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newtone

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Although I am not completely on the 'people don't really want to learn' train, I acknowledge one of the biggest problem in education in aligning incentives. No one is able to answer an innocent question by a kid about why do they need to learn what they are learning in class, without sharing an abstract into-the-future explanation, that the kid cant relate to.

On the topic of AI tutors will change the education, it reminds of this book i recently read (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546065/teaching-machines/). People have been trying to sell similar ideas, in different packaging(technology) for decades now. Video technology had the same pitch for how schools suck, teachers dont want to teach and we will revolutionise the access and personalisation to education. While videos, Sal's or YT in general, have done a great job(specially at accessibility), our education stats are continuously deteriorating. Before the onset of LLMs we created an instant-tutoring service(https://askfilo.com/) that could very much connect students to teachers in real time. Thousands of tutoring session laters we are still learning what students want/need from a teacher, 'they want to learn' but not everything or every subject, 'they are very much capable of learning' but our assessment are built very rigidly.....learning to test well is a learning on it own. There is so much understanding we lack in terms of mass education and it is not because of lack of good content or tooling.

As someone coming from a Tech background and has become deeply involved in education recently, I cannot agree more. There is just so much difference in terms of understanding education among people who have worked with children and people who have not.

For majority of the time the active 'response' from the student is 'no response'. Teachers are amazing at understanding silence and building conversation on silence.

Knowing the social background of the a student, and hence knowing realities of their hardships is the begining point of starting to enable a student who is laggning behind.

AI-tutors are(potentially) great, much like how videos are way better than reading books from a childs perspective, but it is far from innovation in education that few influencers are trying it to be.

We use human tutors only. Besides the academic accuracy and hallucination, I think the biggest issue is lack of proper 'uptake' currently with AI models, to continue the conversation.

The problem is, 'majority of the students do not know what to ask and how to ask a question'.

Our tutoring is AI-driven in the sense that the entire engine from matching to pedagogy-detection in a session relies on some AI model.

I feel you more than ever. We started identifying this long-term debt as `non-linear learning gaps'. As other folks have called out, large chunk of students in higher grades or higher ed need to understand the most basic of stuff referring back to multiple years of grades in their past. The good part is you can do that in a human conversation, go back or ahead of your current grade-level seamlessly in a conversation as your mind creates a mental-model of what you are learning. The 'going-ahead' part is specially important as it build perspective into 'why' of learning a concept.

In short, we believe the long-term debt is fixable.

it’s very hard to catch-up: once you fall behind, you have no way to review past material efficiently enough to compensate the difference - like credit card debt

It is surprising how many people working in education do not understand this. We have clear understanding on technical debt or cycles of poverty but absolutely no understanding of how learning debt evolves among students. It is so evident that couple of months into any academic session you can already see class performance on any test to be pretty similar to what it is going to be at the end of the year. Even if you know 9 months ago in an academic session that 90% of the students are lagging, you can't/don't do much about it. And the fun part is that all the debt is assumed to vanish when you start a new session. Nobody acknowledges that the kid has been collecting debt for a decade now.

Some friend from college and I developed Filo(askfilo.com), mainly for K12. We connect students to live tutors in realtime into an online class. It doesn't sound very sexy in the AI/LLM world by we are pretty proud of the range of students we have been able to help. Still lot of work to do on it though.