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

271–280 of 460 posts

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

#271

Post by Marha01 »

sjsdaiuasgdia wrote: post #268
Marha01 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. My point is that the hallucination rate of modern LLMs, while not zero, is so low that this is no longer an issue in practice. > There's a lot of work being done in 'could'. And it's entirely ignori…

> My point is that the hallucination rate of modern LLMs, while not zero, is so low that this is no longer an issue in practice. Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha Do you actually use these things?

> Do you actually use these things?

I use them every day for SWE. I cannot remember any hallucination from the last 6 months. It pretty much stopped being an issue from the beginning of this year, if you use top paid models. Free models or lower-tier paid models can still hallucinate, though.

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

#272

Post by JimsonYang »

JimsonYang wrote: post #41
catalinvoss wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

I should make this clear-forcing your kids into kumon so they can skip a grade is really shitty

I know its happens, but optimizing for education goals in American is usuabbly a faux pax

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

#273

Post by sjsdaiuasgdia »

Marha01 wrote: post #271
sjsdaiuasgdia wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My point is that the hallucination rate of modern LLMs, while not zero, is so low that this is no longer an issue in practice. Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha Do you actually use these things?

> Do you actually use these things? I use them every day for SWE. I cannot remember any hallucination from the last 6 months. It pretty much stopped being an issue from the beginning of this year, if you use top paid models. Free models or lower-tier paid models can still hallucinate, though.

I can use Claude as much as I want at work, and I get hallucinations every day. I'm not even doing anything all that fancy with it, but I get frequent hallucinatory behavior regardless of the model or how I go about things.

Every single time I have asked Claude or another "top tier" offering a detailed question about something I'm an expert in, there's something wrong in the answer. Usually many things.

Do you actually look at what comes out?

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

#274

Post by lern_too_spel »

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

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.

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

#275

Post by ndriscoll »

zero-sharp wrote: post #269
ndriscoll wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

[flagged]

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

#277

Post by Marha01 »

altmanaltman wrote: post #106
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…

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.

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

#279

Post by cyphar »

dcx wrote: post #122
mlmonkey wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 abl…

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).

[1]: https://wearealigned.org/brief-history-literacy-instruction-... [2]: https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/the-science-of-reading-vs...

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

#280

Post by fourside »

havercosine wrote: post #164
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…

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 advis…

> 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.

Post reply on HN