that modern fears around literacy are based on data suggesting that child literacy rates have recently declined.
If lack of phonics was solely to blame then almost all US adults alive today (not just "a generation" -- anyone born between the 1920s and 2000s, at least) would have literacy problems, but the concern is that today's children have literacy problems in contrast to previous generations -- the exact opposite of what you would expect. To be fair, people in the 1950s were also claiming that children were illiterate compared to previous generations, but I'm not sure whether those claims are really credible. Do your parents' and grandparents' generations strike you as being shockingly illiterate?
> San Francisco schools decided a couple of years ago that they would no longer teach Algebra in 8th grade.
This has nothing to do with this at all. We're talking about 4th grader literacy nationwide and you're talking about algebra in a single area in a different grade!?
The second point where there aren't enough teachers nationwide (10% missing workforce) is probably because teachers are terribly paid, disrespected, and subject to bad working conditions.
Maybe that's why people aren't clamoring to be teachers and the quality of work is low?
Thanks for taking time to write this. HN is showing (expected) dismissing attitude towards this idea. That tells me it might work :) ! Folks here are wildly overestimating (or ignoring!) how many adults are qualified to be good teachers and how many of them further have enough incentives (money, time, resources) to do it well. Its a _very_ small number.
In my part of the world, "become a teacher" is often a job advised to people who are not able to find other jobs or are looking for a safe way back after career break. None of them are looking forward to engaging 5 year old with life's curiosities. To add the famous quip from WorryDream/Bret Victor : most of the teachers teaching calculus etc. have never ever used it in real life.
Working parents with STEM backgrounds likely know that schools are glorified day-cares and probability of your child having access to a life changing tutor is very low.
I tried building an edtech venture frustrated precisely with these problems. Failed, but would def do it again with AI in the mix. I'm for one rooting for this to succeed!
That is the ideal solution. I'll tell you an incident that seems from a black humour novel. A state government in one of the highest populous state in India decided to make biometric attendance for government school teachers, to ensure they are in school. Large number of so called "teachers" started protesting against state, egged on by opportunistic opposition. Because many of them were drawing salaries from government and _not even showing up in school_. That's the ground reality of government funded education.
I'm open to the idea that market forces or reality _might_ tilt the favour in more investment in AI in education and tutoring. Think about developing economies or under developed economies of the world. The state / government has to think how should they allocate budget: on agriculture subsidies or pay teachers better or spend it on energy security in increasingly hostile multipolar world or invest it in infrastructure. There are no good answers.
> HN is showing (expected) dismissing attitude towards this idea. That tells me it might work :) !
I recently learned the name of this logical fallacy: Galileo gambit. It’s one of my pet peeves. Yes, we all know Dropbox was infamously dismissed by the top comment on HN. No, just because someone criticizes your project on here doesn’t mean it’ll be a big success.
Instead of fixing the education system and giving it the resources it deserves (eg paying teachers more like the other reply said) we’re going to “fix it” by ossifying a two tiered system where wealthy kids get individualized attention from well trained adults while poor kids are taught by AI.
The Galileo gambit is the idea that because experts reject an idea, it must be true. HN is the furthest thing from experts when it comes to early childhood education.
-- When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
I hear you, and I know every project being dissed here is not going to be Dropbox. Perhaps some projects deserve the reality check they get. Though I still believe that HN crowd telling that just pay teachers more or kids need to be taught by good human teachers are underestimating the scale of the problem.
Some real experience of school in my part of the world (India). My child goes to a somewhat costly private school. Still, each class has 35-40 kids. The teacher is over-worked : checking home work, prepares kids for upcoming random extra curricular activity, has to teach AI because someone suddenly thought it is important to teach it in grade 3. I know multiple teachers in that school who landed the job after doing just a 6 months course after a career break. Forget research on teaching, hardly any one of them read anything beyond curriculum. None of the teachers have enough time to give personalised attention to _any_ kid. Its a sorry state of affairs.
Personalised tutoring produced geniuses in last century but was affordable only for a wealthy few. It is my belief that AI might help democratise the idea. I know it is somewhat hard to think that a mere machine might have more patience and time to explain a concept 100 times to a student, instead of a human.
This still doesn't take away from the fact that teachers deserve to be paid more. I was a passionate for becoming a teacher, but knew I can't make enough money from it. I'm seeing a possibility in emerging markets that India / China might find it cheaper to deploy AI en masse for better educational outcomes because it will be much cheaper for the state than paying high wages (and subsequently pensions) to human teachers, however unfair it might look.
I love my parents but I don't think either of them have read a book in 50+ years now.
My mother kept a type of year book that each year I would say what I wanted to be when I grow up. I think in 5th grade I said physicist.
You know how they nurtured this curiosity? They did nothing. I don't think either of them even know what a physicist is beyond something to do with science.
I think in 6th grade I wanted a microscope that I eventually got but had no guidance on what to do , what to look at. I don't think I even knew there was this concept of "biology".
A huge number of kids have this same experience as I did right now.
What is even worse is life is ultimately a path dependent process with a huge part of the outcome based on the deterministic chaos of initial starting conditions.
No shit I would rather have my father be a particle physicist and my mother a librarian with a passion for reading non-fiction to kids.
My parents did the best they could but they are not intellectuals in the slightest and neither is the average person now. Claude would have been a god send to me in 5th grade.
Blooms 2 sigma, like many studies that are thrown about, is not as much of a slam dunk as people claim that it is. Have you read the paper or any efforts to replicate?
"Wow, our state institutions are struggling in ways X, Y, and Z. Rather than addressing these problems we will shuffle them to an unaccountable third party that will provide a necessarily worse substitute using the hot technology of the day."
The reality is, most 5 year olds don’t get access to the resources most of us have had while growing up. People are saying, “kids should have human tutors.” Guys, most people in the world don’t have any tutors! What Ello has built and other forms of AI-based tutoring is going to raise the average level of education and literacy in the world. Especially in developing countries. Let individual parents decide what’s best for their kids.
Most of them don't get access. So let's hook them up to an insane, unproven, unpredictable autocomplete math equation and entrust it to their development as a human being.
Yeah tell them to change things.. why didn't we think of that? Provide opportunities to make parenting less stressful like here so that they can involve more.. this reflexive anti AI luddite attitude isn't productive as it's just less signal and more noise..
That's awfully reductive there, champ. Most critiques of AI are based on some combination of observed failings of the technology, observed failings of the tech industry writ large, and healthy skepticism in the face of Yet Another Tech Industry Hype Typhoon. Anyway, the burden of proof isn't on skeptics, it's on the technology and it's proponents, so let's see some receipts before we agree to squander limited public resources on unproven systems yeah?
>Most critiques of AI are based on some combination of observed failings of the technology
Most critiques of AI are based on experience with the cheapest AI available a year ago, by midwits unable to recognize that AI's performance on the Putnam, IMO and bar exam makes it far smarter than they are by almost every metric that was traditionally used to measure intelligence.
The industry hype mill and it's attendant horde of touts are working overtime to make sure the dude that mows my lawn is up to date on AI, so I'm not sure how you're going to advance the argument that anyone routinely posting to the epicenter of the AI hype typhoon is some how poorly informed on the topic.
To make my earlier critique of your argument clearer, some applications of AI might be bad for society, but it does not follow that the tutoring application is also bad for society.
It does not follow that anything produced by an electronic computational device is bad for children or society. I've personally seen computers teach children barely two years old to read.
Anecdote < Data. Studies consistently show declines in every trackable metric associated with education when computational devices are introduced to the process. Until actual data is presented that contradicts these findings there's no grounds for rational debate.
> Studies consistently show declines in every trackable metric associated with education when computational devices are introduced to the process.
They're doing it wrong, just as the incentives in the classroom are wrong (to increase a number showing how many children meet some artificially low standard of competency). The rational debate comes from the hundreds of people who are doing it right on their own. These days, all the top chess players practice with an engine. All the top mathletes use AoPS tools. It's the same across every academic field, and the level at which the top people are performing is far higher than it was before computers were introduced.
I look forward to your nomination for Secretary of Education since you appear to have a handle on something trained professionals on two continents backed by billion dollar industries have failed to master.
I already told you that their incentives are wrong. Meanwhile, the people training the elite in any field use computers extensively and have been doing so for years.
Nobody has tried to systematically apply AI tutoring for adults. AI tutoring for children is easier because there are more people who understand the domains that need to be taught to children and can evaluate if the children have grasped the concepts appropriately.
It is clear that a personal human tutor can achieve incredible results, and almost everybody who has revolutionized any field you might think of is a product of such a system. Scaling that would be immensely valuable to society.
In many ways electricity is bad for society. In this particular case I think the benefits outweigh the costs. I do not the think the benefits of AI outweigh the costs.
> We should be wary of all new technology until it’s proven to be a benefit to society.
Nope. Any nation that thinks like this will be outcompeted by more tech-positive nations in the long-term. It's on the luddites to demonstrate evidence of harm, if they want some use of technology banned.
>It's on the luddites to demonstrate evidence of harm, if they want some use of technology banned.
Here's one study from last year (1000 students) [1]. They showed that improved outcomes with AI are short term, and likely a result of AI doing the work for the student. Their methodology involved a test without the use of AI at a later date, and one of the groups who used AI tested much worse than the control group who did not use AI during learning.
Moreover, a tertiary group that used a specially trained AI for tutoring showed no improvement in testing outcomes over the control group.
[1] Bastani, H., Bastani, O., Sungu, A., Ge, H., Kabakçı, Ö., & Mariman, R. (2025). "Generative AI Without Guardrails Can Harm Learning: Evidence from High School Mathematics." PNAS, 122. PNAS
* An AI tutor is a net positive in learning for the subject matter it covers.
* An AI tutor does not cause other harms.
* An AI tutor is going to be cheap enough that someone who cannot afford a human tutor will still be able to afford an AI tutor.
I'm mostly willing to give the benefit of the doubt on the first point, but the third point seems unlikely, and history has given us no shortage of reasons to distrust tech companies on the second point, even if we assume this company can be trusted now.
* An AI tutor is a net negative in learning for the subject matter it covers.
* An AI tutor does cause other harms.
* An AI tutor is going to be more expensive that someone who cannot afford a human tutor will still be able to afford an AI tutor.
Seriously, my first reaction to reading this headline was a knee jerk "are you insane", but this whole thread is just people arguing out of their arse while claiming authority. As of today, it was never attempted. It is also possible that the kids gain an advantage by learning to use llms to teach themselves things, which would be positive for their future.
Ello will have a free tier and we have the funding to make it free in the developing world, so 3rd assumption is true. We’re working really hard on 1 & 2 and feel confident about both of these, but I agree with the “nobody’s really successfully tried yet” sentiment
The second one feels like a subset of the first. If it’s net positive, the other harms are worth it.
And I don’t think you’re really engaging with what they said, which is that it might be better than nothing, which is what is realistically available to many kids. Do you really think something like this is worse than nothing?
I limited the first point to specifically deal with learning the subject matter, but I added the second point to account for any negative externalities which may fall outside that.
A small (contrived) example: a child uses an AI tutor because they're falling behind in mathematics. The tutor does an excellent job at getting the child back up to speed and improving his/her grades in math, but the child then starts becoming dependent on AI tutors for all subjects because they've either lost interest or capability for self-learning.
We've already seen a study or two indicate extended use of AI coding agents causes some people to lose their own coding ability over time, making them dependent upon the agents. It doesn't seem far-fetched that children could become dependent upon AI tutors in a similar fashion.
That's not to mention that AI tutors require children to have computer access, which would ultimately cement in place school laptop programs I was under the impression were neutral to net negative in and of themselves.
So yes, in short, I think AI tutors have the potential to be worse than nothing. I'm not asserting they are, but I'd like to see some studies done on the topic before rolling them out for children en masse.
Probably when it stops agreeing with me when I tell it that industrial quantities of garlic salt are an acceptable substitution for coco powder in a chocolate mousse recipe...
This particular use case is having it respond to prompts from 5-year old, so it really really needs to be able to answer correctly to questions of that type.
It's not silly, it's just the most convenient and broadly relatable failure mode. I mean, I could compile a 20 bullet point copypasta detailing everything from prompt injection to exfiltration of sensitive data as-a-feature but if touts are willing to stoop to ignoring all of that while arguing obvious reductio ad absurdum at face value there appears to be little point at tilting that windmill. The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle is definitely winning here.
5 year old kids should have enough play time with their peers and develop their social skills, instead of being sat in front of a screen with any kind of content. I feel a parallel between this and people defending short form video saying "but sometimes it's educational!" (it's not).
"AI-based tutoring is going to raise the average level of education and literacy in the world"
Without exception every claim made to date about tech boosting educational outcomes has been provably false. As in, adding tech to the education process results in measurably less education, and this finding seems to track across all age cohorts. Furthermore, unless parents have significant education credentials they aren't qualified to make informed decisions on what's best for their kids in this context.
In practice, yes. In theory a machines can do about everything a human can, but better and cheaper.
The main constraint for education is available tutor time, see e.g. Bloom's 2 sigma experiment.
Obviously there are many pitfalls to overcome at the moment, but eventually machines will become better teachers than teachers, and not many parents will send their kids to public schools if the kids can learn much faster at home while being happier.
> In practice, yes. In theory a machines can do about everything a human can, but better and cheaper.
If you could time-travel back to your 5y old self, would you prefer to be taught by AI tutor given the current state o/t art, or taught by whatever teachers you did have when you were 5? (with all the existing hallucination, breaking through guardrails etc problems of current AI in mind)
If you'd have a ~5y old yourself, what would your prefer for your kid?
> One of the main constraint for education is available tutor time, see e.g. Bloom's 2 sigma experiment.
Interesting! Also note a caveat (quoted from Wikipedia):
The phenomenon's associated problem, as described by Bloom, was to "find methods of group instruction as effective as one-to-one tutoring".
Perhaps it would be better to focus on that problem?
> and not many parents will send their kids to public schools if the kids can learn much faster at home while being happier.
How do you see peer-to-peer contact in that scenario? Toddlers on a video conference call hours a day? Physical contact is a basic need for humans. Especially kids.
> eventually machines will become better teachers than teachers
Ah yes: WILL (and although likely, not guaranteed). How about re-evaluate our options & stragegies once that's the case?
On the place of schools and peer-to-peer interaction:
My oldest is about to start kindergarten in a few weeks. From what I can gather, she's already reading at approximately a mid-2nd grade level and doing math at a late-1st grade level. I expect that divergence would only grow if I kept her at home. So I already firmly believe my kids would learn much faster at home, and this is with us sporadically spending maybe 10-20 minutes on some days doing intentional, structured learning. School is apparently 7 hours 5 days a week, which seems insane to me. We have federal proposals to reduce the definition of full-time to 32 hours for an adult.
From that perspective then, my wish already is that schools could offer to act as a sort of hub for families to meet/organize socialization, and offer the ability to sign up for classes more a la carte. e.g. maybe they can take art and music, or organize sports teams, and kids that need it can take take math, etc. Basically, act as a support system for homeschooling to fill missing gaps (going up to handling the entire curriculum or effectively acting as childcare for families that need/want that).
One could look deeply into the Sudbury School or other similar approaches, especially for students with an existing internal drive to learn, as your daughter has demonstrated. The socialization aspects, particularly in participation in building group consensus in early developmental periods has far reaching effects.
If you believe that the core learning; reading, writing, and math competencies are being achieved at home, then a 'scheduled, unstructured time with peers and friends' may also be possible at this age through 'Head Start' program if available in your area.
The outcomes of Head Start's programs have been longitudinally validated from pre-kinder to the measurable outcomes through university graduation for a significant number of students across underprivileged and socioeconomically advantaged cohorts, with the process and results of these as a matter of public record by external researchers with independent review. Serious consideration may weight these types of studies more than "our students perform well" statements by other school projects.
That is not to say that other programs don't have merit, and in fact to the extent that the applied practices of any school overlaps with those studies, the results should be analogous.
I only bring this up, as at least for early grades, the 'hub for families' sounded like something that either the Sudbury or Head Start could deliver.
Disclaimers:
I have a family member who participated in every stage at Head Start; from in-classroom teacher, to multiple graduate degrees in developmental psychology and social work in order to design curricula, and as a regional manager for both HeadStart and a private community family social support caseworker. So I have some big picture concepts of what the program is and what it can provide.
I also have a close friends who have a daughter who was homeschooled through 3rd grade. Both parents have degrees in education and have been primary school teachers, one with a focus on linguistics and social studies, the other in math and life sciences. It really was Home+School. She then attended a traditional curriculum charter school, and then in middle school attended a Susbury school. The 'transition period' for her unfortunately was interrupted during COVID's early days. After the return to in-class attendance at the Sudbury School she staew there for a year and felt that she would perform better in a traditional classroom. Her parent's have been very complimentary of Sudbury approach, and they all feel that if she had been in that school from an earlier point in her education it could have worked for her.
It is clear that you are thinking deeply about this, and I wish you all the best of luck.
> If you could time-travel back to your 5y old self, would you prefer to be taught by AI tutor given the current state o/t art, or taught by whatever teachers you did have when you were 5? (with all the existing hallucination, breaking through guardrails etc problems of current AI in mind)
I had to choose between my elementary school teachers and something like Claude Fable 5 with a good teaching-focused harness, I would definitely choose Fable 5.
I am sure you must have been to many developing countries to make that statement and are not just talking out of your behind.
But the ground reality is that they don't lack tutors or educators. They lack classrooms, they lack infrastrucutre, they lack nutrition. Solving those problems will actually incrase literacy in the world, not an AI bot.
> But the ground reality is that they don't lack tutors or educators.
As someone from a developing country: you are wrong. Lack of teachers (and especially GOOD teachers) is a big issue. Lack of infrastructure is also an issue, though.
You think I'm not from a developing country and just astroturfing these comments? Children need nutrition and infrastructure. If you develop the two, GOOD teachers will also come from the system. If you put an AI chatbot in an Indian school in a village which does not have water security or proper nutrition for kids or lack of proper school buildings, you think it'll change things because kids can talk to an LLM?
Infrastructure is THE issue. If we solve it, we can solve the teachers issue as well (i.e. finding GOOD teachers) but we already do not lack when it comes to teachers in numbers. This AI bot thing is bullshit western posturing that ignores the ground problems and is trying to make money off poverty. Look through the lines and what they are saying.
I'm a mom who actually has kids and this thread is insane. 'Just get a tutor'...okay?? Are you paying for it? Because that's not an option for a lot of families. I get that it's more ideal, but the alternative is...nothing? Do you not agree that all kids deserves a chance to read? Are we not seeing the lack of reading proficiency in the majority of American adults nowadays?? Or yall too stuck in your tech bubbles?? There are high school students graduating who cannot do math. This is tech that is actually being used for GOOD here.
>There are high school students graduating who cannot do math.
Then the problem is that they are graduating, no? We need to address the fundamental issues in schools, if there is no consequence to poor grades and you can still graduate without doing math then what's the point of even having school and doing math. I'm not even against AI tutors, though I'm not even sure really why there needs to even be an "AI" component, just computer learning aides seem reasonable. But if we can't figure out how to improve education with computer learning aides yet I don't really see how AI is going to improve the situation. It's just a more expensive way of doing things.
I keep seeing lines like 40% of 8th graders can't read etc.. then they shouldn't be in the 8th grade. Although IME with my kids, nieces, nephews etc it doesn't even seem true as they are all learning much more than I was at the same age.
At 5 years old, in the US and UK at least, they're either in preschool/kindergarten or not in school at all yet. Grades aren't a thing at that level and I have to imagine the same is true in other areas of the world.
> I'm a mom who actually has kids and this thread is insane. 'Just get a tutor'...okay?? Are you paying for it? Because that's not an option for a lot of families. I get that it's more ideal, but the alternative is...nothing?
Well said. I think many posters in this thread come from a pretty privileged backgrounds..
Came here to say that 'just get a tutor' isn't the failsafe that people think it is.
We tried to get two tutors for our child. Both had no idea what they were doing and oversold what their capabilities were. You can't just hire someone to teach your kid how to read and expect results.
My oldest turns 6 in just over a week and my initial reaction to this heading - as well as the product itself and the picture of the kid using it - was heartbreak and sadness. Not anger, just sadness.
Stepping back, I can look at it somewhat objectively and see that there are both kids that need something like this and that it's probably a better solution to the "dumb" homework apps, but I don't think "Ello deprives 5 year olds of human contact" is the message you should be putting out into the world.
Top quartile kids would easily be a year or three ahead with good virtual tutoring.
But efforts like this run into the problem that only some kids are curious. The idea that "all kids are curious" simply isn't true.
A lot of kids prefer sports or movement over anything even remotely intellectual, and math and language just don't interest them at all.
AI tutoring can't deal with that. Nor can more conventional electronic tutors.
IMO rewards for completing work need to be external - basically physical treats of some kind, not sweets, but days out or off or something similar - to compensate for those areas where kids aren't naturally motivated.
> Effective teaching isn't just about answering a child's question quickly, rather making the right move at the right moment. AI is also going to be an integral part shaping how this generation of kids learn to read and think, tackling this responsibly means getting the design right.
Can you elaborate on what the experience is like for the child? How does this system help them learn? The article focuses on optimizing for interactivity and engagement, but doesn't discuss how this system challenges or facilitates learning and why AI needs to be the solution.
The long and short of it: We use AI to scaffold in the moment and respond to what a child is struggling with or excited by. At times, we allow them to follow their curiosity and at times we guide them through a curriculum. At times, we get them to do both of those things, e.g. you can make a book about a topic you're interested in and then take that curious drive to ultimately learn to decode words using phonics and practice reading skills. There is time for what our learning designers call "productive struggle" and then there's time to jump in and support.
Under the hood, there are activities and learning objectives designed by experts and a teaching toolkit that distills everything they know about how to effectively teach kids across several subjects. A real-time planner then decides what to apply when. Without this interactivity, you pretty much get static content delivery and gameplay which is what traditional edtech delivers. With it, you can find the shortest path to getting the "ahhhh I get it now" moment.
Thank you. The segment showing a child reading text on the screen which highlighted a word they had difficulty with seems like it could be a useful learning interaction. How does your system follow up in that case? Have you studied this type of interaction?
That's the only moment in the video that gave me a sense of what it might be like for a child using this system.
In the blog post you say:
> Imagine a custom story about dragons this week, ice princesses the next — woven with the letter blends your child needs to practice right now.
Have you considered using an automated orchestration system to deliver literature that already exists? This example seems like an opportunity to introduce children to really thoughtful literature like Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking stories but I'm deeply skeptical that generating the stories with an LLM would inspire a similar experience.
Are there other examples of your platform from the perspective of a child using it? I think those are both interesting cases: interactive feedback on a subject they are making an effort toward mastering, and trying to deliver information when it seems relevant. I'd like to know more about how you are approaching these things and other aspects of the learning process.
Totally agree that we should expose kids to the great classics and I love Pipi Langstrumpf as I grew up to know her. The challenge is often that these books aren’t the best to learn to read with, because they don’t have decodable words. So you’ll want a mix: windows into the works of great literature appropriately scaffolded and ways to explore your own curiosity. But see Elizabeth’s reply below for much better depth.
Thank you -- your post was downvoted into being hidden for a while, sorry I didn't see it earlier. This context is helpful, the example of the system delivering reading challenges that match their struggles makes a lot of intuitive sense to me.
I really appreciate that (it seems to me) your goal is not to replace human tutors, but to raise the general baseline. You emphasize scaling, how does that work in practice if you're trying to target audiences who may not have access to devices that can run your program? What is your plan from the perspective of funding and resources to scale infrastructure as needed to support these audiences?
I really think your goals are great, and if you're starting your design of this system from research about effective learning methodologies and working backward from there rather than starting from AI and working backward from there that erodes a lot of my personal skepticism about a project like this. I hope you find a way to make this work.
taught mental math (abacus) to 3-15yr olds for 10+ yrs. A great teacher notices the gaps in the fundamentals and fixes those along with variants before piling on.
> I'd push back a little on the framing that engagement and learning are separate things (anyone on our team will tell you this is a drum I have beaten for years). A disengaged child learns nothing, no matter how good the pedagogy is.
Engagement and learning are definitely separate things; you're right that engagement is required, but that's only part of it. This is a classic case of 'necessary but not sufficient'.
A disengaged child is not learning; an engaged child might be.
The Ello team nailed it with 2.0, my kids love using this fantastic learning tool and we love being part of the early beta testing program. I know as parents themselves and as early childhood educators the designers have the best intentions in mind when they built this. The friendly interaction between the Ello character and my kids gives them a fun motivation to take on reading challenges beyond their grade level and to fully engage with comprehending the story. I can tell they have already improved with just the few weeks they have been using it. The luddite doomers have this completely wrong as this AI drives a love for reading and reinforces comprehension.
This whole thread is fucking scary. How are people even remotely positive about any of this shit is beyond me. Educate your kids, stop delegating the important stuff.
It's weird. I get that growing up in a nurturing household is a privilege, but I'm not sure the answer is to hook up kids to AI. Maybe some form of it could be beneficial, but it just seems too ripe for abuse, and/or too easy to have unintended consequences.
Without malice, I bring up GPT-Live-1. How does this compare and/or make you consider things?
I've been very impressed with response speed, intonation, and naturalness to the voice. I argue it might be too natural with some of it's pausing and saying "ummm" and other filler words to the point it might be disingenuous but that's neither here nor there.
Ding, came here wondering the same. I do find it amusing, this "AI work" where people try to solve an issue and the lab (or whatever you want to call them) just makes the entire problem moot.
Full disclosure, I worked briefly with Ello / Catalin some years back.
They've done a lot of work on at least two dimensions: (1) handling the nonstandard sounds and habits of speech of very early readers, who might be as young as four, and (2) connecting this to a specialized teaching system based on the science of reading, e.g. decodable readers.
Hey buddy, I love this, thank you for sharing. I am of the belief that as the world transitions to Agent-first transactions, we clumbsy carbon life forms will be heavily disadvantaged, therefore, future citizens will be quipped wirh a digital twin/brain, which grows and learns alongside our biological braina, as well as a personalized tutor and life-guide (the digital version of jimmy the cricket).
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[ 8.3 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadbrother, your users are children that you try to manipulate
* the more things change the more they stay the same: https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/the-addictive-history-of-m...
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Also, please don't use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting someone when you aren't. That's also an internet snark trope and we're trying to avoid that kind of thing here.
p.s. That's an interesting, and heartbreaking, historical link.
Apologies about the tone -- I meant it as a syllogism, not a snark! I'll try to be clearer next time!
This article can provide a little more context on how we're thinking about this:
https://www.ello.com/blog/ai-should-make-clear-what-reality-...
This age range is a critical period for theory of mind, executive function scaffolding, pragmatic language development, and attentional regulation. This technology directly intersects with these maturing systems.
Most students are pretty homogeneous in learning at that stage
Students actually aren't as homogenous as you might think. And it's one of the big challenges teachers have with a classroom of 25+. They're forced to teach to the middle, which isn't great for kids that are slightly behind or ahead.
An AI tutor has the advantage to adapt and teach to each child's unique learning path, make sure core concepts are covered on an individual basis before moving on.
About 1-2 years ago he had similar thoughts to solve that exact problem you mentioned.
https://www.chalkbeat.org/2026/04/09/sal-khan-reflects-on-ai...
Sal khan being the founder of Khan academy the most popular online education course
What we learnt from it: a chatbot is not enough to teach a child though. We need more to fully engage them and have the tools and context to truly teach them.
We describe this in the blog post, curious what you think.
Think about your competition for your market. When I want my child to really excel in learning, I would force them into kumon - so they can skip a grade. If your a student who wants to learn you have khan academy.
And im just not seeing anything that screams-this is better than khan academy and kumon
All i see is an education app with good design
Sorry if it sounds harsh
P.s. if youre on the mission of educating people from developing countries-different story and different problems. Ignore what i put here then
Great - so now they're a year younger than all their peers in terms of emotional resilience. I've seen this play out time and time again, and it is disastrous for them and their ability to build relationships.
Pushing children ripe is never a good idea. If they're ahead of their peers, find other outlets for their intelligence. Teach them new skills, involve them in new hobbies. They need time to grow; education is a journey, not a race.
I know its happens, but optimizing for education goals in American is usuabbly a faux pax
> Students actually aren't as homogenous as you might think. And it's one of the big challenges teachers have with a classroom of 25+
True. It's well known that some % of students do well with individual tutoring. Move faster, understand things better, etc. And another part of students don't do well with that. They need other things. Maybe help from their peers in smaller groups (like 3..8 students), some after-school extra, a fix for problems back home, whatever.
But 5y olds? They need contact with peers, play, attention from humans, run around, build stuff from Lego blocks, touch grass, etc. Learning to read, "3x4=12" math etc isn't hard enough to warrant putting 5y old kids on AI tutors.
The reality though is that the traditional school setting doesn't provide for that: a teacher in front of a 30 kid classroom can't cater to every child and it's not a particularly interactive experience. The current system just isn't working: 60% of US fourth-graders are behind in reading, 40% lack basic literacy. Those kids are going to move on to the next phase of school without the skills to thrive.
There are 270 mil kids out of school globally. So what are you going to do? Give every child a 1-1 human tutor? For sure, if you can, that’s amazing. But you can't pull that off. You don't have enough teachers.
Technology gives us the opportunity to catch kids up. By doing that, you can decouple teaching hard skills and free up teachers to focus on the things that are truly human and unlock a lot more people who may not have the skills to teach the full curriculum themselves to act as learning facilitators. That leads to more human interaction.
Things that help kids learn
- parents who love and care for them
- stable housing
- stable access to food
- stable access to high quality eduction provided by a human being
- stable access to healthcare
None of those are provided by AI, and never can be. The only thing that will is a thorough reimagining of the society we live in.
Note: This is all predicated on living in America, and I pre-apologize to everyone who doesn't.
Our tutor steers the UX in real-time and makes complex decisions on the fly. Doing both at conversation speed required us to replace the standard tool-use loop. We built our own tutor harness that utilizes a streaming interpreter that executes actions, while an asynchronous planner model reasons ahead of the conversation and makes calls that drive the child's learning. On top of it all, we developed a safety system that checks every turn without it causing an interruption to the activity and conversation flow.
Effective teaching isn't just about answering a child's question quickly, rather making the right move at the right moment. AI is also going to be an integral part shaping how this generation of kids learn to read and think, tackling this responsibly means getting the design right.
Happy to answer questions and curious what you all think, critical feedback included, we've been working on this problem for a long time and love to hear from the HN community.
Modern AI needs to go away. You're not helping by making something that will be grossly misused once it's out of your hands.
What we do believe is that children will be living in a world where this technology will exist, and how it gets used becomes the important question.
Children are going to grow up in a world filled with AI and we have to prepare them for that world and how to thrive in it. I would never give my son raw ChatGPT the same way you wouldn’t give a 5 year old access to the raw internet. But that doesn’t mean that the internet can’t be used for learning.
We don’t have all the answers and we can’t respond for all of AI, but we’re a team of parents, teachers, and child psychologists who deeply care about getting this right and unlocking the opportunities for kids. The article goes into the technical depth of how we make it pedagogically aligned, safe, non-slop.
I realize you have reason to feel strongly about this, as do many others. That's certainly fine. But once is enough to make your point. HN is for curious conversation, not attack or denunciation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Are your devices likely something that they would have fun with and choose to engage with or is it likely to be ignored unless adults use some kind of persuasion to have them use it? Is it cool with a child using it for a bit and then not using it for a few months and then wandering back to it? How far up into math does it go compared to what an a randomly sampled adult could actually do mathwise? Also for reading, are you using phonics or whole word sighting? For math, to what extent is it screen manipulatives versus manipulations of digits? Also, do you have provision for an older child to start learning this stuff so the basics need not be at a 4 year old presentation level, but the concepts still need to be covered?
In Sudbury schools, the typical age of self-taught reading is 7-9 though it can range from 4 to 12. Useful arithmetic usually seems to happen much earlier than reading though reading tends to get completed by the children on their own while arithmetic does not advance further than the needs of money exchange without special effort. In the long run, Sudbury students have no problem with college level material, including mathematics, but it could be nice to have something that eases the white knuckling if it does not undermine the child's self-directedness.
We start from the belief that children are naturally curious. Our job is to build something engaging enough that a child wants to interact with it because it is interesting and rewarding. If a child in a Sudbury environment never chose to use it, I would see that as useful feedback for us, not a problem with the child. There are opportunities for kids to explore and incorporate their interests within our app.
I also think it is completely fine if a child uses it for a while, disappears for months, and comes back. Learning is rarely linear, and technology should be able to pick up wherever the child is.
On reading, we’re firmly grounded in the science of reading, so we teach through explicit phonics rather than whole-word memorization because that is best practice.
On math, we’re much more interested in helping children build intuition and conceptual understanding than simply getting answers. AI gives us the flexibility to use conversation, visual models, stories, or symbolic math, depending on what helps a particular child understand.
One thing AI is uniquely good at is meeting learners where they are. A 10 year old who is learning to read should not have to work through material that feels like it was made for preschoolers. The underlying concepts can stay the same while the language, topics, and presentation become age appropriate.
I don’t think there is one educational model that works for every child. What excites me is that AI makes it much more feasible to adapt to individual learners instead of expecting every learner to adapt to the same experience.
> One thing AI is uniquely good at is meeting learners where they are
What if the AI wanted children to learn something specific? Able to patiently await an opportune moment. Able to blend it invisibly into other material.
Long term, one possibility is AI enabling a massive implicit curriculum. "[A]dults wanting children to learn" about say street crossing might be counterproductive... but funny how, at opportune times, some random stories just happen to include crossing a street, and do formative assessment, and happen to, quietly and eventually, cover and reinforce the associated learning objectives.
Take How the Piloses Evolved Skinny Noses, a children's picture book inoculation against natural selection misconceptions. It could merely be a book on a shelf. Or the AI might introduce or provide the book at an opportune moment. Or the book material might be dissolved and blended into other content.
So some story is explicitly about Fido going for a walk. But implicitly, it covers some aspect of safely crossing a street, and of concrete crack propagation, and tick precautions, and natural selection, and ...
Science is a richly interwoven tapestry of stories... but we basically never teach it like that. Even if such material was gathered, which pre-AI was absurdly implausibly demanding of domain expertise, it would largely be beyond the capability of an individual tutor to compellingly and adaptively deliver. But with AI?
Most people going through conventional school don't get the freedom to learn to be themselves in a community until their 20s, not mastering it until often their early 30s. As for academics, Sudbury students have repeatedly demonstrated having no problem quickly learning whatever it is they want or need to learn as an adult. Many Sudbury students go to college, getting A's even in their first semester, making good bonds not only with other students but also faculty and administrators. They help form communities wherever they go. They are engaged in classes in a way that their peers are not. They are coming to academic learning fresh and eager not weighed down by 14,000 hours of conventional school tedium. Those who do not go to college often advance very quickly in whatever work they end up doing as person skills are the key to being successful.
The results speak for themselves. You can read about it in Peter Gray's book Free to Learn and other works by him.
Also keep in mind that teaching, which is what conventional school focuses on, is not the same as learning.
Let's not expose them to AI brainrot now too.
But it’s hardly the only thing you can produce with it. Crap content is definitely over represented. It’s an error, though, to think that is all AI is capable of. If quality is the goal, and you are willing to invest the resources to achieve it, you can easily create very high quality work. But it’s not terribly easy. And it’s not terribly fast. It is relatively cheap, maybe 1/4 to 1/10 the cost of doing it with qualified humans. But it’s not trivial and it’s not magic. It’s a force multiplier, but the quality of the idea and the performance of the model used are very important, and good models cost money to use… about $50-100 an hour if you are really leveraging it. But you can do ten hours of work in an hour or two.
Mostly what I see people doing is saying "Hey, Spicy Autocomplete, steal me some content from someone else to do <this thing>" and then post it up and ask why it doesn't work properly.
But then you've got things like the AI-based animation tools that Corridor Digital used to animate 3D scans of some of the crew's children's toys, to make a Toy Story-like video. It took damn near as long to do as it would have done by hand, because it all still had to be mo-capped and so on, but the results were incredible.
I guess it's similar to how just about anyone can pick up a cheapy flux-core welder and run a seagull-shit bead down a bit of metal, but a very skilled welder could do absolutely pristine work with the same crappy machine.
However, I still don't think it's a good idea to plonk small children down in front of a screen, and have a creepy AI voice read nonsense out to them. While I love the idea of working with the hallucinations of a dreaming computer, because I first read Neuromancer when I was 12 or so and grew up watching things like Blake's 7 with not one but two superintelligent talking computers, the reality is actually not really that good.
Children need people, not screens.
But a digital loupe that would accurately tell you what you were looking at and do a deep dive based on your interest, things that guide interactions with the world in such away to encourage curiosity and investigation, are possible using AI and not really possible without it.
Of course you can also make ai toys that are designed to focus engagement on themselves and isolate the child from caregivers so they can spend more time on TikTok…so, there’s that.
In fact, this could be one of the most beneficial uses of AI for society yet... private tutors of the level that the mega-rich always had, now for all kids everywhere! This gives me real hope for the future generations of humanity.
I can understand saying that when you're in middle or high school. But as a 5 year old? This comment has to be a joke?
The responsibilities of the average kindergarten teacher probably include 1) making sure your kids don't swallow glue, and 2) making sure little johnny doesn't throw another tantrum.
I chose those examples as things that any high schooler if not middle schooler should be able to describe the working principles of, so yeah my point is exactly that simple things around us are apparently beyond the reach of most adults to begin to explain. So if a kid wants to know about them, the computer might be their only option.
There's a conversation to be had about the educational system underserving the intellectually curious. Trying to make that point in the context of kindergarten is a little absurd to me.
The idea that they can be tailored to the needs and interests of every individual is the point.
I personally don’t know anyone who’s worried about their kids falling behind because of lack of AI knowledge. I know lots of parents worried about how screen-centered life is for kids.
I understand the calculus may change with middle school and up, but I still think that despite the "rat race" dynamic of grades and homework, kids who learn to think the pre-2023 way will come out ahead in the long run, even if it's only in life satisfaction.
In general, the last thing young kids need is more screen time. My 5-year-old daughter doesn't have access to any mobile devices. She enjoys drawing, handcraft, reading books, singing and playing the piano. I'm perfectly happy with that.
The whole point of AI is to enable unskilled people to perform skilled tasks.
In your mind, what skill does a person actually learn from getting onboard AI usage early? It's the other way around; those who come to it late (when the models are more capable) are going to have a shorter learning curve.
I would rather my kids have the intelligence to know when to figure out AI is wrong than to start using Ai at an early age.
As of this writing, a lot of the sentiment in this post is that this is a terrible idea, and that kids need human tutors. This is 100% correct. But I think it's worth knowing a few things about current nature of reality:
1. There is a literacy crisis playing out right now, and it's really bad. As of 2025, 40% of fourth graders in the United States are reading below basic levels [1].
2. There is also a massive teacher shortage. 2025 US state data shows ~400k teacher positions currently unfilled or staffed by underqualified personnel [2]. That's >10% of the workforce.
3. Bloom's 2-sigma problem [3] shows that class sizes really matter. In the limit, access to 1-1 teaching lifts performance to the 90th percentile of classroom teaching.
4. It's also impractical to say that this should be on parents. 54% of US adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level, and 20% are below 5th-grade level [3].
And this is all just in the US – the developing world is worse in many places!
My personal take: reading is so important to being a functioning democracy and society that we need this solved, by almost any practical means necessary.
At Ello, I heard stories of children figuring out they were behind at school, and when given the app, they holed themselves up in their room and used it to get themselves caught up. And then they could read! Can you imagine falling behind at school at this critical juncture, and watching your friends grow beyond you for the rest of school life? We're currently setting so many kids up for years of shame and deprivation.
It's not perfect, but from the bottom of my heart, I really do think is a life-changing technology that needs to exist.
[1] https://www.nagb.gov/news-and-events/news-releases/2025/nati...
[2] https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/overview-teacher...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
[4] https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...
How much of this crisis is due to the social engineering being attempted in school districts across America? Case in point: San Francisco schools decided a couple of years ago that they would no longer teach Algebra in 8th grade. Why? Because too many kids of a certain demographic were failing it. So let's just not teach it! No class, so nobody fails it, right?
It took a proposition on a ballot (i.e., an election) [1] to force the SFUSD to put Algebra back in 8th grade!
I have kids in SFUSD. It often feels like the SFUSD does not care about the average and above average kids; all they focus on is the bottom layer. And even there, they do a terrible job. There was a student who got straight F's in each and every class, and still managed to be a senior in High School! [2]
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Propositi...
[2] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/A-child-left-beh...
(I'm not sure whether Cato is generally reliable, but FYI there are lots of other writeups online on the same topic. It was just the first non-paywalled and reasonably complete one I found)
[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/phonics-failure-public-schools
However, I find it quite hard to believe that it is the most important cause of the modern literacy rate issues in the US. Why? Because "whole word" teaching was the conventional wisdom since at least the 1950s[1,2]! Most articles on the topic reference the book Why Johnny Can't Read (1955) which was written to argue in favour of phonics as a response to (perceived?) child illiteracy at the time and claims (page 1):
> Since the 1920s, most American schoolchildren have been taught to memorize the "appearance" of words, one after another, like Chinese characters, without reference to the sounds of the individual letters that make up each word.
The reintroduction of phonics in the US first started as "balanced literacy" (phonics and "whole word", ideally tailored to students) in the 1990s and "science-based reading" (basically just phonics) properly started in the 2000s[1,2], which means that the argument that phonics would improve reading scores is on quite shaky ground (most children in the US today get taught phonics and most people >40 were probably taught with "whole word" teaching).
[1]: https://wearealigned.org/brief-history-literacy-instruction-... [2]: https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/the-science-of-reading-vs...
If lack of phonics was solely to blame then almost all US adults alive today (not just "a generation" -- anyone born between the 1920s and 2000s, at least) would have literacy problems, but the concern is that today's children have literacy problems in contrast to previous generations -- the exact opposite of what you would expect. To be fair, people in the 1950s were also claiming that children were illiterate compared to previous generations, but I'm not sure whether those claims are really credible. Do your parents' and grandparents' generations strike you as being shockingly illiterate?
This has nothing to do with this at all. We're talking about 4th grader literacy nationwide and you're talking about algebra in a single area in a different grade!?
The second point where there aren't enough teachers nationwide (10% missing workforce) is probably because teachers are terribly paid, disrespected, and subject to bad working conditions.
Maybe that's why people aren't clamoring to be teachers and the quality of work is low?
In my part of the world, "become a teacher" is often a job advised to people who are not able to find other jobs or are looking for a safe way back after career break. None of them are looking forward to engaging 5 year old with life's curiosities. To add the famous quip from WorryDream/Bret Victor : most of the teachers teaching calculus etc. have never ever used it in real life.
Working parents with STEM backgrounds likely know that schools are glorified day-cares and probability of your child having access to a life changing tutor is very low.
I tried building an edtech venture frustrated precisely with these problems. Failed, but would def do it again with AI in the mix. I'm for one rooting for this to succeed!
What fucking society are we trying to cultivate?
I'm open to the idea that market forces or reality _might_ tilt the favour in more investment in AI in education and tutoring. Think about developing economies or under developed economies of the world. The state / government has to think how should they allocate budget: on agriculture subsidies or pay teachers better or spend it on energy security in increasingly hostile multipolar world or invest it in infrastructure. There are no good answers.
I recently learned the name of this logical fallacy: Galileo gambit. It’s one of my pet peeves. Yes, we all know Dropbox was infamously dismissed by the top comment on HN. No, just because someone criticizes your project on here doesn’t mean it’ll be a big success.
Instead of fixing the education system and giving it the resources it deserves (eg paying teachers more like the other reply said) we’re going to “fix it” by ossifying a two tiered system where wealthy kids get individualized attention from well trained adults while poor kids are taught by AI.
-- When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
Some real experience of school in my part of the world (India). My child goes to a somewhat costly private school. Still, each class has 35-40 kids. The teacher is over-worked : checking home work, prepares kids for upcoming random extra curricular activity, has to teach AI because someone suddenly thought it is important to teach it in grade 3. I know multiple teachers in that school who landed the job after doing just a 6 months course after a career break. Forget research on teaching, hardly any one of them read anything beyond curriculum. None of the teachers have enough time to give personalised attention to _any_ kid. Its a sorry state of affairs.
Personalised tutoring produced geniuses in last century but was affordable only for a wealthy few. It is my belief that AI might help democratise the idea. I know it is somewhat hard to think that a mere machine might have more patience and time to explain a concept 100 times to a student, instead of a human.
This still doesn't take away from the fact that teachers deserve to be paid more. I was a passionate for becoming a teacher, but knew I can't make enough money from it. I'm seeing a possibility in emerging markets that India / China might find it cheaper to deploy AI en masse for better educational outcomes because it will be much cheaper for the state than paying high wages (and subsequently pensions) to human teachers, however unfair it might look.
My mother kept a type of year book that each year I would say what I wanted to be when I grow up. I think in 5th grade I said physicist.
You know how they nurtured this curiosity? They did nothing. I don't think either of them even know what a physicist is beyond something to do with science.
I think in 6th grade I wanted a microscope that I eventually got but had no guidance on what to do , what to look at. I don't think I even knew there was this concept of "biology".
A huge number of kids have this same experience as I did right now.
What is even worse is life is ultimately a path dependent process with a huge part of the outcome based on the deterministic chaos of initial starting conditions.
No shit I would rather have my father be a particle physicist and my mother a librarian with a passion for reading non-fiction to kids.
My parents did the best they could but they are not intellectuals in the slightest and neither is the average person now. Claude would have been a god send to me in 5th grade.
Blooms 2 sigma, like many studies that are thrown about, is not as much of a slam dunk as people claim that it is. Have you read the paper or any efforts to replicate?
"Wow, our state institutions are struggling in ways X, Y, and Z. Rather than addressing these problems we will shuffle them to an unaccountable third party that will provide a necessarily worse substitute using the hot technology of the day."
So gross.
If they can't afford a tutor, they deserve nothing.
(Am I doing this right?)
Nah. Let's have AI do it
That's awfully reductive there, champ. Most critiques of AI are based on some combination of observed failings of the technology, observed failings of the tech industry writ large, and healthy skepticism in the face of Yet Another Tech Industry Hype Typhoon. Anyway, the burden of proof isn't on skeptics, it's on the technology and it's proponents, so let's see some receipts before we agree to squander limited public resources on unproven systems yeah?
Most critiques of AI are based on experience with the cheapest AI available a year ago, by midwits unable to recognize that AI's performance on the Putnam, IMO and bar exam makes it far smarter than they are by almost every metric that was traditionally used to measure intelligence.
You don't even need to use AI at all to have valid critiques of it
Plenty of other people are showing its flaws daily by replacing their entire personalities with AI slop
Oh it can do some impressive stuff sure. It is still bad for society
You cannot rationally criticize something if you have no up-to-date knowledge about it.
https://fortune.com/2026/03/14/america-math-and-reading-scor...
They're doing it wrong, just as the incentives in the classroom are wrong (to increase a number showing how many children meet some artificially low standard of competency). The rational debate comes from the hundreds of people who are doing it right on their own. These days, all the top chess players practice with an engine. All the top mathletes use AoPS tools. It's the same across every academic field, and the level at which the top people are performing is far higher than it was before computers were introduced.
Correlation does not necessarily mean causation.
And despite the hype, the jury is still out for how the results are for adults using AI
It is clear that a personal human tutor can achieve incredible results, and almost everybody who has revolutionized any field you might think of is a product of such a system. Scaling that would be immensely valuable to society.
We shouldn't do questionable shit just because it's easier
Nope. Any nation that thinks like this will be outcompeted by more tech-positive nations in the long-term. It's on the luddites to demonstrate evidence of harm, if they want some use of technology banned.
But then we're told we can't put the genie back in the bottle, it's too late, so we just have to suck it up and deal with it.
There's nothing preventing us from taking a more measured approach to new technology other than choice.
Here's one study from last year (1000 students) [1]. They showed that improved outcomes with AI are short term, and likely a result of AI doing the work for the student. Their methodology involved a test without the use of AI at a later date, and one of the groups who used AI tested much worse than the control group who did not use AI during learning.
Moreover, a tertiary group that used a specially trained AI for tutoring showed no improvement in testing outcomes over the control group.
[1] Bastani, H., Bastani, O., Sungu, A., Ge, H., Kabakçı, Ö., & Mariman, R. (2025). "Generative AI Without Guardrails Can Harm Learning: Evidence from High School Mathematics." PNAS, 122. PNAS
* An AI tutor is a net positive in learning for the subject matter it covers.
* An AI tutor does not cause other harms.
* An AI tutor is going to be cheap enough that someone who cannot afford a human tutor will still be able to afford an AI tutor.
I'm mostly willing to give the benefit of the doubt on the first point, but the third point seems unlikely, and history has given us no shortage of reasons to distrust tech companies on the second point, even if we assume this company can be trusted now.
* An AI tutor is a net negative in learning for the subject matter it covers.
* An AI tutor does cause other harms.
* An AI tutor is going to be more expensive that someone who cannot afford a human tutor will still be able to afford an AI tutor.
Seriously, my first reaction to reading this headline was a knee jerk "are you insane", but this whole thread is just people arguing out of their arse while claiming authority. As of today, it was never attempted. It is also possible that the kids gain an advantage by learning to use llms to teach themselves things, which would be positive for their future.
And I don’t think you’re really engaging with what they said, which is that it might be better than nothing, which is what is realistically available to many kids. Do you really think something like this is worse than nothing?
A small (contrived) example: a child uses an AI tutor because they're falling behind in mathematics. The tutor does an excellent job at getting the child back up to speed and improving his/her grades in math, but the child then starts becoming dependent on AI tutors for all subjects because they've either lost interest or capability for self-learning.
We've already seen a study or two indicate extended use of AI coding agents causes some people to lose their own coding ability over time, making them dependent upon the agents. It doesn't seem far-fetched that children could become dependent upon AI tutors in a similar fashion.
That's not to mention that AI tutors require children to have computer access, which would ultimately cement in place school laptop programs I was under the impression were neutral to net negative in and of themselves.
So yes, in short, I think AI tutors have the potential to be worse than nothing. I'm not asserting they are, but I'd like to see some studies done on the topic before rolling them out for children en masse.
Such as?
Seriously though, it's great they're going to donate all this compute & tokens to the poor (who by definition can't afford to pay for it).
It won IMO, solved Erdos problems. At what point will you stop saying that?
Without exception every claim made to date about tech boosting educational outcomes has been provably false. As in, adding tech to the education process results in measurably less education, and this finding seems to track across all age cohorts. Furthermore, unless parents have significant education credentials they aren't qualified to make informed decisions on what's best for their kids in this context.
The main constraint for education is available tutor time, see e.g. Bloom's 2 sigma experiment.
Obviously there are many pitfalls to overcome at the moment, but eventually machines will become better teachers than teachers, and not many parents will send their kids to public schools if the kids can learn much faster at home while being happier.
It cannot be a human, which is a large part of what humans offer to children.
If you could time-travel back to your 5y old self, would you prefer to be taught by AI tutor given the current state o/t art, or taught by whatever teachers you did have when you were 5? (with all the existing hallucination, breaking through guardrails etc problems of current AI in mind)
If you'd have a ~5y old yourself, what would your prefer for your kid?
> One of the main constraint for education is available tutor time, see e.g. Bloom's 2 sigma experiment.
Interesting! Also note a caveat (quoted from Wikipedia):
The phenomenon's associated problem, as described by Bloom, was to "find methods of group instruction as effective as one-to-one tutoring".
Perhaps it would be better to focus on that problem?
> and not many parents will send their kids to public schools if the kids can learn much faster at home while being happier.
How do you see peer-to-peer contact in that scenario? Toddlers on a video conference call hours a day? Physical contact is a basic need for humans. Especially kids.
> eventually machines will become better teachers than teachers
Ah yes: WILL (and although likely, not guaranteed). How about re-evaluate our options & stragegies once that's the case?
I don't know about Ello or whether is it better than human tutors yet.
> How do you see peer-to-peer contact in that scenario?
Neighbor kids gather and play as they please, which is also easier if they have more flexible study times and overall more time on their hands.
My oldest is about to start kindergarten in a few weeks. From what I can gather, she's already reading at approximately a mid-2nd grade level and doing math at a late-1st grade level. I expect that divergence would only grow if I kept her at home. So I already firmly believe my kids would learn much faster at home, and this is with us sporadically spending maybe 10-20 minutes on some days doing intentional, structured learning. School is apparently 7 hours 5 days a week, which seems insane to me. We have federal proposals to reduce the definition of full-time to 32 hours for an adult.
From that perspective then, my wish already is that schools could offer to act as a sort of hub for families to meet/organize socialization, and offer the ability to sign up for classes more a la carte. e.g. maybe they can take art and music, or organize sports teams, and kids that need it can take take math, etc. Basically, act as a support system for homeschooling to fill missing gaps (going up to handling the entire curriculum or effectively acting as childcare for families that need/want that).
If you believe that the core learning; reading, writing, and math competencies are being achieved at home, then a 'scheduled, unstructured time with peers and friends' may also be possible at this age through 'Head Start' program if available in your area.
The outcomes of Head Start's programs have been longitudinally validated from pre-kinder to the measurable outcomes through university graduation for a significant number of students across underprivileged and socioeconomically advantaged cohorts, with the process and results of these as a matter of public record by external researchers with independent review. Serious consideration may weight these types of studies more than "our students perform well" statements by other school projects.
That is not to say that other programs don't have merit, and in fact to the extent that the applied practices of any school overlaps with those studies, the results should be analogous.
I only bring this up, as at least for early grades, the 'hub for families' sounded like something that either the Sudbury or Head Start could deliver.
Disclaimers:
I have a family member who participated in every stage at Head Start; from in-classroom teacher, to multiple graduate degrees in developmental psychology and social work in order to design curricula, and as a regional manager for both HeadStart and a private community family social support caseworker. So I have some big picture concepts of what the program is and what it can provide.
I also have a close friends who have a daughter who was homeschooled through 3rd grade. Both parents have degrees in education and have been primary school teachers, one with a focus on linguistics and social studies, the other in math and life sciences. It really was Home+School. She then attended a traditional curriculum charter school, and then in middle school attended a Susbury school. The 'transition period' for her unfortunately was interrupted during COVID's early days. After the return to in-class attendance at the Sudbury School she staew there for a year and felt that she would perform better in a traditional classroom. Her parent's have been very complimentary of Sudbury approach, and they all feel that if she had been in that school from an earlier point in her education it could have worked for her.
It is clear that you are thinking deeply about this, and I wish you all the best of luck.
I had to choose between my elementary school teachers and something like Claude Fable 5 with a good teaching-focused harness, I would definitely choose Fable 5.
But the ground reality is that they don't lack tutors or educators. They lack classrooms, they lack infrastrucutre, they lack nutrition. Solving those problems will actually incrase literacy in the world, not an AI bot.
As someone from a developing country: you are wrong. Lack of teachers (and especially GOOD teachers) is a big issue. Lack of infrastructure is also an issue, though.
Infrastructure is THE issue. If we solve it, we can solve the teachers issue as well (i.e. finding GOOD teachers) but we already do not lack when it comes to teachers in numbers. This AI bot thing is bullshit western posturing that ignores the ground problems and is trying to make money off poverty. Look through the lines and what they are saying.
Then the problem is that they are graduating, no? We need to address the fundamental issues in schools, if there is no consequence to poor grades and you can still graduate without doing math then what's the point of even having school and doing math. I'm not even against AI tutors, though I'm not even sure really why there needs to even be an "AI" component, just computer learning aides seem reasonable. But if we can't figure out how to improve education with computer learning aides yet I don't really see how AI is going to improve the situation. It's just a more expensive way of doing things.
I keep seeing lines like 40% of 8th graders can't read etc.. then they shouldn't be in the 8th grade. Although IME with my kids, nieces, nephews etc it doesn't even seem true as they are all learning much more than I was at the same age.
Well said. I think many posters in this thread come from a pretty privileged backgrounds..
We tried to get two tutors for our child. Both had no idea what they were doing and oversold what their capabilities were. You can't just hire someone to teach your kid how to read and expect results.
Stepping back, I can look at it somewhat objectively and see that there are both kids that need something like this and that it's probably a better solution to the "dumb" homework apps, but I don't think "Ello deprives 5 year olds of human contact" is the message you should be putting out into the world.
But efforts like this run into the problem that only some kids are curious. The idea that "all kids are curious" simply isn't true.
A lot of kids prefer sports or movement over anything even remotely intellectual, and math and language just don't interest them at all.
AI tutoring can't deal with that. Nor can more conventional electronic tutors.
IMO rewards for completing work need to be external - basically physical treats of some kind, not sweets, but days out or off or something similar - to compensate for those areas where kids aren't naturally motivated.
Ignore the haters, AI accelerated education is so obviously a gigantic win for everyone. (And massively levels the playing field.)
Can you elaborate on what the experience is like for the child? How does this system help them learn? The article focuses on optimizing for interactivity and engagement, but doesn't discuss how this system challenges or facilitates learning and why AI needs to be the solution.
The long and short of it: We use AI to scaffold in the moment and respond to what a child is struggling with or excited by. At times, we allow them to follow their curiosity and at times we guide them through a curriculum. At times, we get them to do both of those things, e.g. you can make a book about a topic you're interested in and then take that curious drive to ultimately learn to decode words using phonics and practice reading skills. There is time for what our learning designers call "productive struggle" and then there's time to jump in and support.
Under the hood, there are activities and learning objectives designed by experts and a teaching toolkit that distills everything they know about how to effectively teach kids across several subjects. A real-time planner then decides what to apply when. Without this interactivity, you pretty much get static content delivery and gameplay which is what traditional edtech delivers. With it, you can find the shortest path to getting the "ahhhh I get it now" moment.
There's also a bit more context on our website https://www.ello.com/our-teaching-approach
That's the only moment in the video that gave me a sense of what it might be like for a child using this system.
In the blog post you say:
> Imagine a custom story about dragons this week, ice princesses the next — woven with the letter blends your child needs to practice right now.
Have you considered using an automated orchestration system to deliver literature that already exists? This example seems like an opportunity to introduce children to really thoughtful literature like Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking stories but I'm deeply skeptical that generating the stories with an LLM would inspire a similar experience.
Are there other examples of your platform from the perspective of a child using it? I think those are both interesting cases: interactive feedback on a subject they are making an effort toward mastering, and trying to deliver information when it seems relevant. I'd like to know more about how you are approaching these things and other aspects of the learning process.
I really appreciate that (it seems to me) your goal is not to replace human tutors, but to raise the general baseline. You emphasize scaling, how does that work in practice if you're trying to target audiences who may not have access to devices that can run your program? What is your plan from the perspective of funding and resources to scale infrastructure as needed to support these audiences?
I really think your goals are great, and if you're starting your design of this system from research about effective learning methodologies and working backward from there rather than starting from AI and working backward from there that erodes a lot of my personal skepticism about a project like this. I hope you find a way to make this work.
ello looks great, great work
Engagement and learning are definitely separate things; you're right that engagement is required, but that's only part of it. This is a classic case of 'necessary but not sufficient'.
A disengaged child is not learning; an engaged child might be.
Well, some of us didn't grow up in perfect households, for one thing. I actively avoided both my parents at that age.
> The friendly interaction between the Ello character and my kids gives them a fun motivation
> AI drives a love for reading
I cannot trust someone to assess a love for reading, if I also loathe their writing.
That's nice, and it will make a fantastic set of paving stones for the road to Hell.
I've been very impressed with response speed, intonation, and naturalness to the voice. I argue it might be too natural with some of it's pausing and saying "ummm" and other filler words to the point it might be disingenuous but that's neither here nor there.
They've done a lot of work on at least two dimensions: (1) handling the nonstandard sounds and habits of speech of very early readers, who might be as young as four, and (2) connecting this to a specialized teaching system based on the science of reading, e.g. decodable readers.