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

learnvector.ai

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

#161

Post by nicf »

I've been working for a few years now as a private tutor teaching proof-based math to adults. Maybe this should give me an incentive to join in on some of the cynical replies this has gotten, but that's not actually how I find myself feeling. I love teaching, especially in the one-on-one format, but it really doesn't scale; not everyone can afford a human tutor and there probably aren't nearly enough of them to meet the possible demand.

If a product like this worked well --- and I agree Andrew Ng's involvement seems like a positive sign --- then that would be great! Something I would wonder about from my past experience using LLM's for technical subjects is how to replicate a particular side of the student-teacher relationship. Sometimes a new student of mine will need to be told that they don't actually understand something as well as they think they do, and that they'd be better served by going more slowly than they might have wanted to. This "talking you down gently" conversation is one I'm happy to have (and sometimes it's actually me who's wrong!) but I'd be interested to see whether and how well an LLM run by a company that really wants to retain customers could pull this off.

It's hard to say without an actual product, of course. I'm looking forward to seeing what they come out with.

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

#162

Post by mrtobo »

personjerry wrote: post #28
BobbyTables2 wrote: post #25

$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

He's on the board, at least - "belongs to" isn't correct.

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

#163

Post by UltraSane »

Diogenesian wrote: post #129
UltraSane wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" if you need a human tutor to understand category theory or Lean then you don't have the requiste math/CS background and a human/LLM tutor won't be able to meaningfully teach you anything." What an incredibly elitist thing to say.

No, it's an honest thing to say. If you're not able to read a graduate-level textbook and teach yourself category theory then you don't have the mathematical maturity to understand category theory. You need to start smaller: ideally abstract algebra and point-set topology, or set theory and mathematical logic if you just want the CS applications. Likewise with Lean. Of course there is a place for a good human instruc…

Even if you are correct, which you aren't, a good tutor almost ALWAYS helps people learn faster. This is just a really odd thing to argue.

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

#164

Post by xxwink »

LtWorf wrote: post #91
xxwink wrote: post #80

There's a huge potential in personalized learning/education space. A big problem in education is that everyone learns different, and teachers / schools have to go by the speed of the lowest common denominator. AI can tailor content to the individual students most optimal way of learning. Whoever cracks that code will literally boost humankind

I have a feeling you've not been around a group of teenagers for a while.

I'm a father of two teenage boys. Both of them could've used "customized learning". What makes you think otherwise ?

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

#165

Post by kovek »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #85
kovek wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think learning from another human being live who can understand your confusingly articulated questions and who can adjust their answers for you, another human being, that's great.

Too costly. Now its viable with AI to do it cheaply.

Try being an English speaker learning Mandarin from Claude

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

#166

Post by CamperBob2 »

kovek wrote: post #165
thedevilslawyer wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too costly. Now its viable with AI to do it cheaply.

Try being an English speaker learning Mandarin from Claude

What obstacles do you tend to run into? I'd be inclined to use a Chinese model for that, since Claude was presumably RLHF'ed primarily by native Anglophones.

Have you tried a Chinese-trained LLM for learning Mandarin, and if so, did it help?

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

#167

Post by j45 »

chadash wrote: post #133
j45 wrote: 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.

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.

EdTech is a broad market.

- K-12, Academia/Colleges/Universities, Industry/Training, Adult learning, increasingly experts teaching directly, and more.

Most people aren't aware of the differentiation of the categories because they get to work inside one for the most part.

The learners in each category are different.

Duolingo had it's share of naysayers and doubters, but it did provide it's own take on a learning outcome.

Your post does make me wonder about the existing spend in Education, and how much could/should be EdTech with today's capabilities, or even the capabilities of 10 years ago, and what looking at that with a lens like yours might show, if anything.

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

#168

Post by j45 »

jkhdigital wrote: post #138
sseagull wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lea…

The solutions exists for skill mastery.

They're just outside of K-12 and Academia, who don't necessarily keep the gap close to the real world and it's needs post-graduation

The value in learning is what you do with it, the credential can be a part of the journey but not always. People were definitely about the brand, and it's value, of the stamp of a piece of paper, however given the experience of recent graduates the past 5 years, it's revealing itself to not be an aberration that's going to give way to the 500-1000 years preceeding it.

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

#169

Post by j45 »

jkhdigital wrote: post #131
j45 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How to teach, and how to learn, and how to learn how to learn are for sure different things.

With post secondaries, one thing I see is the obsession with pedagogy, which makes sense on one hand, where teachers who teach K-12, learn how to teach children, for the unfamiliar - peda is children, and gogy roughly means "how to lead".

If our teaching is rooted actually or inaccurately using a word that is rooted in a practice of how to lead children, it doesn't surprise me that the learning experiences of non-adults, including young adults, are so hard.

I've got to work in K-12, Academia and Industry training/certification, and where they work, they do not share as much as each of the categories would like to think.

Thus, when someone takes a K-12 framework or approach and applies it in industry, it's feasible that it might not work, but the takes on why seem to get ignored.

Fundamentally skills and the ability to use your skills change and evolve and fixes curriculum that takes 1-3 years to change one sentence doesn't really work in more and more places. This is more a fundamental change than a short lived irritant.

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