Building a Real-Time AI Tutor for 5-Year-Olds in Under 1000ms

I'm torn about this.

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 […]

This is one of the most insidious projects I've ever seen and despite the touted credentials of the backers looks to be completely divorced from the realities of how children should be taught.

What are your thoughts about children in a Sudbury School model? These are democratic schools where children can do what they like in the day. Mostly they choose to play with other kids, games of imagination, though also doing screen time. One of the basic principles is that children figure out what they want to do and the learning comes along with it; the model views adults wanting children to learn something specific as generally counterproductive though having resources available is okay if it is not coupled with any expectations.

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 […]

I wish I had had this when I was a 5-year-old. Few of my teachers really understood the things I wanted to learn, my peers weren't interested in the nerdy things I was, and my parents certainly didn't have the wealth to provide me with private tutoring. There are a lot of negative comments here, but they are shallow... I'm sure those commenters wouldn't want to live without the access to the Internet, and even a brilliant five-year-old can't use the Internet effectively yet. A smart and curious 5-year-old has endless questions and a properly harnessed LLM has endless patience to provide answers at a level the kind can understand (which usually not even it's parents do).

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.

I can't imagine a worse use case for AI. Literally thought the title was a clown

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

Giving large language models "specific instructions" is not a robust way to ensure safety.

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.

How are your safety systems checking the illustrations generated?

As many others have said already, training 5 year olds to outsource their brains to a blackbox on the network is a truly horrible idea. They are ruined in their formative years and learn that no thinking is possible without trillion dollar companies.

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.

This has fabulous potential if implemented right.

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.

> 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.

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.