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#kids#human#more#tutor#child#need#learning#children#don#reading
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Discussion (33 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
This article can provide a little more context on how we're thinking about this:
https://www.ello.com/blog/ai-should-make-clear-what-reality-...
This is the equivalent of "parenting" by putting a kid in front of YouTube Kids for half the day
* the more things change the more they stay the same: https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/the-addictive-history-of-m...
Our tutor steers the UX in real-time and makes complex decisions on the fly. Doing both at conversation speed required us to replace the standard tool-use loop. We built our own tutor harness that utilizes a streaming interpreter that executes actions, while an asynchronous planner model reasons ahead of the conversation and makes calls that drive the child's learning. On top of it all, we developed a safety system that checks every turn without it causing an interruption to the activity and conversation flow.
Effective teaching isn't just about answering a child's question quickly, rather making the right move at the right moment. AI is also going to be an integral part shaping how this generation of kids learn to read and think, tackling this responsibly means getting the design right.
Happy to answer questions and curious what you all think, critical feedback included, we've been working on this problem for a long time and love to hear from the HN community.
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.
Modern AI needs to go away. You're not helping by making something that will be grossly misused once it's out of your hands.
What we do believe is that children will be living in a world where this technology will exist, and how it gets used becomes the important question.
We also have to prepare them for that world and how to thrive in it. I would never give my son raw ChatGPT the same way you wouldn’t give a 5 year old access to the raw internet. But that doesn’t mean that the internet can’t be used for learning.
We don’t have all the answers and we can’t respond for all of AI, but we’re a team of parents, teachers, and child psychologists who deeply care about getting this right and unlocking the opportunities for kids. The article goes into the technical depth of how we make it pedagogically aligned, safe, non-slop.
As of this writing, a lot of the sentiment in this post is that this is a terrible idea, and that kids need human tutors. This is 100% correct. But I think it's worth knowing a few things about current state of US education as context:
1. We're currently in a literacy crisis, and it's really bad. As of 2025, 40% of fourth graders in the United States are reading below basic levels [1].
2. There is also a massive teacher shortage. 2025 US state data shows ~400k teacher positions currently unfilled or staffed by underqualified personnel [2]. That's >10% of the workforce.
3. Bloom's 2-sigma problem [3] shows that class sizes really matter. In the limit, access to 1-1 teaching lifts performance to the 90th percentile of classroom teaching.
4. As much as we'd like to, it's also impractical to place this responsibility on parents. 54% of US adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level, and 20% are below 5th-grade level [3].
And this is all just in the US – the developing world is worse in many places!
My personal take: reading is so important to being a functioning democracy and society that we need this solved, by almost any practical means necessary.
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 school at this critical juncture, and watching your friends grow beyond you for the rest of your time at school? We're currently setting so many up for years of shame and deprivation.
It's not perfect, but from the bottom of my heart, I really do think is a life-changing technology. This needs to exist.
[1] https://www.nagb.gov/news-and-events/news-releases/2025/nati...
[2] https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/overview-teacher...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
[4] https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...
The more I think about it, the more I want to ban your entire business model
The reality though is that the traditional school setting doesn't provide for that: a teacher in front of a 30 kid classroom can't cater to every child and it's not a particularly interactive experience. The current system just isn't working: 60% of US fourth-graders are behind in reading, 40% lack basic literacy. Those kids are going to move on to the next phase of school without the skills to thrive.
There are 270 mil kids out of school globally. So what are you going to do? Give every child a 1-1 human tutor? For sure, if you can, that’s amazing. But you can't pull that off. You don't have enough teachers.
Technology gives us the opportunity to catch kids up. By doing that, you can decouple teaching hard skills and free up teachers to focus on the things that are truly human and unlock a lot more people who may not have the skills to teach the full curriculum themselves to act as learning facilitators. That leads to more human interaction.
Most students are pretty homogeneous in learning at that stage
Students actually aren't as homogenous as you might think. And it's one of the big challenges teachers have with a classroom of 25+. They're forced to teach to the middle, which isn't great for kids that are slightly behind or ahead.
An AI tutor has the advantage to adapt and teach to each child's unique learning path, make sure core concepts are covered on an individual basis before moving on.
About 1-2 years ago he had similar thoughts to solve that exact problem you mentioned.
https://www.chalkbeat.org/2026/04/09/sal-khan-reflects-on-ai...
Sal khan being the founder of Khan academy the most popular online education course
What we learnt from it: a chatbot is not enough to teach a child though. We need more to fully engage them and have the tools and context to truly teach them.
We describe this in the blog post, curious what you think.
> Students actually aren't as homogenous as you might think. And it's one of the big challenges teachers have with a classroom of 25+
True. It's well known that some % of students do well with individual tutoring. Move faster, understand things better, etc. And another part of students don't do well with that. They need other things. Maybe help from their peers in smaller groups (like 3..8 students), some after-school extra, a fix for problems back home, whatever.
But 5y olds? They need contact with peers, play, attention from humans, run around, build stuff from Lego blocks, touch grass, etc. Learning to read, "3x4=12" math etc isn't hard enough to warrant putting 5y old kids on AI tutors.
Let's not expose them to AI brainrot now too.
But it’s hardly the only thing you can produce with it. Crap content is definitely over represented. It’s an error, though, to think that is all AI is capable of. If quality is the goal, and you are willing to invest the resources to achieve it, you can easily create very high quality work. But it’s not terribly easy. And it’s not terribly fast. It is relatively cheap, maybe 1/4 to 1/10 the cost of doing it with qualified humans. But it’s not trivial and it’s not magic. It’s a force multiplier, but the quality of the idea and the performance of the model used are very important, and good models cost money to use… about $50-100 an hour if you are really leveraging it. But you can do ten hours of work in an hour or two.