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LearnVector – Andrew Ng's AI company building one‑to‑one learning experiences
- keithnoizu 2mo agoam i in danger? https://therobotlearns.com/ https://therobotlearns.com/
- ilya_l 2mo agoReminds me of Karpathy's education startup. I think it had a similar premise. What happened to it?
- hmokiguess 2mo agoWait, when you say one-to-one you mean AI to Human? That’s not the same, I’m sorry.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Gathering6678 2mo agoMay I ask why? If by "not the same" you meant: AI is not at the level of a good human educator, it is a fair argument - but not many humans can afford to have a one-to-one human educator either. Perhaps I am a bit more optimistic, but if AI could give me, let's say, 90% of an average lecturer's capability, at 10% of the price or even less, that is probably extremely valuable. (For one, I would certainly be interested in learning new things that otherwise wouldn't make sense financially)
- UltraSane 2mo agoIn some ways an LLM tutor is better. Try getting a human tutor for things like Category Theory or Lean 4.
- Diogenesian 2mo agoI believe if you need a human tutor to understand category theory or Lean then you don't have the requiste math/CS background, and a human/LLM tutor won't be able to meaningfully teach you anything. Note I said "meaningfully" - something with LLMs that deeply concerns me is that they provide edutainment, and people actually think they're learning something. One of the comments on this thread mentioned giving a "dense linear algebra pdf" and having an LLM use the Socratic method. I guarantee they would have learned more if they read the PDF. I strongly doubt they learned anything at all with a bunch of silly "Socratic" questions about linear algebra. But it felt like they learned something!
- UltraSane 2mo ago" if you need a human tutor to understand category theory or Lean then you don't have the requiste math/CS background and a human/LLM tutor won't be able to meaningfully teach you anything." What an incredibly elitist thing to say.
- Diogenesian 2mo agoNo, it's an honest thing to say. If you're not able to read a graduate-level textbook and teach yourself category theory then you don't have the mathematical maturity to understand category theory. You need to start smaller: ideally abstract algebra and point-set topology, or set theory and mathematical logic if you just want the CS applications. Likewise with Lean. Of course there is a place for a good human instructor. But mathematical maturity must be developed the hard way.
- UltraSane 2mo agoEven if you are correct, which you aren't, a good tutor almost ALWAYS helps people learn faster. This is just a really odd thing to argue.
- raddan 2mo agoMoreover, there are areas of expertise that are very hard to reach without special help. I have a PhD in computer science. Earning that degree was a major time commitment, and it gave me close contact with one of the few experts in a niche area. I absolutely loved the experience. But I did not learn everything I wanted to know. And I can’t afford to take a time-out to go to grad school again for a second PhD. On the other hand, an LLM, in some sense, has access to the world’s knowledge. With some patience and persistence, you can mine almost-expert-level instruction from one. When ChatGPT 3.5 came out, I excitedly tried this for a topic that I WAS an expert in. The results were discouraging. The model’s answers seemed to reflect the general misunderstandings that people had about the topic. More recently though, I had to review a paper in the same area, and I used a late-model ChatGPT to help check my work. It was an eye-opening experience because it was no longer confused. And it found longstanding misunderstandings I had, buttressing its answers against my skepticism with citations to original work. I came away very impressed. This kind of AI “rubber duck programming” is my preferred style of use now. I used it just today to help me learn an area of statistics I have always been fuzzy about. This approach definitely requires some careful prompting, but I am optimistic that AI tutors will one day be a real thing. My only worry is that people lose the ability to understand what makes an answer a good one and why we should care about good answers.
- bonoboTP 2mo agoA lot of knowledge in such niches has never been written down. Papers don't contain it. Tacit knowledge, it's in unpublished config files and unpublished experiments that some prof or PhD student remembers, all the things that are not "publishing-worthy" (because not flashy, not novel-sounding enough, or a negative result etc) but crucial for the method to actually work. Most of expertise is like this and this is why spending years in a research group, talking to the researchers, participating in their culture, understanding their thinking over years (or even just months) can be invaluable. There are also many things that people only say after a beer, after you know each other well. Claude and ChatGPT haven't ingested any of this. They ingested the sanitized surface version, the press release / advertisement version. Because papers are basically career marketing and advertisement mostly. The real expertise is guarded and hidden. This is of course about the PhD level and beyond. For regular university-level education, where the goal is to pass the usual exams, ChatGPT and Claude are more than enough. But for real-world "doing", not (yet).
- hmokiguess 2mo agoI just fundamentally believe that AI cannot replace the human aspect of connection. A teacher does more than just teach, they also connect with the students and form relationships. You could argue we may end up with some form of “AI” connection though if that’s a good thing and what is its long term effects on us as a society we are yet to see. Regardless, what I mean to say is I don’t think AI to Human can replace Human to Human as a whole, that’s my point. The marketing copy feels deceptive and not something that speaks to me, I wouldn’t consider that to be same. This feels like it’s marketed towards MOOCs but I am not a fan of education as a product like that either, I come from a place where education is free and this idea of gatekeeping knowledge and forming products around it just doesn’t sit well with me. This just feels like a way to make more money and marketed towards that narrative. You’re right it lowers the cost, but at what cost? MOOCs already didn’t accomplish much the way I see it, I saw much better results from self made paths with things like YouTube or free lectures and/or self made teachers who go above and beyond. That said, I think there is a role for AI in education and I do think it belongs in there, alongside a human educator, in some form.
- Gathering6678 2mo agoI didn't have "replace" in my mind. I 100% agree with you that AI cannot replace human educators, but I am hopeful that as a supplementary tool, AI can achieve a lot. On your point of MOOCs and YouTube lectures: I agree that the latter is sufficient for me, but there's nothing stopping AI from creating something similar, or even better: lectures tailored to my specific interests and needs. MOOC failed for me exactly because it wasn't "for me" - I might as well try and find a YouTube playlist. These are all tangential, of course. I don't know how this specific thing would turn out.
- Aurornis 2mo agoI also wish we had an infinite supply of expert teachers available to work 1 on 1 with students at any time day or night for a nominal fee. Sadly we do not, so something like this will have to serve as a more accessible backup.
- hahaker 2mo agoWell, hold that thought, what if one-to-one means AI to AI...
- isubkhankulov 2mo agoEdtech has historically not had amazing venture outcomes compared to saas, ads, rockets, etc. Given how much people spend on education, there’s no reason AI education software wont be a huge market. And there’s few people better suited than Andrew Ng to execute this
- dataviz1000 2mo agoI got to see Luis von Ahn the inventor of CAPTCHA discuss his latest crowd sourced venture, Duolingo, which I'm sure everyone has an opinion about, back in 2013 or 2014 at The LAB Miami in Wynwood. At that point they had ~24 employees. He said his interest was crowdsourcing and thought most of the engineering effort would go toward the crowdsourced translation, but at that time, it was being handled by just two employees. They brought on two prominent consultant researchers, leaders in the field of language learning and linguistics. The first question they asked the consultants was which part of speech should they present to the learner first. The consultants didn't have an answer. They decided to dedicate engineers to collecting data in order to answer that question. A big problem with edTech is that we don't know.
- diskzero 2mo agoI don’t understand what you mean by “we don’t know”? Are you saying tech entrepreneurs don’t know education? I agree with that. Or are you saying we don’t know what problem to solve?
- raddan 2mo agoMy interpretation of “we don’t know” is that the space of possible instruction methods is huge, and we don’t know what works best. It is easy to think of it as a kind of optimization problem, but that line of thinking quickly runs into a bunch of practical obstacles: different people learn differently, studies with good experimental design take time and resources so it is slow to iterate, and good teaching seems to require deep insights into student motivations and incentives, aspects of teaching that are hard to quantify. We also don’t have great ways to measure outcomes; grades are weakly predictive of future success. The best teachers seem to combine deep thinking about how to teach with intuition and charisma. The ingredients are hard to replicate. I do think that this is a nut that we will eventually crack, but it is proving to be a very tough nut.
- ryanchants 2mo agoI'm working on a much smaller idea, but so far it's just me using it for grad school, and a friend using it for his master ciccerone prep. It has been really useful in the class I used it for while building it. Looking forward to playing with more as I start my fall semester(UIUC CS 425, Distributed Systems). I need to get some model pricing evals in place to see if I can use open weight models to get it cheap enough, since it's just me and not VC money. The real product potential seems to be getting reusable materials like cert prep, continuing education for careers that require it, and the like. But then you're fighting incumbents that fiercely control their moats. https://studyengine.app/ https://studyengine.app/
- ryanchants 2mo agoIt's funny that AI even gave us similar themes.
- starlineventure 2mo agoIve actually started trying to build games, starting with Roblox, to eventually build a catalog for this same problem. 1:1 learning in the future is probably going to be 80 - 90% gamified because people like playing games. Spent the last 6 months traveling Asia and everybody was playing games on their phones...everywhere. The first game I released is Math Cadet, basically an adventure game to build up math skills for kids elementary and middle school. I have another one in the chamber thats more science related. Any feedback would be great: https://www.roblox.com/games/129132556457079/Math-Cadet-Adventure https://www.roblox.com/games/129132556457079/Math-Cadet-Adve...
- genghisjahn 2mo agoSomebody here posted about a Socratic method skill for Claude (or whatever your LLM of choice is). I’ve found this to be fantastic. Dropped in a dense PDF about Linear Algebra, Postgres (those are the two I’ve gotten into so far). It’s basically just a skill.md that reads, “Here’s a document, give me an opening statement about the material and ask me a question. As I provide answers, guide me to simpler or more complex areas of the topic. Something something Socratic method.” Works great.
- ebbi 2mo agoThat's super interesting - will have to take a look into this!
- westurner 2mo agoKhanmigo specifies the Socratic method as well. These look like system and agent prompts and agent instructions: "Academic Assistant Pro.md", "Code Tutor" https://github.com/linexjlin/GPTs/blob/main/prompts/ https://github.com/linexjlin/GPTs/blob/main/prompts/ Gemini Notebook does flashcards, study guides: https://edu.google.com/ai-gemini-notebook/ https://edu.google.com/ai-gemini-notebook/ Spaced Repetition flashcards or flashquestions to progress through a game might be good; configure Anki decks to surface cards from when for example the user jumps to crush a bonus block. "Ask HN: How can I learn to read mathematical notation?" (2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18511718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18511718 "[Feature Request]: flashcards to advance in the game and learning mode" Issue #3054 ; SuperTux/supertux https://github.com/SuperTux/supertux/issues/3054 https://github.com/SuperTux/supertux/issues/3054
- westurner 2mo agoResources for teaching ml and ai? So I Ctrl-F'd for "Linear algebra" resources in my research log and found: "Interactive Linear Algebra (2019)" (2021) re: Manim https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28173565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28173565 Latest Manim developments; interactive WebGL in browser: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49093210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49093210
- yuanBuilds 2mo agoI do think Andrew is the right person doing this. Someone mentioned that the return of financial outcome is not good in edTech, and this is exactly why backing by Coursera is a huge advantage. Education-related product is slow, and it needs patience. The concern, though, is that how to achieve those 3 thesis. Do they train/fine-turn their own model? according to my own experience, the current models are not well trained in personal education context, and it is either too textbook-like or too task-driven.
- j45 2mo agoI remember reading that Education is a trillion dollar market, so i'm not sure about the financial outcome being poor, only the state of how that money is spent and obligated can differ greatly.
- sseagull 2mo agoThere’s a reason services like GitHub Classroom Replit’s education offerings shut down. Serving educators can be very hands-on. Education can have lots of different requirements (every teacher needs this one little feature), often legal issues (student privacy), and dealing with universities and governments is awful and bureaucratic. Most companies will find it easier to make money elsewhere.
- jkhdigital 2mo agoThe dirty little secret of EdTech is that there is no money in improving learning because there is no way to capture the value. For all but a handful of highly specialized and insular professions, there is no scalable infrastructure for objectively assessing skill mastery. Most learners don’t want to learn for its own sake, they want a credential that proves their value to potential employers. All of the value in learning accrues to the credential, and everyone in the educational establishment is quite happy reserving that privilege for the accredited universities because they can just bundle more and more products and services into the tuition sticker price without ever having to justify it. Oh, and the student loan racket ensures that enough students are price-insensitive that they’ll never look for alternatives.
- westurner 2mo agoAndrew Ng's Coursera courses: https://www.coursera.org/instructor/andrewng https://www.coursera.org/instructor/andrewng
- aphroz 2mo agoSo the founder of Coursera is starting a new venture backed by Coursera ? That sounds like the Musk playbook. I don't really get how this is new or even "AI". Can't you already ask Claude to teach you something ? "Patiently stays with you until you've mastered new skills", that's so nice. Maybe in the future it will be the other way around, your computer will complain about how slow the user is :)
- k2xl 2mo ago100M investment from Coursera? Isn't Andrew Ng a cofounder and still chairman?
- BobbyTables2 2mo ago$100M funding is a hell of a lot of money. Yeah, prominent thing run by famous guy … but why so much funding so early? What does $100M enable in the next 5-10 years that $25M doesn’t?
- personjerry 2mo agoCoursera, the company providing the funding, also belongs to Andrew Ng
- mrtobo 2mo agoHe's on the board, at least - "belongs to" isn't correct.
- personjerry 2mo agoFrom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coursera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coursera > Coursera was founded in 2012 by Stanford University computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller.
- mrtobo 2mo agofounded by and belongs to aren't the same thing
- inasio 2mo agoSee The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
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- ashu1461 2mo agoIs it only me or the website looks vibe coded ? the output feels like a standard claude template.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- jondwillis 2mo ago/frontend-design
- sergiotapia 2mo agoThe home page is entirely written by AI. Riddled with em hyphens. More should be placed on the home page at least.. But really what a wonderful mission. Imagine if they succeed and end up teaching millions and allowing people elevate their home towns/countries. Crazy impact.
- jatins 2mo agoIt is. I just wish people would throw a plain text page with a paragraph instead of this because you bet I am just scrolling through it without reading as soon as Claudism appears
- j0sip 2mo ago[dead]
- wxw 2mo agoI feel like this website would have been better off as just Andrew's letter (halfway down the page) in system default <p> tags. The AI sloppification is palpable. Anywho, curious to see what comes out of this! EdTech & AI is a really promising space.
- sv123 2mo ago"Conventional wisdom says AI will replace people. I believe the opposite." So people will replace AI?
- jpadkins 2mo agoI had the same thought. Then I thought, maybe "replace" is what will become opposite. Antonyms of "replace" are hold keep precede break damage deprive forfeit lose penalize remain take worsen Hmmm. Maybe they should rethink their motto.
- pickledish 2mo agoHaha indeed; maybe they just meant "won't replace"
- Nevermark 2mo agoAnti-replace. They are going to breed us. Speciation. Not extinction.
- moelf 2mo agoI'm just wondering if this is replacing, you know, teachers...
- hahaker 2mo agoSame here. What a confusing statement.
- alok-g 2mo agoRoughtly, "AI will help people." Here's I think how. AI learns skills that people have, and replaces them. vs. AI helps people learn better and develop new skills faster.
- LawrenceKerr 2mo agoYes, it's a bit of an odd h1, website also looks very Claude-generated, but regardless, probably most people understand the intent.
- latenightcoding 2mo agohe has like 20 AI companies now.
- AlexeyBelov 2mo agoIs he a grifter now?
- rramadass 2mo agoThe Digital Maieutic: Socrates and the Art of Prompting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48342887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48342887
- Ozzie_osman 2mo agoThis looks awesome. I'm very excited about how learning will evolve harnessing AI. I'm also a huge fan of Andrew Ng. I wish they hadn't raised so much money. I'm not sure "large funding round" sets up the right dynamic for what he's trying to do.
- ElProlactin 2mo ago> This looks awesome. I'm curious: what looks awesome? The website was created with Claude. There's no detail about what the actual product/service is and how it will work. Everything is a big idea/promise with no specificity.
- ks2048 2mo ago“Just one more AI company, I swear…” - last words of an AI-company-junkie.
- luciana1u 2mo ago[flagged]
- EagnaIonat 2mo ago> 01 Plans a path with you > 02 Adapts to how you learn > 03 Patiently stays with you until you've mastered new skills 1 and 2 any of the big AI companies will do that for you. I have Claude doing this for me for a few learning areas. 3 to me feels like the Duolingo bird. IMHO, they are trying to solve the wrong thing. People who want to learn will gravitate to learning systems. If you can find a way to pull in people who don't want to learn, that has value.
- ajpaulson 2mo agoWhat do you mean by “learning systems?”
- EagnaIonat 2mo agoI was referring to systems that are designed to teach people. SCORM for example.
- j45 2mo agoScorm is a zip file with html files to structure content any way you want with a minimal amount of mandatory standards. It was never meant for assessment, nor is it secure. The creator of scorm said to not use it learning had to be secured. It’s not a system or a framework in any meaningful or standardized sense, and more of a format for compiling content that can be copied between different places.
- EagnaIonat 2mo agoThat's an oversimplification of what SCORM is, but point taken. My comment was about LMS.
- j45 2mo agoIt's not an oversimplification of it at all. I just took the conceptualization of it away from the sufficient experience I have with LMS to do the same with it: Learning management systems are rarely about learning. Too often, they're first about about managing learning for the learning manager, and teh priorities of the learning manager (maintaining compliance) and that's what the software and sales process aims for. The learner, actually learning, or being a central focus is a second or third class citizen in such tools.
- senor_digimon 2mo agoI think this is a great space because almost any AI educational product can be measured and evaluated by the end user. For example, does the user improve from using your product and do they also believe they do, and do they also LIKE your product? If not, then they have every right to seek out the perfect AI educational product, of which, I expect a variety of. Personally, I believe the last 40 years or so of academia has failed at creating the proper reactive curriculum for students, so I'm nearly positive anyone that enters the AI education space has a very good chance of proving to their end users that they can out-teach ... I don't know, the entire NY Board of Education, for example. It is not bold at at all to say K-12 will be eradicated. Higher Ed not so much because many were always buying the status of higher education anyway, so the status in itself still has value as a product.
- leafmeal 2mo ago> It is not bold at at all to say K-12 will be eradicated. Higher Ed not so much because many were always buying the status of higher education anyway, so the status in itself still has value as a product. It’s funny because I believe the opposite for both of these. Living with a teacher, I’ve learned that the most important objectives of k-12 education are teaching kids how to act like adults in society and behave around others. This is something I don’t think AI will ever be good at teaching. A few other things, like learning to read and write, basic math, critical thinking are secondary, but important, but, I imagine not the best use case for AI either. Beyond that however, you’re an adult equipped to take learning into your own hands with all the understanding and agency to make it happen. With the help of AI I don’t think there’s much you couldn’t learn, at least that doesn’t require human interaction (e.g. teaching).
- LogicFailsMe 2mo agoOh it will be even better than humans some day. Not any time soon, and definitely not when the sort of people training these things range from incredibly awkward around people to downright psychotic in public. But the infinite patience and persistence of coding agents in the form of a teacher for other things than code would be pretty amazing, but we're nowhere close to that. Case in point, I would love to know who thought deploying a figuratively "demilitarized" sexbot as a teacher in NY town in 2026 was a good idea. And I say that as someone who loved the movie Weird Science. And I'm evil enough to admit that Van Halen's Hot For Teacher was the first thing that slipped into my mind reading the article below. But really? Who? https://www.npr.org/2026/07/29/g-s1-136072/ai-robot-teacher https://www.npr.org/2026/07/29/g-s1-136072/ai-robot-teacher
- real-hacker 2mo agodeeplearning.ai context hub codream.ai OpenWorker LearnVector This guy never stops.
- benji8000 2mo agoI wonder what they will do different compared to Khanmigo, which wasn‘t particularily successful wirh full-on AI learning assistance. Support for traditional human learning systems?
- est 2mo agosounds like mathacademy and many other alike services
- gffrd 2mo agoMan, that's a dog of a website.
- madhu_ghalame 2mo ago[dead]
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- zuzuleinen 2mo agoAs a daily user of Anki and Math Academy, I'm very excited about how software can help us learn. Now, with AI, we can really build tools that were not possible before. I built for myself AlgoTutor[1], a CLI tool that teaches Go developers algorithmic skills and concurrency. The recent Understanding floating point[2] from Oz Nova is also a type of tutorial I want to see more often. [1] https://github.com/zuzuleinen/algotutor https://github.com/zuzuleinen/algotutor [2] https://proto.csprimer.com/fp/ https://proto.csprimer.com/fp/
- jbstack 2mo agoI'd never heard of Math Academy. It seems interesting, but quite expensive ($49/month for software which is in beta). Would you say it's significantly superior to something like Khan Academy (which is free) to justify paying that much?
- sanswork 2mo agoI tried Math academy twice and I cannot understand the hype but a lot of people seem to love it so maybe it's just not my style of learning. Each topic seemed to contain too little information to actually grasp it. It was like Trig 1 -> This is a triangle and trig is about triangles. Quiz 1: blah
- zuzuleinen 2mo agoIt is indeed expensive, especially considering my current location(Romania). I have a rule of doing 20 XP per day, and I kept that rule for more than half a year. Maybe the price is also a factor, but I never managed to keep that pace for Khan Academy when I tried it. You can check their current courses here: https://www.mathacademy.com/courses https://www.mathacademy.com/courses I think the topics and curriculum are more serious, and I would definitely recommend it if you have kids or are in highschool/uni. I'm 37 now and only do it to keep my brain sharp and build my mathematical intuition and I think is great for that due to its focus on practice and spaced reviews. I think they have a 1-month trial, and you get your money back if you cancel within 30 days if you want to try it.
- abcd_f 2mo ago
- docheinestages 2mo agoHopefully the app itself won't look AI-generated like the design of the website. This one isn't so bad, but has hallmarks of Claude designs. Nowadays I keep getting shocked to find severely sloppy designs when browsing through Y Combinator startups. For me, this is a signal that the people behind the product don't care much.
- imjonse 2mo ago"We're heads‑down building, and will have products to show by early 2027." By then frontier models may be able to do this by prompting. Even now it is very easy to get one of the chat interfaces to keep quizzing you and adapt to your level, answer your questions, and in general behave how I imagine a tutor behaves. It lacks integrated stats/progress/gamification/long term memory but those can be added by a simple vibecoded app or are usually unnecessary for actual learning.
- baq 2mo agoI hope they’re planning to build hardware so the learning experience can be close to pen and paper. Keyboards and screens are a distraction and the brain learns better with a pencil than with a keyboard.
- fluoridation 2mo agoI feel the exact opposite. I hand-write very slowly, so having to focus on that instead of the material is literally a distraction, compared to just typing out my thoughts. The exception to this is if the focus of the learning is the writing in itself. Right now I'm learning kanji, so I need to draw them to focus on and memorize the shapes. That said, it doesn't have to be on paper. Dragging my finger on a tablet or moving a mouse are just as effective as using pen and paper.
- baq 2mo agoSlow is half the point though! Memory has a very limited bandwidth. The other half: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/15/3/345 https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/15/3/345 and a plethora of others.
- fluoridation 2mo ago>Handwriting activates a broader network of brain regions involved in motor, sensory, and cognitive processing. Typing engages fewer neural circuits, resulting in more passive cognitive engagement. Yes, that's exactly what I mean. If I'm focusing on what my hands are doing I'm focusing less on the material proper than I'm trying to digest.
- xxwink 2mo agoThere's a huge potential in personalized learning/education space. A big problem in education is that everyone learns different, and teachers / schools have to go by the speed of the lowest common denominator. AI can tailor content to the individual students most optimal way of learning. Whoever cracks that code will literally boost humankind
- drusepth 2mo agoThe job postings being all on-site (no remote) is kind of wild.
- bottlepalm 2mo agoNot really, have you tried to do anything innovative working remote with a team? In any meeting half the people are checked out watching youtube. The collaborative whiteboarding experience is terrible. Working remote is good for plug and chug type work, but the team dynamic is an empty husk compared to working alongside others in the real world. It can be done if you absolutely have to, but don't try even pretend the effectiveness is anywhere close to being in person.
- drusepth 2mo agoYes, I've worked remotely for the last decade+ on many innovative teams and typically find them more engaged, autonomous, and innovative than most of the on-site-only teams I've also occasionally helped.
- luciana1u 2mo ago[flagged]
- antonyragleap 2mo agoThe hardest problem seems less like content generation and more like accurately modeling what a learner actually understands.
- hamburgererror 2mo agoPlease, stop destroying human everyday life experience with technology and for your personal wealth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fun_They_Had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fun_They_Had
- orbital-decay 2mo agoThis is one of weaker Asimov's works, in my opinion, as it merely projects pre-mass education era teaching into the future. Conflating mass education and socialization is pretty myopic when writing about the future with unlimited intelligent robots. You don't have to be taught in one-size-fits-all way to have shared experiences, it just happens to be done that way due to the scale, out of necessity, and many education systems and experiments since the 90's are trying to combine individualized learning with socialization. Unfortunately many post-WWII sci-fi predictions turned out to be self-fulfilling, because a lot of people got conditioned on them and can't imagine breaking the lore which is now a part of their lives.
- abcd_f 2mo agoIf said experience is subpar, e.g. when it happens with 30+ student classes when 80% dgaf, there's no harm in offering an alternative to those who wants it. And the rest can continue enjoying everyday human life experience.
- lII1lIlI11ll 2mo agoNot sure I would consider public schools a fun experience though. At least not for the majority of pupils.
- embedding-shape 2mo agoCare to enlighten the rest of us how this is at all related to the submission? Is it because it's AI it is "destroying human everyday life experience"? Seems this company is trying to find a healthier (and better) way of using AI, unless I misunderstand something?
- doginasuit 2mo agoThe classroom experience cannot be replaced, but obviously Independent learning is still valuable and needed.
- epolanski 2mo agoFeels like yet-another-ai-product that will be swallowed natively by the big labs.
- ghlancet 2mo agoWebsite is by Claude (Claude likes beige). I wonder if they'll work on a real product or if this is just a new company to divert money from Coursera.
- utopiah 2mo agoposted the same day https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh but the TL;DR is that actual understanding of the gaps is required to teach.
- jordanscales 2mo agoEd-tech alumni here. You'd have significantly better outcomes if that 100M investment went towards free breakfast and lunch for students.
- vnchr 2mo agoThat would cover school breakfast and lunches for NYC Public Schools for only 3 weeks. Personally, I'd rather see investment in technologies that can give more than just one large school district a temporary improvement. Sophisticated personalized education for the masses is finally within reach. Andrew Ng is one of the most significant leaders in ed-tech. I'm grateful that he's pursuing this venture and hopeful for the impact it could have on my family and many others.
- iknownthing 2mo agoin my experience, people are not super interested in using LLMs to help them learn beyond the basic chatgpt chat experience.
- TheqO 2mo agoTo help anyone else who hadn't also previously heard of Andrew Andrew Yan-Tak Ng is a ...computer scientist and technology entrepreneur focusing on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI)... Ng was a cofounder and head of Google Brain and was the former Chief Scientist at Baidu. Ng is an adjunct professor at Stanford University... Ng has also worked in online education, cofounding Coursera and DeepLearning.AI... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Ng https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Ng
- root-parent 2mo agoThis looks like another investor play to save Coursera and somehow have a vector (pun intended) to help raise its valuation. Coursera and Udemy already offer AI learning tools, so why create a separate company and commit $100 million? It looks like the product, commercial relationship, ownership structure, IP rights are still unclear.
- nicf 2mo agoI've been working for a few years now as a private tutor teaching proof-based math to adults. Maybe this should give me an incentive to join in on some of the cynical replies this has gotten, but that's not actually how I find myself feeling. I love teaching, especially in the one-on-one format, but it really doesn't scale; not everyone can afford a human tutor and there probably aren't nearly enough of them to meet the possible demand. If a product like this worked well --- and I agree Andrew Ng's involvement seems like a positive sign --- then that would be great! Something I would wonder about from my past experience using LLM's for technical subjects is how to replicate a particular side of the student-teacher relationship. Sometimes a new student of mine will need to be told that they don't actually understand something as well as they think they do, and that they'd be better served by going more slowly than they might have wanted to. This "talking you down gently" conversation is one I'm happy to have (and sometimes it's actually me who's wrong!) but I'd be interested to see whether and how well an LLM run by a company that really wants to retain customers could pull this off. It's hard to say without an actual product, of course. I'm looking forward to seeing what they come out with.
- effnorwood 2mo agoMr. Rogers death arbitrages a funny fast film of child education for the modern era.