alt Hacker NewsBuilding a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
Hey HN! We've spent the good part of this past year building an AI tutor that teaches kids ages 4-9 reading, math, ESL and more. Getting an AI tutor to effectively teach a child turns out to be a really hard technical challenge, this took getting the underlying architecture right.
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.
Comments
The criticisms here remind me of a quotation that I'll paraphrase: "in silicon valley there's a million apps to order a coffee, but not one to teach you to read".
People seem to have the basic premise: why not just get an educated adult, or good teacher, or personal human tutor for the kids which is so much better?
Well there's a billion parents who cannot ever afford that...
So I'd just like to note that HN is absolutely 100% not the kind of community that you need to impress or sell to. Best of luck.
One of my ever favorite AI prompt keywords is ELI5 (Explain Like I'm 5). Last month I asked Gemini Pro to provide me ELI5 explanation on the waveform mechanism of a novel wireless system that I've been working on. To my surprise it described the principle succintly and intuitively as described to me by the original inventor of the wireless system a few years back. I was literally speechless for a minute or two.
Who needs to spend time raising their kid outsource that shit to a an AI SaaS lmfao what is wrong with people
Please don't do this.
> A couple of seconds is enough for a child's attention to wander and for learning to stop.
I'm not sure they understand just how dystopian this sounds. God forbid the five year old mind wanders.
My oldest turns 6 in just over a week and my initial reaction to this heading - as well as the product itself and the picture of the kid using it - was heartbreak and sadness. Not anger, just sadness. Like when you read a story about a kid that's a victim of a crime.
Stepping back, I can look at it somewhat objectively and see that there are both kids that need something like this and that it's probably a better solution to the "dumb" homework apps that the kids use for 20 mins a week at this age, but I don't think "Ello deprives 5 year olds of human contact" is the message you should be putting out into the world.
The Daimond Aige: Or, A Young Person’s Illustrated Prompter
Without malice, I bring up GPT-Live-1. How does this compare and/or make you consider things?
I've been very impressed with response speed, intonation, and naturalness to the voice. I argue it might be too natural with some of it's pausing and saying "ummm" and other filler words to the point it might be disingenuous but that's neither here nor there.
As someone who has been engaged in children's lives in the age range of 4-9 that have struggled with school, I can't imagine using AI being a net benefit to them. You know what helped me succeed in helping these children more than anything else? Listening to them. That's it. Listening to them to understand their viewpoint and perspective on the world, their interest areas, and the things they were curious about. Then you incorporate those things in how you teach them through direct one on one instruction. It's that simple. My niece, as an example, is now at the top of her class in most subjects and has realized she has a passion for history and geology.
Not every child has the benefit of involved adults in their life, but I'd rather solve that problem than think AI is going to fix this. You're proposing taking one of the most vulnerable populations in the country and manipulating them (intentionally or not) to be reliant on one of the most exploitative technologies that has ever existed. I don't think your intent is evil, but the product here is evil. Remember that the path to hell is paved with good intentions.
Will Butlerian Jihad be on the 2028 ticket?
This is frankly disgusting and I hope you do not deploy this to any children. The classroom is the last place where we should be deploying AI.
Look where smartphones not being used in the classroom got us. Imagine how this would harm us.
Oh fuck off with this bullshit. Not going to slopify my child
I would argue that effective tutoring is going to have to factor in the child having regular breaks. Staring at an object a short distance away for prolonged periods will effect their eyesight, and they also need some kind of movement for other physiological reasons.
Hey buddy, I love this, thank you for sharing. I am of the belief that as the world transitions to Agent-first transactions, we clumbsy carbon life forms will be heavily disadvantaged, therefore, future citizens will be quipped wirh a digital twin/brain, which grows and learns alongside our biological braina, as well as a personalized tutor and life-guide (the digital version of jimmy the cricket).
Yet again another product that could’ve used AI to help with a problem but basically puts everything in AI hands and calls a day.
AI is great for learning, but you know what’s most important thing for children as part of their learning? Presence of a parent.
Why not make this an assistant for parent & child learning session, where you can use it as encyclopedia lookup or permutation / generation of an exercise or even cheatsheet / checklist for your learning session?
I think there’s huge value in being able to have such thing, where you don’t have to pull out your phone when doing something with your child and instead you could ask that assistant for a lookup online, but putting child in front of a screen and putting it’s self-development in a hands of AI is just irresponsible, lazy and quite frankly dangerous
We're so fucking doomed.
This sounds like a terrible idea. 5 years olds need human interaction with a human tutor or with other children.
oh boy, who validates that the blackbox of bullshit is spewing valid information and not the typical nonsense ...?
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The async planner is the part I'd love more detail on. If it's reasoning ahead while the kid is still talking, some chunk of that work gets invalidated every time the kid says something off-script, which at age 5 is presumably constantly. Is the speculative planning you throw away a real cost line or a rounding error? I build streaming LLM stuff (nothing this ambitious) and the "right move at the right moment" framing rings true, latency budgets change what the model can even attempt per turn.
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stop. children need humans not AI. i hate this.
Is your hallucination rate 0.00000000? If not, then it doesn't deserve to be used.
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.
It's bad enough that schools give 5-year-olds tablets to do their maths work on.
Let's not expose them to AI brainrot now too.