Earlier quoted context omitted.
Multiple things can be bad for different qualitative reasons.
I don't disagree but something less bad is better than something more bad if those are the only two options. I only said Duolingo was better than Youtube. Duolingo is nuts. I get my children's spam from them and it is this crazy emotionally abusive manipulative therapy talk nonsense trying to get them to use the app. I hope they are using AI to write that. LOL. I can't imagine the actual human who would do that for a…
Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
421–430 of 460 posts
Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#422Please, no. The last thing a child need is a screen. Give children books, creative toys, teach them read, enjoy music, do science or any activity always with a human companion and let it be disconnected from the virtual world. Children do not need screens to learn. I didn't need one when I was a kid, nor endless generations either needed it. Why are we trying to push everything through an LLM?
> Give children books, creative toys, teach them read, enjoy music, do science or any activity always with a human companion Privileged much?
The concept of using untested, unregulated, demonstrably harmful models - see news about 'suicide ideation and school shooting facilitation' by public facing enterprise models - is a dangerous condition that no amount of hand-wavy, but "My co-founder, who is a clinical child psychologist" statements mitigate.
First, that isn't a statement by the actual person purporting to be a professional, and second this statement plays into the misconception in American consumers' minds which often conflates psychiatrist with psychologist . The first is a medical degree with the responsibility and risk of losing a medical accreditation for engaging in this kind of unethical, untested approach on children at large. The second has no supervisory board capable of revoking credentials, and may even mean nothing more than an undergraduate degree in basic psychology. Thus, I am highly skeptical about any such business' ability to carry liability insurance from a reputable firm.
Here on HN you can readily find articles about firms offering fraudulent compliance readiness; so I'm not doubtful of being able to procure the verisimilitude of coverage, just the veracity and legality of the coverage available to any organization taking this cavalier approach which relies on these models.
Now, if the model and infrastructure Elo is leaning on is an in-house, on-premises, refined private MoE (Mixture of Experts) framework with a curated harness and training data which is demonstrably free of harmful materials and has been/continues to be fine tuned to provide provably safe content and interactions: that might be testable for compliance and liability coverage.
The cost of such an infrastructure would make it a premium product, with a potential customer base that can and does already have 'affordable' human tutoring. As this human one-on-one to on-on-a-few tutoring is the gold standard benchmark for 'best-case' that this product cannot exceed, there is no viable use-case for it's existence or use, except when the parents might find an AI subscription to be less of cognitive load than managing actual people. Even rich people can be self serving and delusional about the well-being of their own children.
All I can see from here is; attention grabbing, AI hype delusional, high risk, for-profit exploitation of overworked middle class parents, using uncontrollable public facing models which hide behind a 'we take no responsibility for the results' disclaimer organizations that can and will spin the dials on performance and capacity quotas and 'upgrade' to a degraded, de-safety limited model with zero notice, mid workload. Which once the enticingly low costs of providing this 'risk factors as a service' are covered, has the appearance of profitability for the founders in the short term, and when the 'unlimited plan' is actually very limited will be an external 'force majeure' for either subscription price increases or rug pull from under the by-then addicted young minds.
The need for solutions to the gap in educational opportunity between children of the top 1% and the rest of the world is real. This approach is not a solution; but is an entirely different class of risk posing as a solution.
Shame on you both.
Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#423Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Give children books, creative toys, teach them read, enjoy music, do science or any activity always with a human companion Privileged much?
It's simple for parents - be the human tutor they need. If you're capable of loving them and being responsible for raising them, that task fall to you. Underprivileged by socioeconomic realities? In the US there is Head Start for this problem, and yes, it does work and has been longitudinally proven to do so by independent studies and peer reviewed publication. In a nation without these services, but able to be here…
A simple rejoinder - The OP is one solution to many households where they can just be "the human tutor". If you can't see that, you simply don't know the average household.
Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 th…
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.
Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
-> You could create a mountain of educational material, apps, and tools with LLM assistance and verify it. Same result. I very strongly disagree with this. Teaching is not the same as a bunch of educational material and apps. The use of AI in education does not replace teachers, but it can get much closer to the responsive, learner centered, high-touch learning experiences that teachers provide, and that are proven t…
We’re going to disagree about the quality of LLM learning experiences. As an educator I’ve used them a lot for myself and in teaching others. Good for one-off topics if you check facts and a lot of human educators have built good quality content that it rips off. LLMs are rather terrible at an extended progressive curriculum. That said, the core thesis was simple: it’s dangerous to teach children to trust LLMs. Not w…
Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
Children are going to witness or experience violence at some point or ask questions about it. They will probably see some at school. I think it depends when and how you introduce it. For example, there is a heavy focus on refugees in western schools and media, but at some point a child is eventually going to have to ask what refugees are running from. (Torture and violence.) It's hard to avoid discussing violence in…
You’re not claiming that most refugees are running from torture are you? Most are economic refugees running TOWARDS a better economic outcome than is available in their home country.
Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#428Full 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…
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.
Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
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.
Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Pay your teachers better.
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.