Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

ello.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 460 posts

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

#231

Post by ndriscoll »

zero-sharp wrote: post #192
jbotz wrote: post #25

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 bril…

>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 works.

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

#232

Post by teleforce »

One of my ever favorite AI prompt keywords is ELI5 (Explain Like I'm 5). Last month I asked Gemini Pro to provide me ELI5 explanation on the waveform mechanism of a novel wireless system that I've been working on. To my surprise it described the principle succintly and intuitively as described to me by the original inventor of the wireless system a few years back. I was literally speechless for a minute or two.

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

#233

Post by K0balt »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #128
K0balt wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#234

Post by Marha01 »

TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #228
IshKebab wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's quite as simple as that. LLMs do make mistakes but generally with slightly obscure difficult stuff. They're not going to struggle at all with things a 4-9 year old is learning. Also it's not like teachers never make confident mistakes.

> They're not going to struggle at all with things a 4-9 year old is learning. Ask them how many r's are in strawberry. > Also it's not like teachers never make confident mistakes. That's an extraordinary false equivalency that is popular around here. Teachers don't make confident mistakes because the student asked the wrong way. Teachers can be held accountable. Teachers can learn. Teachers can love their students.

> Ask them how many r's are in strawberry.

2024 called and wants its talking points back.

> Teachers don't make confident mistakes because the student asked the wrong way. Teachers can be held accountable. Teachers can learn. Teachers can love their students.

All of these can be true, and at the same it can be true that a child tutored by a good quality state-of-the-art LLM with a good teaching-focused harness could have better learning outcomes than a child without it. Even if we agreed that a good human teacher is better than a LLM, human teacher's time and attention is limited.

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

#235

Post by Marha01 »

byzantinegene wrote: post #132
jph00 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heaven forbid we let poor people use software that helps their kids read. If they can't afford a tutor, they deserve nothing. (Am I doing this right?)

there's a big universe of solutions between getting nothing versus getting an AI 'educational' software that could do more harm than good.

[flagged]

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

#236

Post by TonyAlicea10 »

Marha01 wrote: post #234
TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're not going to struggle at all with things a 4-9 year old is learning. Ask them how many r's are in strawberry. > Also it's not like teachers never make confident mistakes. That's an extraordinary false equivalency that is popular around here. Teachers don't make confident mistakes because the student asked the wrong way. Teachers can be held accountable. Teachers can learn. Teachers can love their students.

> Ask them how many r's are in strawberry. 2024 called and wants its talking points back. > Teachers don't make confident mistakes because the student asked the wrong way. Teachers can be held accountable. Teachers can learn. Teachers can love their students. All of these can be true, and at the same it can be true that a child tutored by a good quality state-of-the-art LLM with a good teaching-focused harness could…

> 2024 called and wants its talking points back.

It's a classic example of the kinds of questions LLMs get wrong. There's plenty of others. Not sure your point here. We can easily find things a 4-9 year old will talk about that an LLM will get wrong, hallucinate, etc.

> a child tutored by a good quality state-of-the-art LLM with a good teaching-focused harness could have better learning outcomes than a child without it.

There's a lot of work being done in 'could'. And it's entirely ignoring the dangers.

I'm not saying "no LLMs in education". I'm a technical educator and I give students LLM prompts and agent skills that I've built to help them learn.

This isn't that. We're talking about giving an LLM to a 4-9 year old and saying "this is your teacher".

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

#237

Post by Marha01 »

nkrisc wrote: post #178
CaptWorld wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

A reflexive anti-AI Luddite attitude is the healthy default until there is overwhelming evidence otherwise. We should be wary of all new technology until it’s proven to be a benefit to society.

> 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.

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

#238

Post by ndriscoll »

RetroTechie wrote: post #210
bmacho wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fa…

> 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 yours…

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 or music or science lab, 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).

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

#239

Post by cindyllm »

TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #236
Marha01 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ask them how many r's are in strawberry. 2024 called and wants its talking points back. > Teachers don't make confident mistakes because the student asked the wrong way. Teachers can be held accountable. Teachers can learn. Teachers can love their students. All of these can be true, and at the same it can be true that a child tutored by a good quality state-of-the-art LLM with a good teaching-focused harness could…

> 2024 called and wants its talking points back. It's a classic example of the kinds of questions LLMs get wrong. There's plenty of others. Not sure your point here. We can easily find things a 4-9 year old will talk about that an LLM will get wrong, hallucinate, etc. > a child tutored by a good quality state-of-the-art LLM with a good teaching-focused harness could have better learning outcomes than a child without…

[dead]

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

#240

Post by Marha01 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #203
logicchains wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> Most critiques of AI are based on experience with the cheapest AI available a year ago, by midwits 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 don't even need to use AI at all to have valid critiques of it

You cannot rationally criticize something if you have no up-to-date knowledge about it.

Post reply on HN