Sorry — we had to step away to put our kids to bed, but this post had really blown up! We’re not able respond to every comment right now but just wanted to say one thing: we've been working on Ello 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 to that who is ahead 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 the happy 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 because it's AI.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
I wish I had had this when I was a 5-year-old. Few of my teachers really understood the things I wanted to learn, my peers weren't interested in the nerdy things I was, and my parents certainly didn't have the wealth to provide me with private tutoring. There are a lot of negative comments here, but they are shallow... I'm sure those commenters wouldn't want to live without the access to the Internet, and even a brilliant five-year-old can't use the Internet effectively yet. A smart and curious 5-year-old has endless questions and a properly harnessed LLM has endless patience to provide answers at a level the kind can understand (which usually not even it's parents do).
In fact, this could be one of the most beneficial uses of AI for society yet... private tutors of the level that the mega-rich always had, now for all kids everywhere! This gives me real hope for the future generations of humanity.
I 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.
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).
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.
* 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.
* 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
Ello will have a free tier and we have the funding to make it free in the developing world, so 3rd assumption is true. We’re working really hard on 1 & 2 and feel confident about both of these, but I agree with the “nobody’s really successfully tried yet” sentiment
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..
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?
Probably when it stops agreeing with me when I tell it that industrial quantities of garlic salt are an acceptable substitution for coco powder in a chocolate mousse recipe...
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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?
To all the detractors, I would like to point out that your opinion of kids needing a good human teacher is overfit to your experience of having had some of those growing up.
In third world countries like mine, we grow up with absolutely unqualified teachers who were unable to muster anything but a learnt-by-rote understanding of key concepts.
In hindsight these were just desperate adults trying to eek a living for themselves and their family in an impoverished country and resorting to any means by which to do it: gaming the school system or calling in favours to join school faculty. I bear them no ill will. But we as kids were much worse off for it.
I can assure you that no matter what concerns you may have about hallucinations in LLMs, I can bet everything I have that a reasonably modern model (and I'm thinking in the range of gemini-flash, not Fable) in a well designed harness geared towards tutoring would handily and repeatedly outperform every single teacher I had all throughout my schooling.
Don't let a quest for the perfect ruin what is likely already way better than status quo.
> 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.
I didn't realize Ello was so young! One of my kids went from barely a reluctant reader to a proficient reader near the start of your lifetime then, I am deeply grateful we had tried so many things. Massive props.
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.
> 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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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?
Replacing a human tutor with an AI that will wildly hallucinate is wrong, and will directly contribute to the dumbing down of society that people here often bemoan.
This is the equivalent of "parenting" by putting a kid in front of YouTube Kids for half the day
"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.
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."
"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.
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.
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
> 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.
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
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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
My oldest turns 6 in just over a week and my initial reaction to this heading - as well as the product itself and the picture of the kid using it - was heartbreak and sadness. Not anger, just sadness. Like when you read a story about a kid that's a victim of a crime.
Stepping back, I can look at it somewhat objectively and see that there are both kids that need something like this and that it's probably a better solution to the "dumb" homework apps that the kids use for 20 mins a week at this age, but I don't think "Ello deprives 5 year olds of human contact" is the message you should be putting out into the world.
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.
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
Sorry — we had to step away to put our kids to bed, but this post had really blown up! We’re not able respond to every comment right now but just wanted to say one thing: we've been working on Ello 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 to that who is ahead 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 the happy 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 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
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.
> 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.
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)
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 can't imagine a worse use case for AI. Literally thought the title was a clown
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
This scene from the prescient Wall•E springs to mind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xToQ4cIHkk&t=60
Never read Diamond Age huh?
I wish I had had this when I was a 5-year-old. Few of my teachers really understood the things I wanted to learn, my peers weren't interested in the nerdy things I was, and my parents certainly didn't have the wealth to provide me with private tutoring. There are a lot of negative comments here, but they are shallow... I'm sure those commenters wouldn't want to live without the access to the Internet, and even a brilliant five-year-old can't use the Internet effectively yet. A smart and curious 5-year-old has endless questions and a properly harnessed LLM has endless patience to provide answers at a level the kind can understand (which usually not even it's parents do).
In fact, this could be one of the most beneficial uses of AI for society yet... private tutors of the level that the mega-rich always had, now for all kids everywhere! This gives me real hope for the future generations of humanity.
I 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.
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
Ello will have a free tier and we have the funding to make it free in the developing world, so 3rd assumption is true. We’re working really hard on 1 & 2 and feel confident about both of these, but I agree with the “nobody’s really successfully tried yet” sentiment
We could encourage parents to take an active role in tutoring their kids but I guess that's just entirely out of the question?
Nah. Let's have AI do it
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..
It's not reflexive, I've spent a lot of time and effort considering why I think AI is bad for society.
Is electricity bad for society? There are uses that are bad for society and uses that aren't bad for society.
"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?
> insane, unproven, unpredictable autocomplete math equation
It won IMO, solved Erdos problems. At what point will you stop saying that?
Also encouraged a guy to kill himself.
Probably when it stops agreeing with me when I tell it that industrial quantities of garlic salt are an acceptable substitution for coco powder in a chocolate mousse recipe...
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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?
This has fabulous potential if implemented right.
To all the detractors, I would like to point out that your opinion of kids needing a good human teacher is overfit to your experience of having had some of those growing up.
In third world countries like mine, we grow up with absolutely unqualified teachers who were unable to muster anything but a learnt-by-rote understanding of key concepts.
In hindsight these were just desperate adults trying to eek a living for themselves and their family in an impoverished country and resorting to any means by which to do it: gaming the school system or calling in favours to join school faculty. I bear them no ill will. But we as kids were much worse off for it.
I can assure you that no matter what concerns you may have about hallucinations in LLMs, I can bet everything I have that a reasonably modern model (and I'm thinking in the range of gemini-flash, not Fable) in a well designed harness geared towards tutoring would handily and repeatedly outperform every single teacher I had all throughout my schooling.
Don't let a quest for the perfect ruin what is likely already way better than status quo.
> 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 didn't realize Ello was so young! One of my kids went from barely a reluctant reader to a proficient reader near the start of your lifetime then, I am deeply grateful we had tried so many things. Massive props.
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.
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...
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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’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?
Replacing a human tutor with an AI that will wildly hallucinate is wrong, and will directly contribute to the dumbing down of society that people here often bemoan.
This is the equivalent of "parenting" by putting a kid in front of YouTube Kids for half the day
"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.
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.
Gross
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
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 Daimond Aige: Or, A Young Person’s Illustrated Prompter
Will Butlerian Jihad be on the 2028 ticket?
Pretty interesting. Hopefully this ends up being an affordable solution for without the means for hiring a human tutor.
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
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My oldest turns 6 in just over a week and my initial reaction to this heading - as well as the product itself and the picture of the kid using it - was heartbreak and sadness. Not anger, just sadness. Like when you read a story about a kid that's a victim of a crime.
Stepping back, I can look at it somewhat objectively and see that there are both kids that need something like this and that it's probably a better solution to the "dumb" homework apps that the kids use for 20 mins a week at this age, but I don't think "Ello deprives 5 year olds of human contact" is the message you should be putting out into the world.
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.