If anything, an app should be made where a child learns to correct an LLM's mistakes and learn that it isn't trustworthy.

Actually, better, don't put an LLM in front of children. At all.

EDIT: If a use case is for children who can't afford good education, then use an LLM to make educational materials for children, review them, and make them available for free. After all, the contents are ripped off from human educators anyway.

All learning is good, yes. But a baseline curriculum is necessary to create a ground floor of knowledge for society.

vs "you like dinosaurs! me too!” From the blog post.

In a world of AI everywhere, off-line social interaction will be the major currency. We're all going to crave people... and each other.... The kids who grow up with social skills will be the most successful.

Ask them how many r's are in strawberry.

> Also it's not like teachers never make confident mistakes.

That's an extraordinary false equivalency that is popular around here. Teachers don't make confident mistakes because the student asked the wrong way. Teachers can be held accountable. Teachers can learn. Teachers can love their students.

> Teachers don't make confident mistakes because the student asked the wrong way.

I don't see why the mechanism of being wrong matters. If anything it's worse when teachers are reliably wrong independently of how you ask the question.

> Teachers can be held accountable.

lol no. Have you ever tried correcting a teacher?

> Teachers can learn.

Good teachers can learn. The ones that make confident mistakes don't. Anyway no learning is needed for 4-9 year old education.

> Teachers can love their students.

That's just such a weird point to make. It is great that my kids' primary school teachers are super kind and loving. But it's not what they're for, and it's definitely not what AI tutors are for. Nobody is claiming this will replace a hug from a parent.

This is an extraordinarily naive statement. Learning how to teach well takes a lifelong commitment. A topic being basic for an adult does not mean it is easier to teach to a child. In many ways it makes it harder.

> That's just such a weird point to make. It is great that my kids' primary school teachers are super kind and loving. But it's not what they're for, and it's definitely not what AI tutors are for. Nobody is claiming this will replace a hug from a parent.

This doesn't seem weird at all. Developmentally they need (kind, loving) human interaction. That's obviously not the only purpose of teachers, but if you think 7 hours a day without it wouldn't make a difference... just like a computer can't be held accountable, a computer can't have compassion.

No, it's not. The claim that "teacher's make mistakes too" suggests that AI is equivalent to a human teacher in value. I posit other ways in which a human teacher is potentially more valuable.

Also, teachers who love their students tend to want to educate them well.

> lol no. Have you ever tried correcting a teacher?

Do you mean as a student? If so, that's a different dynamic. Because teachers certainly have accountability processes in many institutions.

2024 called and wants its talking points back.

> Teachers don't make confident mistakes because the student asked the wrong way. Teachers can be held accountable. Teachers can learn. Teachers can love their students.

All of these can be true, and at the same it can be true that a child tutored by a good quality state-of-the-art LLM with a good teaching-focused harness could have better learning outcomes than a child without it. Even if we agreed that a good human teacher is better than a LLM, human teacher's time and attention is limited.

It's a classic example of the kinds of questions LLMs get wrong. There's plenty of others. Not sure your point here. We can easily find things a 4-9 year old will talk about that an LLM will get wrong, hallucinate, etc.

> a child tutored by a good quality state-of-the-art LLM with a good teaching-focused harness could have better learning outcomes than a child without it.

There's a lot of work being done in 'could'. And it's entirely ignoring the dangers.

I'm not saying "no LLMs in education". I'm a technical educator and I give students LLM prompts and agent skills that I've built to help them learn.

This isn't that. We're talking about giving an LLM to a 4-9 year old and saying "this is your teacher".

My point is that the hallucination rate of modern LLMs, while not zero, is so low that this is no longer an issue in practice.

> There's a lot of work being done in 'could'. And it's entirely ignoring the dangers.

I agree that there are some risks. But for many children, the alternative is not human teacher, but no teacher at all. This considerably changes the risk-benefit calculus, IMHO.

That's just not true. Talk to an LLM about a subject you know deeply. They make up things all the time.

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Do you actually use these things?

I use them every day for SWE. I cannot remember any hallucination from the last 6 months. It pretty much stopped being an issue from the beginning of this year, if you use top paid models. Free models or lower-tier paid models can still hallucinate, though.

Their output is just.... not very good. For example, it may not fail tests, but it does so for wrong reasons and will fail under different conditions. Or it checks or guards for things in trivially redundant ways, like doing something like `if (x > 5 && x > 3)` that betray its lack of "knowing" what it's doing. And I can't even get answers from them anymore because they just feed anything I say into the LLM and copy/paste the response.

I'm basically being forced to code with LLMs via review through a person proxy. Or maybe they just have it hooked up to read it directly. It's maddening. It's like having a realistic enough chatbot just shuts people's brains off.

Every single time I have asked Claude or another "top tier" offering a detailed question about something I'm an expert in, there's something wrong in the answer. Usually many things.

Do you actually look at what comes out?

if my aunt had wheels, she'd be a bicycle.

I'm not participating in the debate, but fyi I have just asked haiku, sonnet, opus and fable that question and they all got it right. Tried with the letter s in portuguese word "sussuarana" (mountain lion) too - same thing.

Children ask some incredibly deep questions, I would not sell them short.

Say what you will about the biases of teachers, but I'll take them any day over the propaganda [1] some foreign megacorporation has inculcated into its AI.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48664834

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  Ello has specific instructions to talk to the child about the learning activities.

There really needs to be more published technical detail on what safety systems you have in this because if trillion dollar companies can't stop AI going off the rails, I feel you're overselling the safety systems you've built.

Reading further it then goes beyond "learning activities" into LLM generated content.

  Some (not all) of Ello’s stories and illustrations have been created with AI technology, and AI allows children to create their own stories and experiences through guided and safe scaffolding.

I primarily think that a a kid who won't pick books is a failure of the family of not noticing their interests.

When i noticed my oldest 3 yr old was obsessed about cars, i bought him a car encyclopedia. He probably could not read most words or did not understand them. But pretty soon he was telling me about car models that i did not even recognize myself.

And as i saw interests, i kept feeding them.

My biggest struggle now is to actually keep books away from them at key times (morning routine, etc) , or keeping bad books (think cynical like My Weird School Daze, etc; or books that openly demean adults or parents) away from them

Start small. Graphical novels, mostly drawings, and continue to buil on that. It can be done. Rome wasn't built on a day.

At some point when they hit 5 yrs old, Grok / OpenAI are great tools to find good series appropriate to their reading level. Before that it can be vibed. Feed the addiction, buy whatever they like.

At some point, you need to watch out for cynical/nasty series. In fact, all of the books we purchase are ranked against peers they have read in the past, or those we know to actively avoid buying due to cynicism, sarcasm, or open disdain towards adults (Wimpy Kid).

At some point around age 9,you will need to decide if violence and some adult themes, are tolerable (Dragon Wing series).

This iterative rocess also works really well for foreign language learning (reinforcing via reading mostly), by leveraging localized RPG video games.

With all that said, notice that I've focused on reading skills.

I don't know how i'd go about replicating this iterative path on other skills like math, mechanical, or electrical engineering learning. That's where I think a busy parent will need to find AI as the solution.

I'm not. Keep AI the hell away from teaching children.

This is interesting because when I was 7-8 my mum just recommended me whatever books she was reading, some of which were quite... adult in retrospect, and I turned out mostly well-adjusted.

Kids aren't LLMs, they know that what they're reading is fiction. Maybe reading something like that would be a fun way to start a conversation about it?

I think it also influenced a lot of work which came afterward.

Naivety which is part of human psychology and sociology of living and where if the wrong conditions are brought to the child at a young age, sure they won't understand and carry on. The repercussions from the negative conditions do surface later; having a detrimental effect later on in their life.

I walk home from work and see at toddlers with tablets as a digital nanny. With the upcoming generations, those who have grown up with such get anxiety if they're not within reach of a technological device. Attention span is at a whole new low.

We have no idea nor studies how AI will affect children and on conclusion we are already starting to see negative effects on mature adults.

It's not necessarily wrong "it teaches kids" and maybe in ways that reach the child but teaching is subjective. At least with tablets it's contained, or was. L

Now with the push of AI, Tablets with AI and negative environment without moderation, it's going to be horrific.

All devices have had the same effect just the earlier was more under control unless propaganda'ed.

yeah how do you "know" this? our kid is obsessed with wimpy kid and a few other similar series and "cynicism" nails it perfectly, is there a list? of what's known to be "cynical" and what's not?

> I'd like recommendations for book series that avoid self-pity, misanthropy, nihilism, and over-indulgence in self-identity analysis. Lessons on character building and virtue can be present but ideally without overt moralizing. Characters should simply inspire through their actions. Starting from Curious George, and working toward things like LotR. Background themes should lay the groundwork for stoic and transcendental philosophy later.

If you then ask for series to avoid, at least in my session Wimpy Kid is explicitly named. Or more succinctly it basically told me I want pre-1970s children's literature and adventure fiction and stay away from contemporary school-market YA.

I remember playing GTA 4 when I was like 7 or 8. good times... not much books though.

but like... avoid buying due to sarcasm...? what?

Most are economic refugees running TOWARDS a better economic outcome than is available in their home country.

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 below basic levels [1].

2. There's a massive teacher shortage. 2025 US state data shows ~400k teacher positions either unfilled or underqualified [2] – over 10% of the workforce.

3. Bloom's 2-sigma shows that 1-1 tutoring delivers outcomes at the 90th percentile of classroom teaching. Early research is finding that AI can deliver some of this benefit [3].

4. This can't always be solved by parents: 54% of US adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level, and 20% are below 5th-grade level [4].

At Ello, I heard stories of children figuring out they were behind at school, and when given the app, they holed themselves up in their room and used it to get themselves caught up. And then they could read! Can you imagine falling behind at this critical juncture, and being stuck illiterate while your friends grow past you? We're currently setting kids up for lives of shame and deprivation.

My take: this really is a life-changing technology. And we need this problem solved. Democracy doesn't function without an educated populace.

[1] https://www.nagb.gov/news-and-events/news-releases/2025/nati...

[2] https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/overview-teacher...

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666920X2...

[4] https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...

In my part of the world, "become a teacher" is often a job advised to people who are not able to find other jobs or are looking for a safe way back after career break. None of them are looking forward to engaging 5 year old with life's curiosities. To add the famous quip from WorryDream/Bret Victor : most of the teachers teaching calculus etc. have never ever used it in real life.

Working parents with STEM backgrounds likely know that schools are glorified day-cares and probability of your child having access to a life changing tutor is very low.

I tried building an edtech venture frustrated precisely with these problems. Failed, but would def do it again with AI in the mix. I'm for one rooting for this to succeed!

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 the resources it deserves (eg paying teachers more like the other reply said) we’re going to “fix it” by ossifying a two tiered system where wealthy kids get individualized attention from well trained adults while poor kids are taught by AI.

What fucking society are we trying to cultivate?

How much of this crisis is due to the social engineering being attempted in school districts across America? Case in point: San Francisco schools decided a couple of years ago that they would no longer teach Algebra in 8th grade. Why? Because too many kids of a certain demographic were failing it. So let's just not teach it! No class, so nobody fails it, right?

It took a proposition on a ballot (i.e., an election) [1] to force the SFUSD to put Algebra back in 8th grade!

I have kids in SFUSD. It often feels like the SFUSD does not care about the average and above average kids; all they focus on is the bottom layer. And even there, they do a terrible job. There was a student who got straight F's in each and every class, and still managed to be a senior in High School! [2]

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Propositi...

[2] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/A-child-left-beh...

This has nothing to do with this at all. We're talking about 4th grader literacy nationwide and you're talking about algebra in a single area in a different grade!?

The second point where there aren't enough teachers nationwide (10% missing workforce) is probably because teachers are terribly paid, disrespected, and subject to bad working conditions.

Maybe that's why people aren't clamoring to be teachers and the quality of work is low?

(I'm not sure whether Cato is generally reliable, but FYI there are lots of other writeups online on the same topic. It was the first non-paywalled and reasonably complete one I found)

[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/phonics-failure-public-schools

However, I find it quite hard to believe that it is the most important cause of the modern literacy rate issues in the US. Why? Because "whole word" teaching was the conventional wisdom since at least the 1950s[1,2]! Most articles on the topic reference the book Why Johnny Can't Read (1955) which was written to argue in favour of phonics as a response to (perceived?) child illiteracy at the time and claims (page 1):

> Since the 1920s, most American schoolchildren have been taught to memorize the "appearance" of words, one after another, like Chinese characters, without reference to the sounds of the individual letters that make up each word.

The reintroduction of phonics in the US first started as "balanced literacy" (phonics and "whole word", ideally tailored to students) in the 1990s and "science-based reading" (basically just phonics) properly started in the 2000s[1,2], which means that the argument that phonics would improve reading scores is on quite shaky ground (most children in the US today get taught phonics and most people >40 were probably taught with "whole word" teaching).

[1]: https://wearealigned.org/brief-history-literacy-instruction-... [2]: https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/the-science-of-reading-vs...

Blooms 2 sigma, like many studies that are thrown about, is not as much of a slam dunk as people claim that it is. Have you read the paper or any efforts to replicate?

Are your devices likely something that they would have fun with and choose to engage with or is it likely to be ignored unless adults use some kind of persuasion to have them use it? Is it cool with a child using it for a bit and then not using it for a few months and then wandering back to it? How far up into math does it go compared to what an a randomly sampled adult could actually do mathwise? Also for reading, are you using phonics or whole word sighting? For math, to what extent is it screen manipulatives versus manipulations of digits? Also, do you have provision for an older child to start learning this stuff so the basics need not be at a 4 year old presentation level, but the concepts still need to be covered?

In Sudbury schools, the typical age of self-taught reading is 7-9 though it can range from 4 to 12. Useful arithmetic usually seems to happen much earlier than reading though reading tends to get completed by the children on their own while arithmetic does not advance further than the needs of money exchange without special effort. In the long run, Sudbury students have no problem with college level material, including mathematics, but it could be nice to have something that eases the white knuckling if it does not undermine the child's self-directedness.

We start from the belief that children are naturally curious. Our job is to build something engaging enough that a child wants to interact with it because it is interesting and rewarding. If a child in a Sudbury environment never chose to use it, I would see that as useful feedback for us, not a problem with the child. There are opportunities for kids to explore and incorporate their interests within our app.

I also think it is completely fine if a child uses it for a while, disappears for months, and comes back. Learning is rarely linear, and technology should be able to pick up wherever the child is.

On reading, we’re firmly grounded in the science of reading, so we teach through explicit phonics rather than whole-word memorization because that is best practice.

On math, we’re much more interested in helping children build intuition and conceptual understanding than simply getting answers. AI gives us the flexibility to use conversation, visual models, stories, or symbolic math, depending on what helps a particular child understand.

One thing AI is uniquely good at is meeting learners where they are. A 10 year old who is learning to read should not have to work through material that feels like it was made for preschoolers. The underlying concepts can stay the same while the language, topics, and presentation become age appropriate.

I don’t think there is one educational model that works for every child. What excites me is that AI makes it much more feasible to adapt to individual learners instead of expecting every learner to adapt to the same experience.

> One thing AI is uniquely good at is meeting learners where they are

What if the AI wanted children to learn something specific? Able to patiently await an opportune moment. Able to blend it invisibly into other material. Able to subtly check and correct understanding.

Long term, one possibility is AI enabling a massive implicit curriculum. "[A]dults wanting children to learn" about say street crossing might be counterproductive... but funny how, at opportune times, some random stories just happen to include crossing a street, and do formative assessment, and happen to, quietly and eventually, cover and reinforce the associated learning objectives.

Take How the Piloses Evolved Skinny Noses, a children's picture book inoculation against natural selection misconceptions. It could merely be a book on a shelf. Or the AI might introduce or provide the book at an opportune moment. Or the book's approach itself might be dissolved and blended into other content.

So some story is explicitly about Fido going for a walk. But implicitly, it covers some aspect of safely crossing a street, and street lights as a communication device, and of concrete crack propagation, and tick precautions, and natural selection, and ...

Science is a richly interwoven tapestry of stories... but we basically never teach it like that. Even if such material was gathered, which pre-AI was absurdly implausibly demanding of domain expertise, it would largely be beyond the capability of an individual tutor to compellingly and adaptively deliver. But with AI?

Most people going through conventional school don't get the freedom to learn to be themselves in a community until their 20s, not mastering it until often their early 30s. As for academics, Sudbury students have repeatedly demonstrated having no problem quickly learning whatever it is they want or need to learn as an adult. Many Sudbury students go to college, getting A's even in their first semester, making good bonds not only with other students but also faculty and administrators. They help form communities wherever they go. They are engaged in classes in a way that their peers are not. They are coming to academic learning fresh and eager not weighed down by 14,000 hours of conventional school tedium. Those who do not go to college often advance very quickly in whatever work they end up doing as person skills are the key to being successful.

The results speak for themselves. You can read about it in Peter Gray's book Free to Learn and other works by him.

Also keep in mind that teaching, which is what conventional school focuses on, is not the same as learning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xToQ4cIHkk&t=60

But then again, that's a potential upsell just waiting to happen - do you want eyeglasses with that? Your kid is gonna need them.

Then there is a big bunch of local children that might have not otherwise survived an ongoing civil war & famine - instead they are saved and educated by a mass produced purely AI driven version of the same smart book. End result - very effective and quite ruthless child army the main character ends up leading.

Unless you're also advocating that kids shouldn't read books?

Giving children extended time in front of screens will lead to Idiocracy.

It's a giant No from me.

Monetising kids is what YT kids, kids scrolling tiktoks all day is doing because parents can't give a f**. Making a LLM tutor for kids is not monetising kids, in the same way creating a school is not "monetising" kids. LLMs are much more effective in teaching than 99% of teachers anyway.

In fact, this could be one of the most beneficial uses of AI for society yet... private tutors of the level that the mega-rich always had, now for all kids everywhere! This gives me real hope for the future generations of humanity.

The responsibilities of the average kindergarten teacher probably include 1) making sure your kids don't swallow glue, and 2) making sure little johnny doesn't throw another tantrum.

I chose those examples as things that any high schooler if not middle schooler should be able to describe the working principles of, so yeah my point is exactly that simple things around us are apparently beyond the reach of most adults to begin to explain. So if a kid wants to know about them, the computer might be their only option.

There's a conversation to be had about the educational system underserving the intellectually curious. Trying to make that point in the context of kindergarten is a little absurd to me.

The idea that they can be tailored to the needs and interests of every individual is the point.

Edit: Having more of a look I see you’re making this freemium, which is a good thing.

This: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48855732 is a much better comment of yours, even better were the swipe about arse talking to be removed.

Also thanks for engaging with my comments but I said what I said.

What makes it worse is that AI is addictive and children naturally gravitate towards the addictive.

I suggest Joe the Camel as a mascot that sold nicotine to teenagers.

So gross.

If they can't afford a tutor, they deserve nothing.

(Am I doing this right?)

* An AI tutor is a net positive in learning for the subject matter it covers.

* An AI tutor does not cause other harms.

* An AI tutor is going to be cheap enough that someone who cannot afford a human tutor will still be able to afford an AI tutor.

I'm mostly willing to give the benefit of the doubt on the first point, but the third point seems unlikely, and history has given us no shortage of reasons to distrust tech companies on the second point, even if we assume this company can be trusted now.

* An AI tutor is a net negative in learning for the subject matter it covers.

* An AI tutor does cause other harms.

* An AI tutor is going to be more expensive that someone who cannot afford a human tutor will still be able to afford an AI tutor.

Seriously, my first reaction to reading this headline was a knee jerk "are you insane", but this whole thread is just people arguing out of their arse while claiming authority. As of today, it was never attempted. It is also possible that the kids gain an advantage by learning to use llms to teach themselves things, which would be positive for their future.

I don't think it's going to happen, but that's just my opinion based on essentially prejudice, not a fact

Such as?

Seriously though, it's great they're going to donate all this compute & tokens to the poor (who by definition can't afford to pay for it).

Nah. Let's have AI do it

We should be wary of all new technology until it’s proven to be a benefit to society.

That's awfully reductive there, champ. Most critiques of AI are based on some combination of observed failings of the technology, observed failings of the tech industry writ large, and healthy skepticism in the face of Yet Another Tech Industry Hype Typhoon. Anyway, the burden of proof isn't on skeptics, it's on the technology and it's proponents, so let's see some receipts before we agree to squander limited public resources on unproven systems yeah?

Most critiques of AI are based on experience with the cheapest AI available a year ago, by midwits unable to recognize that AI's performance on the Putnam, IMO and bar exam makes it far smarter than they are by almost every metric that was traditionally used to measure intelligence.

You don't even need to use AI at all to have valid critiques of it

Plenty of other people are showing its flaws daily by replacing their entire personalities with AI slop

Oh it can do some impressive stuff sure. It is still bad for society

You cannot rationally criticize something if you have no up-to-date knowledge about it.

And despite the hype, the jury is still out for how the results are for adults using AI

It is clear that a personal human tutor can achieve incredible results, and almost everybody who has revolutionized any field you might think of is a product of such a system. Scaling that would be immensely valuable to society.

We shouldn't do questionable shit just because it's easier

https://fortune.com/2026/03/14/america-math-and-reading-scor...

It won IMO, solved Erdos problems. At what point will you stop saying that?

But the ground reality is that they don't lack tutors or educators. They lack classrooms, they lack infrastrucutre, they lack nutrition. Solving those problems will actually incrase literacy in the world, not an AI bot.

As someone from a developing country: you are wrong. Lack of teachers (and especially GOOD teachers) is a big issue. Lack of infrastructure is also an issue, though.

Without exception every claim made to date about tech boosting educational outcomes has been provably false. As in, adding tech to the education process results in measurably less education, and this finding seems to track across all age cohorts. Furthermore, unless parents have significant education credentials they aren't qualified to make informed decisions on what's best for their kids in this context.

One of the main constraint for education is available tutor time, see e.g. Bloom's 2 sigma experiment.

Obviously there are many pitfalls to overcome at the moment, but eventually machines will become better teachers than teachers, and not many parents will send their kids to public schools if the kids can learn much faster at home while being happier.

It cannot be a human, which is a large part of what humans offer to children.

This seems like a large problem to me.

If you could time-travel back to your 5y old self, would you prefer to be taught by AI tutor given the current state o/t art, or taught by whatever teachers you did have when you were 5? (with all the existing hallucination, breaking through guardrails etc problems of current AI in mind)

If you'd have a ~5y old yourself, what would your prefer for your kid?

> One of the main constraint for education is available tutor time, see e.g. Bloom's 2 sigma experiment.

Interesting! Also note a caveat (quoted from Wikipedia):

The phenomenon's associated problem, as described by Bloom, was to "find methods of group instruction as effective as one-to-one tutoring".

Perhaps it would be better to focus on that problem?

> and not many parents will send their kids to public schools if the kids can learn much faster at home while being happier.

How do you see peer-to-peer contact in that scenario? Toddlers on a video conference call hours a day? Physical contact is a basic need for humans. Especially kids.

> eventually machines will become better teachers than teachers

Ah yes: WILL (and although likely, not guaranteed). How about re-evaluate our options & stragegies once that's the case?

My oldest is about to start kindergarten in a few weeks. From what I can gather, she's already reading at approximately a mid-2nd grade level and doing math at a late-1st grade level. I expect that divergence would only grow if I kept her at home. So I already firmly believe my kids would learn much faster at home, and this is with us sporadically spending maybe 10-20 minutes on some days doing intentional, structured learning. School is apparently 7 hours 5 days a week, which seems insane to me. We have federal proposals to reduce the definition of full-time to 32 hours for an adult.

From that perspective then, my wish already is that schools could offer to act as a sort of hub for families to meet/organize socialization, and offer the ability to sign up for classes more a la carte. e.g. maybe they can take art or music or science lab, or organize sports teams, and kids that need it can take take math, etc. Basically, act as a support system for homeschooling to fill missing gaps (going up to handling the entire curriculum or effectively acting as childcare for families that need/want that).

I don't know about Ello or whether is it better than human tutors yet.

> How do you see peer-to-peer contact in that scenario?

Neighbor kids gather and play as they please, which is also easier if they have more time on their hands, stay home, and overall live in each other's proximity.

I had to choose between my elementary school teachers and something like Claude Fable 5 with a good teaching-focused harness, I would definitely choose Fable 5.

Can you elaborate on what the experience is like for the child? How does this system help them learn? The article focuses on optimizing for interactivity and engagement, but doesn't discuss how this system challenges or facilitates learning and why AI needs to be the solution.

The long and short of it: We use AI to scaffold in the moment and respond to what a child is struggling with or excited by. At times, we allow them to follow their curiosity and at times we guide them through a curriculum. At times, we get them to do both of those things, e.g. you can make a book about a topic you're interested in and then take that curious drive to ultimately learn to decode words using phonics and practice reading skills. There is time for what our learning designers call "productive struggle" and then there's time to jump in and support.

Under the hood, there are activities and learning objectives designed by experts and a teaching toolkit that distills everything they know about how to effectively teach kids across several subjects. A real-time planner then decides what to apply when. Without this interactivity, you pretty much get static content delivery and gameplay which is what traditional edtech delivers. With it, you can find the shortest path to getting the "ahhhh I get it now" moment.

There's also a bit more context on our website https://www.ello.com/our-teaching-approach

That's the only moment in the video that gave me a sense of what it might be like for a child using this system.

In the blog post you say:

> Imagine a custom story about dragons this week, ice princesses the next — woven with the letter blends your child needs to practice right now.

Have you considered using an automated orchestration system to deliver literature that already exists? This example seems like an opportunity to introduce children to really thoughtful literature like Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking stories but I'm deeply skeptical that generating the stories with an LLM would inspire a similar experience.

Are there other examples of your platform from the perspective of a child using it? I think those are both interesting cases: 1) interactive feedback on a subject they are making an effort toward mastering, and 2) trying to deliver information when it seems relevant. I'd like to know more about how you are approaching these things and other aspects of the learning process.

Here's what it actually looks like for a child. Say a 6-year-old is reading a story out loud (I will use a reading example here). The tutor is listening to every word. When she stumbles on "chick," it doesn't just tell her the word; it decides, based on her history, whether to break it into sounds, point back to a pattern she's seen before, or let her wrestle with it a moment longer because she's close. If she misses the same pattern twice, that digraph shows up woven into her next story. If she reads fluently but can't tell the character what happened in the comprhension conversation after the story, she gets another text to work on comprehension instead of just pushing harder words. The instructional approach isn't novel or new, it's what a good teacher does, grounded in the science of learning. We run evals on the interactions and real subject matter experts are grading and annotating the behavior. What's new is doing it responsively, for one specific child, on every turn.

On engagement: I'd push back a little on the framing that engagement and learning are separate things (anyone on our team will tell you this is a drum I have beaten for years). A disengaged child learns nothing, no matter how good the pedagogy is. But we're not optimizing for time-on-screen. The lessons and sessions are bounded. The engagement work exists so the child stays in the productive struggle zone long enough for the teaching to happen.

Why AI: it's not that AI "needs" to be the solution. In fact, a great human tutor is better, full stop, but it has never scaled. A classroom teacher with 25+ kids teaches to the middle. This is the first technology that can make real-time, child-specific teaching decisions, which is what tutoring actually is. More on the pedagogy here if you're curious: https://www.ello.com/our-teaching-approach)

Engagement and learning are definitely separate things; you're right that engagement is required, but that's only part of it. This is a classic case of 'necessary but not sufficient'.

A disengaged child is not learning; an engaged child might be.

ello looks great, great work

I really appreciate that (it seems to me) your goal is not to replace human tutors, but to raise the general baseline. You emphasize scaling, how does that work in practice if you're trying to target audiences who may not have access to devices that can run your program? What is your plan from the perspective of funding and resources to scale infrastructure as needed to support these audiences?

Edit: I also think of other learning systems like duolingo and the application of tablets and computers in schools which begin from good places, but I'm curious if you are studying these alternatives and what you have learned from them?

I really think your goals are great, and if you're starting your design of this system from research about effective learning methodologies and working backward from there rather than starting from AI and working backward from there that erodes a lot of my personal skepticism about a project like this. I hope you find a way to make this work.

If it's really true that a teacher's job nowadays is to constantly try to cater to the whims of easily bored and distracted kids, then I pity both the teachers and the kids.

Kids learn most from peers and structure up until they are 10. Social queues and behaviors not taught by screens, AI, or your parents.

I understand the calculus may change with middle school and up, but I still think that despite the "rat race" dynamic of grades and homework, kids who learn to think the pre-2023 way will come out ahead in the long run, even if it's only in life satisfaction.

In general, the last thing young kids need is more screen time. My 5-year-old daughter doesn't have access to any mobile devices. She enjoys drawing, handcraft, reading books, singing and playing the piano. I'm perfectly happy with that.

I personally don’t know anyone who’s worried about their kids falling behind because of lack of AI knowledge. I know lots of parents worried about how screen-centered life is for kids.

Like since i'm sure most of us work in software, how is this different from letting your kid learn how to code early. Wouldn't restricting access just make them...more illiterate with AI

I would rather my kids have the intelligence to know when to figure out AI is wrong than to start using Ai at an early age.

The whole point of AI is to enable unskilled people to perform skilled tasks.

In your mind, what skill does a person actually learn from getting onboard AI usage early? It's the other way around; those who come to it late (when the models are more capable) are going to have a shorter learning curve.

To all the detractors, I would like to point out that your opinion of kids needing a good human teacher is overfit to your experience of having had some of those growing up.

In third world countries like mine, we grow up with absolutely unqualified teachers who were unable to muster anything but a learnt-by-rote understanding of key concepts.

In hindsight these were just desperate adults trying to eek a living for themselves and their family in an impoverished country and resorting to any means by which to do it: gaming the school system or calling in favours to join school faculty. I bear them no ill will. But we as kids were much worse off for it.

I can assure you that no matter what concerns you may have about hallucinations in LLMs, I can bet everything I have that a reasonably modern model (and I'm thinking in the range of gemini-flash, not Fable) in a well designed harness geared towards tutoring would handily and repeatedly outperform every single teacher I had all throughout my schooling.

Don't let a quest for the perfect ruin what is likely already way better than status quo.

What can we do to help them? Better teacher training? Better new teachers? Better new teacher colleges? Consider the latencies. A decade cohort is 1+ B kids.

So refining intervention safety and efficacy is nice. Especially for development problems. Less so for an acute humanitarian disaster. For maximizing the golden hour in crisis mass-casualty triage. In some literate and numerate sense, most of this last decade's 1+ B kids did not survive our collective care.

None of the AI stuff has been proven to be safe or effective for kids going thru an extremely important growth time for personality development and relational attachment. Your experience of having bad teachers doesn’t negate that the best way we know to enrich kids lives is to have effective and empathetic human teachers.

In the vast majority of the developing world, there are hardly any of those!

Here's a glimpse of what public education in India is like:

https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/the-sorry-state-of-education-in-in...

We don’t move fast and break things when the things are kids, you maniacs

is doing some heavy lifting.

The problem is that this is an experiment with a ten year horizon.

What are the *social* ramifications of an education system where children learn increasingly from AI tutors, while staring at a screen in a classroom for multiple hours a day?

Children need to spend time interacting with other children, as well as with adults. We have a mountain worth of data that children have become addicted to their devices, why are we doubling down on this by including MORE screen time at such an early age?

>If implemented right

This same argument could be applied to any technology, or policy that has ever been created. But we don't live in a world where people can do things the right way because of any number of externalities that muddies the actual implementation.

Ello 1.0, our reading product that isn’t fully agentic but incorporates extensive use of AI, is already in the homes of tens of thousands of happy families, and every day we continue be be blown away by the messages we receive from our customers for whom Ello has been able to meaningfully impact. We know there's some skepticism on how AI will evolve over time, but we've been witness to how impactful technology can when done right can be. This is why we think it's even more important that we try to get this right, than to simply rule it off the technology because it's AI.

If you want to read up on some reviews from the families using the current version of Ello, you can take a look here: https://www.reviews.io/company-reviews/store/ello

Personally I'd question the "who is this coming from?" (you answered that in another comment), and "what's the intention behind it?".

If you're a commercial company, I'd be tempted to suspect a "hook 'em while they're young" thought behind it. Perhaps not now, but turning into that over time because 'reasons' (cough "shareholder value" & the like).

If you were a non-profit otoh, I'd give you the benefit of the doubt.

To address that, would you be willing to pursue a non-profit status for your company and/or platform? Has this been discussed @ some point?

Btw: thanks for taking the time to address the many issues raised in this thread! HN can be a brutal place for people not used to its audience! (trust me, we're mostly friendly but with an extreme no-bullshit attitude at times).

Then the problem is that they are graduating, no? We need to address the fundamental issues in schools, if there is no consequence to poor grades and you can still graduate without doing math then what's the point of even having school and doing math. I'm not even against AI tutors, though I'm not even sure really why there needs to even be an "AI" component, just computer learning aides seem reasonable. But if we can't figure out how to improve education with computer learning aides yet I don't really see how AI is going to improve the situation. It's just a more expensive way of doing things.

I keep seeing lines like 40% of 8th graders can't read etc.. then they shouldn't be in the 8th grade. Although IME with my kids, nieces, nephews etc it doesn't even seem true as they are all learning much more than I was at the same age.

Well said. I think many posters in this thread come from a pretty privileged backgrounds..

We tried to get two tutors for our child. Both had no idea what they were doing and oversold what their capabilities were. You can't just hire someone to teach your kid how to read and expect results.

"AI is also going to be an integral part shaping how this generation of kids learn to read and think"

You think they will be even dumber/helpless without gudance from the 'net than Gen Z and A?