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LearnVector – Andrew Ng's AI company building one‑to‑one learning experiences

learnvector.ai

21–30 of 181 posts

Re: LearnVector – Andrew Ng's AI company building one‑to‑one learning experiences

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got to see Luis von Ahn the inventor of CAPTCHA discuss his latest crowd sourced venture, Duolingo, which I'm sure everyone has an opinion about, back in 2013 or 2014 at The LAB Miami in Wynwood. At that point they had ~24 employees. He said his interest was crowdsourcing and thought most of the engineering effort would go toward the crowdsourced translation, but at that time, it was being handled by just two emplo…

Very cool to hear that you were at the LAB Miami in 2014, Around 2016, I was trying to organize a group of folks to build a variable spaced repitition application that tied to a off the shelf eeg, to figure out the optimal time to learn at one of the local hackathons.. We had a whole team of folks, some of the Flomio hardware people, and other local startup folks. Never was able to build the prototype at a hackathon,…

> off the shelf eeg

We know that mild stress can narrow focus and help learning. "Neural connections do form when you struggle." [0] A little stress is not only good but necessary for learning while a lot of stress causes a breakdown. The trick is being able to judge the stress level of the student and every person is different.

The idea of using some type of bio metric data from EEG or blood pressure sensors will help determine a little struggle from a lot of struggle in formative assessment.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh0OS4MrN3E

Re: LearnVector – Andrew Ng's AI company building one‑to‑one learning experiences

#22

Edtech has historically not had amazing venture outcomes compared to saas, ads, rockets, etc. Given how much people spend on education, there’s no reason AI education software wont be a huge market. And there’s few people better suited than Andrew Ng to execute this

There is not a huge market of people who actually want to learn something on their own motivation. Get some piece of paper, yes. So the huge market will only materialize if the degree granting institutions adopt something like this.

Re: LearnVector – Andrew Ng's AI company building one‑to‑one learning experiences

#23

Edtech has historically not had amazing venture outcomes compared to saas, ads, rockets, etc. Given how much people spend on education, there’s no reason AI education software wont be a huge market. And there’s few people better suited than Andrew Ng to execute this

I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and hope for the best. My wife has been a high school math teacher for 25 years and has seen waves of tech luminaries give their visions of how tech will radically improve education and learning. She can’t point to any startup that has had a major impact in improving outcomes. I wish I could point her to something that really will have an impact in, or even out, of the classroom…

That's not unique to tech startups. Almost nothing in terms of explicit methodology has any effect on education outcomes. The literature on education research is of abysmal quality too.

Re: LearnVector – Andrew Ng's AI company building one‑to‑one learning experiences

#26

Somebody here posted about a Socratic method skill for Claude (or whatever your LLM of choice is). I’ve found this to be fantastic. Dropped in a dense PDF about Linear Algebra, Postgres (those are the two I’ve gotten into so far). It’s basically just a skill.md that reads, “Here’s a document, give me an opening statement about the material and ask me a question. As I provide answers, guide me to simpler or more compl…

https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools/blob/main/pl...

Re: LearnVector – Andrew Ng's AI company building one‑to‑one learning experiences

#27
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask why? If by "not the same" you meant: AI is not at the level of a good human educator, it is a fair argument - but not many humans can afford to have a one-to-one human educator either. Perhaps I am a bit more optimistic, but if AI could give me, let's say, 90% of an average lecturer's capability, at 10% of the price or even less, that is probably extremely valuable. (For one, I would certainly be interested…

Moreover, there are areas of expertise that are very hard to reach without special help. I have a PhD in computer science. Earning that degree was a major time commitment, and it gave me close contact with one of the few experts in a niche area. I absolutely loved the experience. But I did not learn everything I wanted to know. And I can’t afford to take a time-out to go to grad school again for a second PhD. On the…

A lot of knowledge in such niches has never been written down. Papers don't contain it. Tacit knowledge, it's in unpublished config files and unpublished experiments that some prof or PhD student remembers, all the things that are not "publishing-worthy" (because not flashy, not novel-sounding enough, or a negative result etc) but crucial for the method to actually work. Most of expertise is like this and this is why spending years in a research group, talking to the researchers, participating in their culture, understanding their thinking over years (or even just months) can be invaluable. There are also many things that people only say after a beer, after you know each other well. Claude and ChatGPT haven't ingested any of this. They ingested the sanitized surface version, the press release / advertisement version. Because papers are basically career marketing and advertisement mostly. The real expertise is guarded and hidden.

This is of course about the PhD level and beyond. For regular university-level education, where the goal is to pass the usual exams, ChatGPT and Claude are more than enough. But for real-world "doing", not (yet).

Re: LearnVector – Andrew Ng's AI company building one‑to‑one learning experiences

#28

$100M funding is a hell of a lot of money. Yeah, prominent thing run by famous guy … but why so much funding so early? What does $100M enable in the next 5-10 years that $25M doesn’t?

Coursera, the company providing the funding, also belongs to Andrew Ng

Re: LearnVector – Andrew Ng's AI company building one‑to‑one learning experiences

#29

Somebody here posted about a Socratic method skill for Claude (or whatever your LLM of choice is). I’ve found this to be fantastic. Dropped in a dense PDF about Linear Algebra, Postgres (those are the two I’ve gotten into so far). It’s basically just a skill.md that reads, “Here’s a document, give me an opening statement about the material and ask me a question. As I provide answers, guide me to simpler or more compl…

Would you care to share them?

Re: LearnVector – Andrew Ng's AI company building one‑to‑one learning experiences

#30

$100M funding is a hell of a lot of money. Yeah, prominent thing run by famous guy … but why so much funding so early? What does $100M enable in the next 5-10 years that $25M doesn’t?

See The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
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