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

learnvector.ai

131–140 of 181 posts

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

#131
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an oversimplification of what SCORM is, but point taken. My comment was about LMS.

It's not an oversimplification of it at all. I just took the conceptualization of it away from the sufficient experience I have with LMS to do the same with it: Learning management systems are rarely about learning. Too often, they're first about about managing learning for the learning manager, and teh priorities of the learning manager (maintaining compliance) and that's what the software and sales process aims for…

Yep. Literally every EdTech idea is a rehashing of the same flawed reasoning: we just need better monitoring and metrics to manage everyone’s learning process! No. Learning comes from repetitive deliberate practice in the zone of proximal development. For essentially all knowledge-based skills, what’s missing is the core foundational skill progression that leads to actual mastery.

How many different personal training styles do you see for competitive sports? There’s variation, but only at the margins. Nobody deviates from the essential training core because doing so leads to poor performance and competitive failure. And yet we have a total free-for-all in knowledge disciplines where we just throw untrained PhDs in front of a classroom and assume they’ll produce results. Oh, and we also provide zero tangible incentives for them to improve learning outcomes.

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

#133
post #123

I do think Andrew is the right person doing this. Someone mentioned that the return of financial outcome is not good in edTech, and this is exactly why backing by Coursera is a huge advantage. Education-related product is slow, and it needs patience. The concern, though, is that how to achieve those 3 thesis. Do they train/fine-turn their own model? according to my own experience, the current models are not well trai…

I remember reading that Education is a trillion dollar market, so i'm not sure about the financial outcome being poor, only the state of how that money is spent and obligated can differ greatly.

The biggest success that people usually point to in EdTech is Duolingo. They were founded in 2011 and IPO’d for about $6.5b in 2021. A big success by any measure. But that’s the pinnacle. Compare that to DoorDash which is an $80b company, let alone the trillion $ AI labs and you’ll see why the largest VCs hardly touch the space.

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

#134
post #35

"Conventional wisdom says AI will replace people. I believe the opposite." So people will replace AI?

Yeah, that was my first reaction to that headline too. Given a second thought, he probably means the opposite of "replace", so in this context, "maintain people." maybe? I know marketing headlines shouldn't be interpreted literally, but it tripped me up at first.

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

#135

> 01 Plans a path with you > 02 Adapts to how you learn > 03 Patiently stays with you until you've mastered new skills 1 and 2 any of the big AI companies will do that for you. I have Claude doing this for me for a few learning areas. 3 to me feels like the Duolingo bird. IMHO, they are trying to solve the wrong thing. People who want to learn will gravitate to learning systems. If you can find a way to pull in peopl…

I mean "People who want to learn will gravitate to learning systems." means that this is the obvious target market for a learning system. Since there are lots of those out there you win on execution. >If you can find a way to pull in people who don't want to learn, that has value. Most companies try to address a known market and not create one. At any rate you have two types of people who don't want to learn: 1. peop…

Most people don’t want to learn, they want a credential. The real hard problem here, that has been sidestepped for decades and decades, is how to gate credentials behind standardized skill assessments rather than branded gatekeepers. Stanford, Harvard and MIT can do whatever they hell they want in the classroom as long as they continue to skim the cream of each generation and no objective assessment exists to demonstrate that they contributed nothing above what their exceptional students probably would’ve done in four years anyway.

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

#136

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…

While the model itself is great at hiding the answer, the AI summary keeps giving it away, it's so annoying and AFAIK it cannot be disabled.

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

#137
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it works for some people, but it certainly doesn't for me. When I'm handwriting, especially in bulk, all I can think about it how much I hate it and how I can get it to end faster. I take fewer notes with more abbreviations that are later harder to decipher. It's different if it's something like mathematical expressions, because those are never easier to type, but just regular sentences? Absolutely not.

Interesting, I can see where you're coming from. Key detail is the notes are actually not supposed to be read later, just written down - the act of writing by hand helps to commit their content to memory.

I get what you mean, and have noticed that effect on my own too, but the increased recall doesn't supplant the note, it just indexes it. I might hear something and go "oh, I remember making a note about that; it was something about magnets", for example, but I still need the note for the specifics. I haven't noticed any difference between typing and handwriting, in that regard.

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

#138
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading that Education is a trillion dollar market, so i'm not sure about the financial outcome being poor, only the state of how that money is spent and obligated can differ greatly.

There’s a reason services like GitHub Classroom Replit’s education offerings shut down. Serving educators can be very hands-on. Education can have lots of different requirements (every teacher needs this one little feature), often legal issues (student privacy), and dealing with universities and governments is awful and bureaucratic. Most companies will find it easier to make money elsewhere.

The dirty little secret of EdTech is that there is no money in improving learning because there is no way to capture the value. For all but a handful of highly specialized and insular professions, there is no scalable infrastructure for objectively assessing skill mastery. Most learners don’t want to learn for its own sake, they want a credential that proves their value to potential employers. All of the value in learning accrues to the credential, and everyone in the educational establishment is quite happy reserving that privilege for the accredited universities because they can just bundle more and more products and services into the tuition sticker price without ever having to justify it. Oh, and the student loan racket ensures that enough students are price-insensitive that they’ll never look for alternatives.

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

#139

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…

I've made an entire platform based on Socratic AI Agents that co-work with a person as method acting assistants in an office suite. https://midombot.com/b1/home

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

#140

> 01 Plans a path with you > 02 Adapts to how you learn > 03 Patiently stays with you until you've mastered new skills 1 and 2 any of the big AI companies will do that for you. I have Claude doing this for me for a few learning areas. 3 to me feels like the Duolingo bird. IMHO, they are trying to solve the wrong thing. People who want to learn will gravitate to learning systems. If you can find a way to pull in peopl…

People want to learn at the last moment, when it is needed to know, and then they want to discard that knowledge until it is needed again. We need to implement both in our modern software: it needs to solve complex problems, and it needs to guide a human (or AI) operator in the subtle nuances of that complexity so their solution of the moment is good to last for the time being.
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