I think teaching a child to trust an LLM from a formative age is horrifically irresponsible.

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.

You are not making the world a better place. You've made the world worse with this project.

> A teacher is constantly deciding how to engage a student, whether to say something, draw on the whiteboard, play a game, or change topics entirely.

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.

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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?

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.

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 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.

> 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).

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'm torn about this."

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

This sounds psychotic. An over-controlling fedora's approximation of what good academic parenting looks like. You just want to create your D&D partner. You'll probably succeed lol.

Children are a lot less fragile than parents think they are.

Children are going to witness or experience violence at some point or ask questions about it. They will probably see some at school. I think it depends when and how you introduce it. For example, there is a heavy focus on refugees in western schools and media, but at some point a child is eventually going to have to ask what refugees are running from. (Torture and violence.) It's hard to avoid discussing violence in the context of history, or even when bullying comes up.

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

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?

This is bad and you should feel bad about it. What the actual F? You can't be real man. Yeah, lets just monetize kids and ruin their lifes. What a great idea!

The OP is just thoroughly American. Absolutely everything is a business, even marrying and having kids. And the kids themselves of course. If it weren't so deeply disturbing, I would find the pathology fascinating.

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 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.

Hi! I'm Elizabeth (one of the co-founders of Ello). This is an interesting question. I actually think there is more overlap than people might assume, but it's a bit more because adaptability to various approaches to learning is part of the point. While I'm not deeply familiar with the Sudbury School model, I think there are various approaches to teaching kids that are successful because different approaches serve different types of kids and learners. I can see why this approach would be successful for a certain profile of student for whom it's the right fit.

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.

Thanks for replying. Glad to hear you use phonics. It sounds like it could have a lot of potential and I intend to pass it along to our community. If you would like to possibly explore its use in a Sudbury community, you can send an email to my gmail account which is the same username as listed here.

>> 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

> 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?

I have a child who has to use a speech board to communicate. Will Ello adjust itself to work with a non-verbal child? If not, is that in the plans?

Sounds a bit like unschooling which is a terrible idea because kids don't know what they need to know.

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

Biological weapons research seems like a worse use case to be honest.

On the other hand it's got to be better than the shit busy overworked parents show their kids from YouTube or whatever.

It was amusing for a moment watching all these logical technical people act like religious fundamentalists about AI, fitting problems to the predetermined solution, but now it’s just upsetting how much the people with no empathy or understanding have decided they should run the world

What?

This scene from the prescient Wall•E springs to mind:

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

Never read Diamond Age huh?

Yeah, hard to get a children army going without cheap personalized AI tutors. ;-)

Yeah, it's like Diamond age, except it also destroys your kid's vision.

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

In ca 1995 fiction, the upsell was human ractors occasionally coming in, temporarily substituting AI on heiress class instances. Sounds pretty much spot on for one of those coveted post AI jobs...

Well, that was the catch in the book - you accidentally end up with a plebeian girl getting a smart book meant to educate aristocratic children which includes a connection to a human tutor. The girl grows up into a smart independent person & sets on a quest to reconnect with the tutor, which effectively became her mother.

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.

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.

>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.

I can understand saying that when you're in middle or high school. But as a 5 year old? This comment has to be a joke?

I was that same 5 year old. I do think that if we want AI to force-multiply humanity, we need to start leveraging it for education. I think it's one of the biggest levers we have to be honest

AI aside, I think the biggest thing we could do is stop thinking about education as a profit centre. We’re not multiplying humanity if we’re only doing it for the fraction that can afford it.

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

And fully free in emerging markets, beginning in Africa

how much do you think education costs in "Africa"?

Had they said in Europe or in Asia would you be doing this dance of just seeking to correct something perceived to be wrong on the internet?

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.

Europe is tricky because of the EU but yes "poverty in Asia" is as meaningless as "poverty in Africa". At least care enough to know the specifics otherwise there is no point except grandstanding.

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

are you advocating to allow 5-year olds access to the internet?

Full disclosure: I worked on a small project with Ello / Catalin a few years ago.

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...

Thanks for taking time to write this. HN is showing (expected) dismissing attitude towards this idea. That tells me it might work :) ! Folks here are wildly overestimating (or ignoring!) how many adults are qualified to be good teachers and how many of them further have enough incentives (money, time, resources) to do it well. Its a _very_ small number.

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!

> We're in crisis. As of 2025, 40% of fourth graders are reading below basic levels

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...

The explanation I've heard is that the national curriculum switched away from phonics and to a teaching method called "balanced literacy", and this went terribly [1]. IIRC it involved teaching kids to recognize words by their overall visual shape. I believe this is what mature readers do, but the problem is that for this to work, one first needs to have bootstrapped a robust vocabulary. And that happens via being able to sound out words, i.e. phonics.

(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

The reality is, most 5 year olds don’t get access to the resources most of us have had while growing up. People are saying, “kids should have human tutors.” Guys, most people in the world don’t have any tutors! What Ello has built and other forms of AI-based tutoring is going to raise the average level of education and literacy in the world. Especially in developing countries. Let individual parents decide what’s best for their kids.

5 year old kids should have enough play time with their peers and develop their social skills, instead of being sat in front of a screen with any kind of content. I feel a parallel between this and people defending short form video saying "but sometimes it's educational!" (it's not).

There's more than enough time in a day for a 5 year old to play with other kids and also spend some time learning.

At that age especially, play with other kids is time spent learning.

Most of them don't get access. So let's hook them up to an insane, unproven, unpredictable autocomplete math equation and entrust it to their development as a human being.

So gross.

Heaven forbid we let poor people use software that helps their kids read.

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

(Am I doing this right?)

Your reaction is based on 3 unproven assertions:

* 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.

Your reaction is based on 3 unproven assertions:

* 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

Won't somebody think of the poor people's kids?!

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).

there's a big universe of solutions between getting nothing versus getting an AI 'educational' software that could do more harm than good.

Yeah tell them to change things.. why didn't we think of that? Provide opportunities to make parenting less stressful like here so that they can involve more.. this reflexive anti AI luddite attitude isn't productive as it's just less signal and more noise..

A reflexive anti-AI Luddite attitude is the healthy default until there is overwhelming evidence otherwise.

It's not reflexive, I've spent a lot of time and effort considering why I think AI is bad for society.

In many ways electricity is bad for society. In this particular case I think the benefits outweigh the costs. I do not the think the benefits of AI outweigh the costs.

yes, an using it as an educational tool for 5-year olds is an unproven use we don't need to implement.

"reflexive anti AI luddite attitude"

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

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

Also encouraged a guy to kill himself.

And let’s not forget it provided helpful, timely tips on weapon use for a school shooter.

Why are you telling it that? No one is arguing LLMs are perfect but at this point dismissing them as stochastic parrots seems a bit silly

This particular use case is having it respond to prompts from 5-year old, so it really really needs to be able to answer correctly to questions of that type.

I am sure you must have been to many developing countries to make that statement and are not just talking out of your behind.

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.

"AI-based tutoring is going to raise the average level of education and literacy in the world"

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.

> In practice, yes. In theory a machines can do about everything a human can, but better and cheaper.

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?

>In practice, yes. In theory a machines can do about everything a human can, but better and cheaper.

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

This seems like a large problem to me.

> 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.

Yeah totally. Here's a video that shows some parts of the experience: https://x.com/CatalinVoss/status/2074527066926776802?s=20

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

Thank you. The segment showing a child reading text on the screen which highlighted a word they had difficulty with seems like it could be a useful learning interaction. How does your system follow up in that case? Have you studied this type of interaction?

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.

Totally agree that we should expose kids to the great classics and I love Pipi Langstrumpf as I grew up to know her. The challenge is often that these books aren’t the best to learn to read with, because they don’t have decodable words. So you’ll want a mix: windows into the works of great literature appropriately scaffolded and ways to explore your own curiosity. But see Elizabeth’s reply below for much better depth.

Fyi fwiw, x.com video requires Sign-up/Log-in to view.

Elizabeth here, co-founder (and clinical child psychologist). Fair question. Catalin's post was about the engineering (he is my co-founder and our CTO), so the learning side got short shrift :).

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)

> 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.

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.

Attention is not all you need? ;-)

taught mental math (abacus) to 3-15yr olds for 10+ yrs. A great teacher notices the gaps in the fundamentals and fixes those along with variants before piling on.

ello looks great, great work

Thank you -- your post was downvoted into being hidden for a while, sorry I didn't see it earlier. This context is helpful, the example of the system delivering reading challenges that match their struggles makes a lot of intuitive sense to me.

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.

I strongly feel this should be illegal and the creators of this product should be judged, forbidden from holding any decision making positions in the future, and the families of the children compensated

Screen time is fundamentally bad for a five year old regardless of the content.

Why?

Are you for real?

The child will be saying "It's not laziness. It's the dog." to her teacher...

Sorry — we had to step away to put our kids to bed, but this post has really blown up! not able respond to every comment right now but just wanted to say one thing: we've been working on this problem for over 5 years now, and our team has witnessed how transformative technology can be when set up correctly to change a child who has fallen behind back up to par, and at times even exceed their peers, in very short periods of time.

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

You’re teaching children to behave like machines

Super curious to hear from the parents here: Honestly, at this point isn't not exposing our kids to AI just setting them up to fail in the future? Like not letting them learn to use the internet? I have friends who are actually teaching their kids how to use AI because they don't want them to fall behind

No, in my opinion as a parent this is lunacy. By the time my little kids "need" AI or the Internet in a meaningful way the AI labs will have either delivered the dream of "just talk to the computer" in which case there's nothing to learn to use, or they will be smoldering Pets.com-esque craters. Either way, for us right now it's books and a little bit of "old fashioned" movies and video games; no algorithmic feeds, all human-created content, and a focus on enjoying narratives and experiences together. We can look things up together on the Internet if we need to, and if that routes to an LLM Dad may groan a little but it's OK. Mostly we learn by trying things out, making guesses and talking about them, or looking in books.

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.

My generation did not have access to the internet until we were teenagers, yet we perfectly managed to catch up. In fact, I don't think that the following generations (the so-called 'digital natives') have overall better computer skills, on the contrary.

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.

My school district is beginning to roll back on computer use for kids, after having gone all in on putting almost all student work on laptops (and heavily relying on learning apps) during the pandemic. They are now offering guidance to teachers and parents about when and how to limit computer usage. They also banned student cell phones a couple years ago and students are never allowed to access social media on school property. All that to say, I think my district (and other similar ones) are struggling so hard to balance good active learning against unhealthy amounts of screen time that they will reach this same place with AI fairly quickly, within a year or two I think, and start wanting to set restrictions and place guardrails.

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.

What does teach how to use AI mean for grade schoolers? It’s a search engine for those purposes, the lesson is a blend of the Google and Wikipedia lessons.

No like in general not just for school - one of them taught their kid how to create their own bedtime stories, like with illustrations. Another one taught their kid how to make their own games with AI. Though yes I also literally have friends who have put their kids in alpha school which is SUPER ai.

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

The whole point of AI is that it doesn't require advanced specialised knowledge to use; you literally can't fall meaningfully behind in it.

Why is "AI literacy" supposed to be a good thing here when you're effectively contrasting it with actual literacy, like bedtime stories, or "creative literacy" like learning to draw or make games?

Certainly my parents have considered computers important enough, so I learned all the skills for dealing with them - installing Windows 98, finding working drives, navigating eMule, debugging IDE drives... Well, what use is that now?

I thought AI was supposed to get better and easier to use as time went on, so why should we bother to teach them now when it will be so easy to learn in the future?

Oh no. DON'T.

"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?

Really awesome work! I've been trying to do some of this real time back and forth voice coaching myself and it's no easy feat. Congrats on the progress.

Yeah – this is hard stuff. If we're successful in getting the this right, our users won't be feeling any of the complexity.

> our users won't be feeling any of the complexity.

brother, your users are children that you try to manipulate

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

I'm a mom who actually has kids and this thread is insane. 'Just get a tutor'...okay?? Are you paying for it? Because that's not an option for a lot of families. I get that it's more ideal, but the alternative is...nothing? Do you not agree that all kids deserves a chance to read? Are we not seeing the lack of reading proficiency in the majority of American adults nowadays?? Or yall too stuck in your tech bubbles?? There are high school students graduating who cannot do math. This is tech that is actually being used for GOOD here.

>There are high school students graduating who cannot do math.

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.

exactly, maybe the grading wasn't rigorous enough if 7th graders managed to get into 8th grade without being able to read

why would a 5-year old need a tutor?

because of bad grades?

This is very sad. Just spend the time in person with the 5 year old, no screens, no AI, nothing impersonal. A 5 year old just wants mommy and daddy in person playing with them. No 5 year old (or any age in that neighborhood) should be exposed to screens.

It's utterly bizarre reading the above submission, written with such glee, focused on slamming an AI in front of a 5 year old and thinking that's a good idea. Posts like this we really depress me thinking about how much a child exposed to this garbage might miss out on, sitting there like a stalker from Half Life 2.

Please don't. Don't deprive children of the interaction with other human beings. 5 year olds don't need tutors. They need play, touch, sense, feel, run, breath, sky, earth.

We agree with this sentiment. Our goal is to supplement children with effective learning, NOT replace humans.

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-...

In your article you hit the nail on the head on why this should not be used for developing minds, especially between the ages of 5-7, though i would consider using your product after that.

This age range is a critical period for theory of mind, executive function scaffolding, pragmatic language development, and attentional regulation. This technology directly intersects with these maturing systems.

I applaud your dreams and hopes. I don't share them though, and predict this type of device will destroy countless meaningfull parent-child-teacher relationship.

I’m curious why it has to be an either or? Spending 30 minutes with a tutor doesn’t deprive children of interaction with humans. If we can support a child’s learning (perhaps even more efficiently) doesn’t it give them more time to do that?

"That will wildly hallucinate" feels wildly hyperbolic considering how fast models are improving in their abilities, especially with proper safeguards built into the model harness.

I was making a dessert recipe last week where everything including utensils needed to stay cold, and Gemini suggested I freeze my hands in an ice bath before getting started.

It's fairly common to briefly cool your hands with cold water or in an ice bath before working on certain recipes.

It used the words "freeze your hands"

Some 5 year olds could use a human tutor. Giving them AI instead is no different than plopping them in front of "Youtube Kids" instead of being a parent.

"Some 5 year olds could use a gourmet meal. Giving them a mass-produced TV dinner is no different than sedating them with opiates* and pouring garbage on them instead of being a parent."

* the more things change the more they stay the same: https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/the-addictive-history-of-m...

"Don't be snarky."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Also, please don't use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting someone when you aren't. That's also an internet snark trope and we're trying to avoid that kind of thing here.

p.s. That's an interesting, and heartbreaking, historical link.

Yes, it's easy to forget context. Especially the time component. Several 100 k children will be born tomorrow. 100+ M in the coming year. Then in six years, almost all of them will hit schools. Schools which are, pervasively, really really bad.

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.

> if implemented right

is doing some heavy lifting.

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

> your opinion of kids needing a good human teacher is overfit to your experience of having those growing up

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.

> 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...

Proven to be safe? Do you want a randomized trial? Do you demand that of every math tutorial video that goes up on YouTube?

I demand that does technological experiments involving children be supervised by someone who understands the ethical and moral effects it can have. Its not like a YouTube video.

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

This is so cool!

Ignore the haters, AI accelerated education is so obviously a gigantic win for everyone. (And massively levels the playing field.)

Win for everyone except the children. The same thing people said about digital classroom and it failed.

What you're building should be illegal. Educators who use these tools on children should face jail time.

It's hard to overstate the harm of the system you are building. Please understand, there is no way this idea is salvageable or any tweaks or safeguards can make it safe. If you've actually tested this on real children you've already risked extreme harm.

Please, stop.

What is being taught to 5 year olds? And why would an AI tutor be better than an pre-k learning app

Most students are pretty homogeneous in learning at that stage

We started with reading, providing patient coaching as kids learn to read out loud. We are now adding math and in some countries, English as a Second Language.

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.

Have you read the Sal Khan thoughts on AI and education?

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

Yes! Deeply admire what Sal Khan set out to do. One of the original pioneers of how technology could transform education.

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.

Being frank I think its not enough to have a good looking app and have some llm calls

Think about your competition for your market. When I want my child to really excel in learning, I would force them into kumon - so they can skip a grade. If your a student who wants to learn you have khan academy.

And im just not seeing anything that screams-this is better than khan academy and kumon

All i see is an education app with good design

Sorry if it sounds harsh

P.s. if youre on the mission of educating people from developing countries-different story and different problems. Ignore what i put here then

> When I want my child to really excel in learning, I would force them into kumon - so they can skip a grade

Great - so now they're a year younger than all their peers in terms of emotional resilience. I've seen this play out time and time again, and it is disastrous for them and their ability to build relationships.

Pushing children ripe is never a good idea. If they're ahead of their peers, find other outlets for their intelligence. Teach them new skills, involve them in new hobbies. They need time to grow; education is a journey, not a race.

Please define "we".

> 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.

we = a team of teachers, AI experts, child psychologists, learning designers, and parents; building in the US and Kenya

The Ello team nailed it with 2.0, my kids love using this fantastic learning tool and we love being part of the early beta testing program. I know as parents themselves and as early childhood educators the designers have the best intentions in mind when they built this. The friendly interaction between the Ello character and my kids gives them a fun motivation to take on reading challenges beyond their grade level and to fully engage with comprehending the story. I can tell they have already improved with just the few weeks they have been using it. The luddite doomers have this completely wrong as this AI drives a love for reading and reinforces comprehension.

> best intentions in mind when they built this

That's nice, and it will make a fantastic set of paving stones for the road to Hell.

This comment looks like pure astroturfing.

> my kids love using this fantastic learning tool

> The friendly interaction between the Ello character and my kids gives them a fun motivation

> AI drives a love for reading

I cannot trust someone to assess a love for reading, if I also loathe their writing.

This whole thread is fucking scary. How are people even remotely positive about any of this shit is beyond me. Educate your kids, stop delegating the important stuff.

It's weird. I get that growing up in a nurturing household is a privilege, but I'm not sure the answer is to hook up kids to AI. Maybe some form of it could be beneficial, but it just seems too ripe for abuse, and/or too easy to have unintended consequences.

> How are people even remotely positive about any of this shit is beyond me.

Well, some of us didn't grow up in perfect households, for one thing. I actively avoided both my parents at that age.

Uniting children with the machine god, what could ever go wrong?

the question is, why AI? there are good educational software and games in place that can are fun, engaging and provide meaningful stimulus for children at the age of five.

Gross

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.

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.

Ai is brainrot because that’s what many people choose to produce with it, and it’s easy to produce brainrot at scale with AI.

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.

You can, but very few people do.

Mostly what I see people doing is saying "Hey, Spicy Autocomplete, steal me some content from someone else to do <this thing>" and then post it up and ask why it doesn't work properly.

But then you've got things like the AI-based animation tools that Corridor Digital used to animate 3D scans of some of the crew's children's toys, to make a Toy Story-like video. It took damn near as long to do as it would have done by hand, because it all still had to be mo-capped and so on, but the results were incredible.

I guess it's similar to how just about anyone can pick up a cheapy flux-core welder and run a seagull-shit bead down a bit of metal, but a very skilled welder could do absolutely pristine work with the same crappy machine.

However, I still don't think it's a good idea to plonk small children down in front of a screen, and have a creepy AI voice read nonsense out to them. While I love the idea of working with the hallucinations of a dreaming computer, because I first read Neuromancer when I was 12 or so and grew up watching things like Blake's 7 with not one but two superintelligent talking computers, the reality is actually not really that good.

Children need people, not screens.

Dear God no. Keep kids away from AI, and keep AI away from kids. Kids need more human contact, not less.

The more I think about it, the more I want to ban your entire business model

Personally I would like to see kids learn way way more in much less time, and it’s clear AI is going to make that possible. What you are saying sounds a lot like “I want kids to learn less and be dumber”

Im unsure as to how "it's clear that AI is going to make that possible".

Things that help kids learn

- parents who love and care for them

- stable housing

- stable access to food

- stable access to high quality eduction provided by a human being

- stable access to healthcare

None of those are provided by AI, and never can be. The only thing that will is a thorough reimagining of the society we live in.

Note: This is all predicated on living in America, and I pre-apologize to everyone who doesn't.

Agree that kids benefit from more human interaction, not less. That's our goal.

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.

Business model is interesting BTW. We’re a public benefit company and are planning to make our products completely free in emerging markets and have a free tier in the US. Impact and business should be aligned here, but pulling in opposite corners.

> 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.

Pretty interesting. Hopefully this ends up being an affordable solution for without the means for hiring a human tutor.

The Daimond Aige: Or, A Young Person’s Illustrated Prompter

Sorry, but 5 year olds don't need a tutor, let alone solo screen time. If you're giving your young child screen time, it should be with a parent, and then you might as well spend it offline.

IMO, tutoring is for when a kid is behind in curriculum and you don't see that until late grade school, if not middle school.

One on one "tutoring" is the most effective way to make early education productive and it's not even close. Even the outcomes of parents spending 20 minutes a day reading to their infants and toddlers correlates with better educational outcomes. and I'm sure there are many here that share my own story. The only reason I was somewhat academically successful was because my mother took the time to teach me how to read when I was 3-4. Without that early literacy, I'm sure I would have never been able to achieve anything I've done, especially with ADHD. By the time I was in kindergarten, I knew how to read already, but, even there, reading was taught 1 on 1, with students taking turns with the teacher to learn. I don't think that's done anymore at most places, especially when you have 30:1 teacher ratios. 5 year olds can be way more capable than we give them credit for, but they need personal attention.

Why does early education need to be productive? At that age, I'd much rather my kids learn life skills, socialize, play, etc than any kind of "curriculum" learning.

There are a lot of studies showing that emotional intelligence is a better predictor of happiness than early academics.

They'll have plenty of time to be addicated to screens later on in life /s

Will Butlerian Jihad be on the 2028 ticket?

It is on mine.

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).

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.

Full disclosure, I worked briefly with Ello / Catalin some years back.

They've done a lot of work on at least two dimensions: (1) handling the nonstandard sounds and habits of speech of very early readers, who might be as young as four, and (2) connecting this to a specialized teaching system based on the science of reading, e.g. decodable readers.

Ding, came here wondering the same. I do find it amusing, this "AI work" where people try to solve an issue and the lab (or whatever you want to call them) just makes the entire problem moot.

I deeply wish I had AI-accelerated education growing up rather than sitting bored out of my mind while a teacher lectures at the bottom quartile

Top quartile kids would easily be a year or three ahead with good virtual tutoring.

But efforts like this run into the problem that only some kids are curious. The idea that "all kids are curious" simply isn't true.

A lot of kids prefer sports or movement over anything even remotely intellectual, and math and language just don't interest them at all.

AI tutoring can't deal with that. Nor can more conventional electronic tutors.

IMO rewards for completing work need to be external - basically physical treats of some kind, not sweets, but days out or off or something similar - to compensate for those areas where kids aren't naturally motivated.

This sounds like a terrible idea. 5 years olds need human interaction with a human tutor or with other children.

Human tutor is definitely the best thing we could do, but it’s not attainable to give every child a human tutor and clearly the current system isn’t working. If you manage to build a good AI tutor, you can unlock more human interaction outside of self-directed learning time

oh boy, who validates that the blackbox of bullshit is spewing valid information and not the typical nonsense ...?

stop. children need humans not AI. i hate this.