Dear God no. Keep kids away from AI, and keep AI away from kids. Kids need more human contact, not less. The more I think about it, the more I want to ban your entire business model
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Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
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Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#22Dear God no. Keep kids away from AI, and keep AI away from kids. Kids need more human contact, not less. The more I think about it, the more I want to ban your entire business model
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Business model is interesting BTW. We’re a public benefit company and are planning to make our products completely free in emerging markets and have a free tier in the US. Impact and business should be aligned here, but pulling in opposite corners.
Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#23[flagged]
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.
We also 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.
Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 advant…
Please define "we". > 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 student…
we = a team of teachers, AI experts, child psychologists, learning designers, and parents; building in the US and Kenya
Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#25I 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.
Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#26It's bad enough that schools give 5-year-olds tablets to do their maths work on. Let's not expose them to AI brainrot now too.
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.
Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#27This sounds like a terrible idea. 5 years olds need human interaction with a human tutor or with other children.
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
Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#28I 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 bril…
I was that same 5 year old. I do think that if we want AI to force-multiply humanity, we need to start leveraging it for education. I think it's one of the biggest levers we have to be honest
Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#29Really 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.
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Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#30Really 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.
Yeah – this is hard stuff. If we're successful in getting the this right, our users won't be feeling any of the complexity.