catalinvoss

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.

And fully free in emerging markets, beginning in Africa

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

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

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

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

I get where you're coming from. There’s a lot of potential to misuse AI with kids.

What we do believe is that children will be living in a world where this technology will exist, and how it gets used becomes the important question.

We also have to prepare them for that world and how to thrive in it. I would never give my son raw ChatGPT the same way you wouldn’t give a 5 year old access to the raw internet. But that doesn’t mean that the internet can’t be used for learning.

We don’t have all the answers and we can’t respond for all of AI, but we’re a team of parents, teachers, and child psychologists who deeply care about getting this right and unlocking the opportunities for kids. The article goes into the technical depth of how we make it pedagogically aligned, safe, non-slop.

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.

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.