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Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12

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Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12

#91

Post by closetkantian »

alexsouthmayd wrote: post #89
closetkantian wrote: post #88

So, professional educator here, with fifteen years of high school teaching experience. If the sample passages and questions on the front page accurately reflect what's inside this, I would not let my kids go anywhere near it. You've chosen to use the most generic AI-generated prose, when you could have licensed or hired writers to craft thoughtful, rich passages. I doubt you've consulted any serious standardized test…

Thanks for engaging! Our passages are a mix of public domain passages and in-house authored material which are specced to a long list of requirements. This allows us to create passages spanning a rich variety of characteristics, including genres, contexts, settings, cultures, socioeconomic backgrounds, household family set-ups (e.g., single-parent households, grandparent-led households), etc. We also rigorously vet o…

Okay, thanks for the extended response. I suppose I would have to look at more questions, but I'm really surprised by what you chose to include on the front page, where you'd presumably want to highlight your best work. That passage strikes me as very obviously AI generated.

Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12

#93

Post by senordevnyc »

closetkantian wrote: post #88

So, professional educator here, with fifteen years of high school teaching experience. If the sample passages and questions on the front page accurately reflect what's inside this, I would not let my kids go anywhere near it. You've chosen to use the most generic AI-generated prose, when you could have licensed or hired writers to craft thoughtful, rich passages. I doubt you've consulted any serious standardized test…

"professional educator here, with fifteen years of high school teaching experience"

You do ACT / SAT prep and tutoring, correct? Just wanted to be clear, because the description here sure makes it sound like you're a high school teacher.

Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12

#94

Post by [deleted] »

closetkantian wrote: post #91
alexsouthmayd wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for engaging! Our passages are a mix of public domain passages and in-house authored material which are specced to a long list of requirements. This allows us to create passages spanning a rich variety of characteristics, including genres, contexts, settings, cultures, socioeconomic backgrounds, household family set-ups (e.g., single-parent households, grandparent-led households), etc. We also rigorously vet o…

Okay, thanks for the extended response. I suppose I would have to look at more questions, but I'm really surprised by what you chose to include on the front page, where you'd presumably want to highlight your best work. That passage strikes me as very obviously AI generated.

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12

#95

Post by docheinestages »

alexsouthmayd wrote: post #89
closetkantian wrote: post #88

So, professional educator here, with fifteen years of high school teaching experience. If the sample passages and questions on the front page accurately reflect what's inside this, I would not let my kids go anywhere near it. You've chosen to use the most generic AI-generated prose, when you could have licensed or hired writers to craft thoughtful, rich passages. I doubt you've consulted any serious standardized test…

Thanks for engaging! Our passages are a mix of public domain passages and in-house authored material which are specced to a long list of requirements. This allows us to create passages spanning a rich variety of characteristics, including genres, contexts, settings, cultures, socioeconomic backgrounds, household family set-ups (e.g., single-parent households, grandparent-led households), etc. We also rigorously vet o…

I got the same impression looking at your website and demo video. They both came across as generic AI-made content.

Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12

#96

Post by docheinestages »

cocoflunchy wrote: post #68
alexsouthmayd wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting, can you say more?

I think 383toast is talking about your landing page design which has very strong AI-generated design vibes (blue-green gradients, rounded rectangles with a colored border on the left...) There are a bunch of skills you can find online to improve on this if you want to keep designing with Claude, and the latest generation of models are better (Fable/GPT5.6). Check https://github.com/jakubkrehel/skills or https://githu…

I got the same vibes. I really wish YCombinator would mentor startups on design. Unfortunately, most of the landing pages in their startup directory look like raw AI designs.

Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12

#98

Post by windexh8er »

closetkantian wrote: post #88

So, professional educator here, with fifteen years of high school teaching experience. If the sample passages and questions on the front page accurately reflect what's inside this, I would not let my kids go anywhere near it. You've chosen to use the most generic AI-generated prose, when you could have licensed or hired writers to craft thoughtful, rich passages. I doubt you've consulted any serious standardized test…

100%

This looks very poorly thought out by the site alone. The quotes are all concerning as well because all three of them have emdashes. Maybe they're paraphrased, but then those aren't the actual quotes from those educators.

Parents and teachers who are willing to put middle schoolers in front of screens more are doing our future a disservice. There are real studies (none that I can find on Bloomy) showcasing how this negatively impacts students [0]. I doubt you'll find a correlation that more screen / compute interaction at younger ages improves long term cognition as it's not how kids develop.

Beyond this every parent should run after a glance at the privacy policy and the sheer number of different backend services required to run this. This is a privacy nightmare, long-term, for kids who have no choice. School districts, and a lot of parents, don't understand any of this. I don't even see how this abides by laws in some states simply because there are no protections of model training by some of the examples provided in the privacy policy. This does not abide by our state laws requiring a provider to be able to remove student data permanently within 90 days. In fact no LLM that doesn't have a "no train" clause abides by this simple requirement and it's unfortunate that districts will get sued over using tools like this in the near future.

My advice to this is: if you want to build a tutor then target parents. When you try to shove this down the throat of every student in a district you're making a lot of assumptions and impacting many negatively long term. This may be great for disadvantaged areas, but this is not how kids need to learn. They need to learn, explore and make mistakes on their own and not be preconditioned to the easy answer.

The iPad generation of parenting is about to get a whole lot darker as more and more of these types of companies are taking shots at easy targets, like school districts, with little to no studies behind impacts.

Finally, very expensive! I ran a simple 5 student cost calculation and it's over $2000 a year for those students. And that cost does not include math which is currently not available which would be another $1400.

[0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...

Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12

#99

Post by alexsouthmayd »

closetkantian wrote: post #91
alexsouthmayd wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for engaging! Our passages are a mix of public domain passages and in-house authored material which are specced to a long list of requirements. This allows us to create passages spanning a rich variety of characteristics, including genres, contexts, settings, cultures, socioeconomic backgrounds, household family set-ups (e.g., single-parent households, grandparent-led households), etc. We also rigorously vet o…

Okay, thanks for the extended response. I suppose I would have to look at more questions, but I'm really surprised by what you chose to include on the front page, where you'd presumably want to highlight your best work. That passage strikes me as very obviously AI generated.

Thanks, that's very helpful feedback! We'll improve this.

Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12

#100

Post by alexsouthmayd »

windexh8er wrote: post #98
closetkantian wrote: post #88

So, professional educator here, with fifteen years of high school teaching experience. If the sample passages and questions on the front page accurately reflect what's inside this, I would not let my kids go anywhere near it. You've chosen to use the most generic AI-generated prose, when you could have licensed or hired writers to craft thoughtful, rich passages. I doubt you've consulted any serious standardized test…

100% This looks very poorly thought out by the site alone. The quotes are all concerning as well because all three of them have emdashes. Maybe they're paraphrased, but then those aren't the actual quotes from those educators. Parents and teachers who are willing to put middle schoolers in front of screens more are doing our future a disservice. There are real studies (none that I can find on Bloomy) showcasing how t…

Thanks for engaging! Let me clear up some inaccuracies lest others misunderstand.

First, those are all verbatim quotes from the educators. They were taken directly from letters of reference (which I recently had to compile for a quite intense Technical Due Diligence for a district). They're real school leaders. They're listed plainly on the website. You can look them up online. Whether they used AI in the creation or editing of their letters, I do not know.

The platform has been designed to minimize PII required. We have a very standard third-party vendor stack. Basically just OpenAI and Anthropic as frontier labs for the models, but neither is permitted to train on our data (we have Zero Data Retention agreements with those organizations). The other vendors are standard for operating the app (e.g., Supabase, Vercel). Nothing crazy here.

Not only can users request deletion of their data -- it's standard for any user who cancels their relationship, within 30 days. You can read it right in our privacy policy.

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