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Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds

ello.com

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Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds

#121

Post by bmacho »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #95
jordanmeyer wrote: post #36

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 bes…

"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…

In practice, yes. In theory a machines can do about everything a human can, but better and cheaper.

One of 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.

Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds

#122

Post by dcx »

mlmonkey wrote: post #54
dcx wrote: post #35

Full disclosure: I worked on a small project with Ello / Catalin a few years ago. At the time of writing, the sentiment in this post is that this is a terrible idea, and that kids need human tutors. The latter is 100% true. But also, you might want to know some facts about the state of children's literacy in the US (Ello is a math and reading tutor): 1. We're in crisis. As of 2025, 40% of fourth graders are reading b…

> 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,…

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 the problem is that for this to work, one first needs to have bootstrapped a robust vocabulary. And that happens 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 the first non-paywalled and reasonably complete one I found)

[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/phonics-failure-public-schools

Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds

#123

Post by 28304283409234 »

catalinvoss wrote: post #18
28304283409234 wrote: post #4

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.

We agree with this sentiment. Our goal is to supplement children with effective learning, NOT replace humans. 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-...

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.

Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds

#124

Post by mncharity »

catalinvoss wrote: post #59
erikschoster wrote: post #53

> 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…

[flagged]

Fyi fwiw, x.com video requires Sign-up/Log-in to view.

Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds

#125

Post by dcx »

irjustin wrote: post #58

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.

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.

Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds

#127

Post by d675 »

eba7keb wrote: post #61
erikschoster wrote: post #53

> 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…

Elizabeth here, co-founder (and clinical child psychologist). Fair question. Catalin's post was about the engineering (he is my co-founder and our CTO), so the learning side got short shrift :). Here's what it actually looks like for a child. Say a 6-year-old is reading a story out loud (I will use a reading example here). The tutor is listening to every word. When she stumbles on "chick," it doesn't just tell her th…

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.

ello looks great, great work

Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds

#128

Post by ErroneousBosh »

K0balt wrote: post #26
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #15

It'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. Bu…

You can, but very few people do.

Mostly what I see people doing is saying "Hey, Spicy Autocomplete, steal me some content from someone else to do " 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.

Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds

#130

Post by imp0cat »

m4rtink wrote: post #126
sailfast wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never read Diamond Age huh?

Yeah, hard to get a children army going without cheap personalized AI tutors. ;-)

Yeah, it's like Diamond age, except it also destroys your kid's vision.

But then again, that's a potential upsell just waiting to happen - do you want eyeglasses with that? Your kid is gonna need them.

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