Somebody 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.
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.
This 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.
Care 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?
If 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.
This is exactly right. I started teaching undergrad CS about 18 months ago after 20 years wandering through other careers, and I quickly realized that students do not need better teaching. They need frequent, direct feedback and an environment that more or less requires them to commit to studying until mastery or to quit early and do something else.
Effective learning techniques have been known for decades, but universities have -zero- incentive to improve teaching quality. There is no standardized assessment infrastructure to compare graduates across schools, or to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching interventions at scale. So any effort put into teaching quality is invisible and thus worthless to a university.
Every attempt to make high-quality instruction available for free has been largely irrelevant to the unwashed masses, because universities have a monopoly on credentialing. The self-starters can learn anything for free, but they were never the problem. It’s the middle 50% that we have utterly failed.
I started learn linear algebra and some mid-level math stuff couple of years back. While I really wanted to learn I still struggled to find a good learning path and use a product similar to Duolingo for math.
Eventually I learned some, then stopped using it and then forgotten all of it.
But my point is despite if me really want to learn I found it quite challenging to find learning path that I trusted to be good start for me.
I also need to make the point; I didn’t have 5 hours a day, so this 30-90 minutes in a good day endeavor.
There are still tons of things to solve in this area, how to cross to chasm, a learning path that’s right for you and how can you be sure of that. Learning something in one good 60m instead of 5 different videos and 5 hours. Etc. I think these problems are far from solved.
I also want to get fit but that doesn’t mean I’ll show up in my gym to workout everyday. So even when you really really want to learn you still need to stay motivated.
What you're looking for is not something to help your with your goals, it's something that sells you the idea that you can achieve your goals while seemingly be unwilling to put the necessary effort in.
What if it's simply impossible to learn linear algebra and mid-level math stuff by spending only 30 minutes a day? What if you can't get fit if you don't go to the gym?
It sounds like what they are looking for is a pathway. Khan used to have a really good one with the world of math pathway where you could go for 2 + 2 to Calculus in a set sequence of steps each building on the next. I've tried Khan a few times since they got rid of it and it just feels like you're all over the place and regularly missing skills it expects you to have.
They aren't trying to get fit by not going to the gym they are looking for a progressive overload program for math.
AI isn't that general purpose. If There is a chef course curated / tested with Jamie Oliver I'll buy that over a Claude chat. And by "I" I mean regular folk who are most of the market every SaaS and AI wants to capture.
You don't have to see the value - the learners have to benefit, being the majority, they usually won't be setting it all up like you are implying on their computers.
Scorm 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.
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.
I think learning from another human being live who can understand your confusingly articulated questions and who can adjust their answers for you, another human being, that's great.
I agree, at least in that we need more human contact, not less.
But I will say Gemini / Claude have both been surprisingly good at understanding my half-assed attempts to put a complicated question into a coherent sentence.
Is it? People want to learn things they think they need. Is there a growing disconnection between what they think they need and what they actually need?
I mean "People who want to learn will gravitate to learning systems." means that this is the obvious target market for a learning system. Since there are lots of those out there you win on execution.
>If you can find a way to pull in people who don't want to learn, that has value.
Most companies try to address a known market and not create one.
At any rate you have two types of people who don't want to learn:
1. people who don't want to learn and have to anyway, for some reason (generally work related)
2. people who don't want to learn and have nothing forcing them.
Number 1 is a potential market, number 2 seems hopeless.
I 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.
I 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.
There’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.
As 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.
I'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?
It 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
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.
I 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.
It is vastly superior to Khan. Had my kids go through both, so can compare.
That said, on higher levels there's some cruft that trains mechanical skills, and that's on subjects that are needed only in the scope of the US system. For Europeans these should be optional, alas they are not and this adds a lot of tedium and hassle to an otherwise rather frictionless process.
I 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
It 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
The 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.
May 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)
Moreover, 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.
>And it found longstanding misunderstandings I had, buttressing its answers against my skepticism with citations to original work.
Did you check those citations to make sure they actually contained the information they were being cited for? Because I've asked difficult questions too and have had mixed results. I would never trust an LLM as a teacher. They make stuff up all the time, and when you're learning you're in the very worst position to be checking the information you're given.
A 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).
I 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!
" 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."
I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and hope for the best.
My wife has been a high school math teacher for 25 years and has seen waves of tech luminaries give their visions of how tech will radically improve education and learning. She can’t point to any startup that has had a major impact in improving outcomes. I wish I could point her to something that really will have an impact in, or even out, of the classroom for her students.
That's not unique to tech startups. Almost nothing in terms of explicit methodology has any effect on education outcomes. The literature on education research is of abysmal quality too.
I 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.
Very cool to hear that you were at the LAB Miami in 2014, Around 2016, I was trying to organize a group of folks to build a variable spaced repitition application that tied to a off the shelf eeg, to figure out the optimal time to learn at one of the local hackathons.. We had a whole team of folks, some of the Flomio hardware people, and other local startup folks. Never was able to build the prototype at a hackathon, but always thought there is a physiological element to learning, and ed tech in general.
We know that mild stress can narrow focus and help learning. "Neural connections do form when you struggle." [0] A little stress is not only good but necessary for learning while a lot of stress causes a breakdown. The trick is being able to judge the stress level of the student and every person is different.
The idea of using some type of bio metric data from EEG or blood pressure sensors will help determine a little struggle from a lot of struggle in formative assessment.
My understanding (in hindsight) is that success of Duolingo had nothing to do with “crowdsourcing” - is that correct? (Beyond maybe stories for fundraising).
It doesn’t seem to have a lot to say about “ed tech” - popularity of apps seems disconnected to popularity
I 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?
My 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.
There is not a huge market of people who actually want to learn something on their own motivation. Get some piece of paper, yes. So the huge market will only materialize if the degree granting institutions adopt something like this.
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.
I'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.
Hopefully 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.
"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.
I 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.
I 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.
>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.
The idea is that focus and actually working all of your hand instead of just fingers helps learning the material more efficiently even if your own perception of it does not agree.
Maybe it works for some people, but it certainly doesn't for me. When I'm handwriting, especially in bulk, all I can think about it how much I hate it and how I can get it to end faster. I take fewer notes with more abbreviations that are later harder to decipher.
It's different if it's something like mathematical expressions, because those are never easier to type, but just regular sentences? Absolutely not.
I 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?
There'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
Ive 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-Adve...
So 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 :)
Not 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.
I 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.
> 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).
Somebody 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.
Probably referring to my post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48938375 (100 up votes)
Direct link to the doc page:
https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/plugins-detai...
This was in the context of how I use ChatGPT Live to brainstorm/discuss/learn while on a walk, but of course useful in other contexts too.
https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools/blob/main/pl...
https://github.com/bevibing/socrates-skill
I recently used this to prep for interviews - I got the job :)
Would you care to share them?
Khanmigo 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/
Gemini Notebook does flashcards, study guides: 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
"[Feature Request]: flashcards to advance in the game and learning mode" Issue #3054 ; SuperTux/supertux https://github.com/SuperTux/supertux/issues/3054
Resources 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
Latest Manim developments; interactive WebGL in browser: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49093210
That's super interesting - will have to take a look into this!
Please, stop destroying human everyday life experience with technology and for your personal wealth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fun_They_Had
This 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.
Care 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?
Not sure I would consider public schools a fun experience though. At least not for the majority of pupils.
If 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.
> 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.
This is exactly right. I started teaching undergrad CS about 18 months ago after 20 years wandering through other careers, and I quickly realized that students do not need better teaching. They need frequent, direct feedback and an environment that more or less requires them to commit to studying until mastery or to quit early and do something else.
Effective learning techniques have been known for decades, but universities have -zero- incentive to improve teaching quality. There is no standardized assessment infrastructure to compare graduates across schools, or to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching interventions at scale. So any effort put into teaching quality is invisible and thus worthless to a university.
Every attempt to make high-quality instruction available for free has been largely irrelevant to the unwashed masses, because universities have a monopoly on credentialing. The self-starters can learn anything for free, but they were never the problem. It’s the middle 50% that we have utterly failed.
I started learn linear algebra and some mid-level math stuff couple of years back. While I really wanted to learn I still struggled to find a good learning path and use a product similar to Duolingo for math.
Eventually I learned some, then stopped using it and then forgotten all of it.
But my point is despite if me really want to learn I found it quite challenging to find learning path that I trusted to be good start for me.
I also need to make the point; I didn’t have 5 hours a day, so this 30-90 minutes in a good day endeavor.
There are still tons of things to solve in this area, how to cross to chasm, a learning path that’s right for you and how can you be sure of that. Learning something in one good 60m instead of 5 different videos and 5 hours. Etc. I think these problems are far from solved.
I also want to get fit but that doesn’t mean I’ll show up in my gym to workout everyday. So even when you really really want to learn you still need to stay motivated.
> While I really wanted to learn I still struggled to find a good learning path
For that 3Blue1Brown is very good for this.
https://www.youtube.com/@3blue1brown
Better Explained as well, but focuses more on how to understand the concept so you can start to learn.
https://betterexplained.com/articles/linear-algebra-guide/
3B1B are primarily math entertainment videos, they don't actually teach you anything.
They are good if you already know a subject well, and want a new perspective on the material though.
You are partly correct.
They have training video series as well. Even one on Linear Algebra. Starts from scratch and works up to advanced.
What you're looking for is not something to help your with your goals, it's something that sells you the idea that you can achieve your goals while seemingly be unwilling to put the necessary effort in.
What if it's simply impossible to learn linear algebra and mid-level math stuff by spending only 30 minutes a day? What if you can't get fit if you don't go to the gym?
It sounds like what they are looking for is a pathway. Khan used to have a really good one with the world of math pathway where you could go for 2 + 2 to Calculus in a set sequence of steps each building on the next. I've tried Khan a few times since they got rid of it and it just feels like you're all over the place and regularly missing skills it expects you to have.
They aren't trying to get fit by not going to the gym they are looking for a progressive overload program for math.
AI isn't that general purpose. If There is a chef course curated / tested with Jamie Oliver I'll buy that over a Claude chat. And by "I" I mean regular folk who are most of the market every SaaS and AI wants to capture.
Qwen 3.6 27B will do that for you, or any other model with a few billion parameters. I don't see any value there other than nice UI on top of an LLM.
You don't have to see the value - the learners have to benefit, being the majority, they usually won't be setting it all up like you are implying on their computers.
What do you mean by “learning systems?”
I was referring to systems that are designed to teach people.
SCORM for example.
Scorm 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.
That's an oversimplification of what SCORM is, but point taken. My comment was about LMS.
It'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.
Yeah, I think people who really want to learn will very quickly grow out of this.
This is for people who don't want to learn but actually have to for some reasons.
I think learning from another human being live who can understand your confusingly articulated questions and who can adjust their answers for you, another human being, that's great.
I agree, at least in that we need more human contact, not less.
But I will say Gemini / Claude have both been surprisingly good at understanding my half-assed attempts to put a complicated question into a coherent sentence.
Too costly.
Now its viable with AI to do it cheaply.
Totally agree that the missing ingredient is making people want to learn. Which seems like something that gets harder every day.
A very cynical way to put it: "Why should I learn something when AI could do for me?"
In a world where most people learn to get a job, its less of a cynical question and more a practical question.
Is it? People want to learn things they think they need. Is there a growing disconnection between what they think they need and what they actually need?
There is a growing lack of motivation.
They are solving the bloom sigma problem from where I see it.
It’s far from solved.
I mean "People who want to learn will gravitate to learning systems." means that this is the obvious target market for a learning system. Since there are lots of those out there you win on execution.
>If you can find a way to pull in people who don't want to learn, that has value.
Most companies try to address a known market and not create one.
At any rate you have two types of people who don't want to learn:
1. people who don't want to learn and have to anyway, for some reason (generally work related)
2. people who don't want to learn and have nothing forcing them.
Number 1 is a potential market, number 2 seems hopeless.
I 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.
I 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.
There’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.
As 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
[2] https://proto.csprimer.com/fp/
Massive thank you for the introduction to Math Academy. After a quick look I signed up and it is fantastic - exactly what I wanted.
I'll take a look at AlgoTutor in the future :)
I'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?
It 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
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.
I 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
It is vastly superior to Khan. Had my kids go through both, so can compare.
That said, on higher levels there's some cruft that trains mechanical skills, and that's on subjects that are needed only in the scope of the US system. For Europeans these should be optional, alas they are not and this adds a lot of tedium and hassle to an otherwise rather frictionless process.
"Conventional wisdom says AI will replace people. I believe the opposite."
So people will replace AI?
No no, the opposite is replenish. As in increase people supplies. As in the Matrix.
Yes, it's a bit of an odd h1, website also looks very Claude-generated, but regardless, probably most people understand the intent.
I 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.
Haha indeed; maybe they just meant "won't replace"
Anti-replace. They are going to breed us.
Speciation. Not extinction.
Roughtly, "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.
Same here. What a confusing statement.
I'm just wondering if this is replacing, you know, teachers...
Is it only me or the website looks vibe coded ? the output feels like a standard claude template.
It 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
/frontend-design
The 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.
Wait, when you say one-to-one you mean AI to Human? That’s not the same, I’m sorry.
May 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)
Moreover, 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.
>And it found longstanding misunderstandings I had, buttressing its answers against my skepticism with citations to original work.
Did you check those citations to make sure they actually contained the information they were being cited for? Because I've asked difficult questions too and have had mixed results. I would never trust an LLM as a teacher. They make stuff up all the time, and when you're learning you're in the very worst position to be checking the information you're given.
A 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).
In some ways an LLM tutor is better. Try getting a human tutor for things like Category Theory or Lean 4.
I 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!
" 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.
I 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.
Well, hold that thought, what if one-to-one means AI to AI...
I 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.
Edtech 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
I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and hope for the best.
My wife has been a high school math teacher for 25 years and has seen waves of tech luminaries give their visions of how tech will radically improve education and learning. She can’t point to any startup that has had a major impact in improving outcomes. I wish I could point her to something that really will have an impact in, or even out, of the classroom for her students.
That's not unique to tech startups. Almost nothing in terms of explicit methodology has any effect on education outcomes. The literature on education research is of abysmal quality too.
I 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.
Very cool to hear that you were at the LAB Miami in 2014, Around 2016, I was trying to organize a group of folks to build a variable spaced repitition application that tied to a off the shelf eeg, to figure out the optimal time to learn at one of the local hackathons.. We had a whole team of folks, some of the Flomio hardware people, and other local startup folks. Never was able to build the prototype at a hackathon, but always thought there is a physiological element to learning, and ed tech in general.
> off the shelf eeg
We know that mild stress can narrow focus and help learning. "Neural connections do form when you struggle." [0] A little stress is not only good but necessary for learning while a lot of stress causes a breakdown. The trick is being able to judge the stress level of the student and every person is different.
The idea of using some type of bio metric data from EEG or blood pressure sensors will help determine a little struggle from a lot of struggle in formative assessment.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh0OS4MrN3E
My understanding (in hindsight) is that success of Duolingo had nothing to do with “crowdsourcing” - is that correct? (Beyond maybe stories for fundraising).
It doesn’t seem to have a lot to say about “ed tech” - popularity of apps seems disconnected to popularity
I 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?
My 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.
It's also quite possible that the method that works best for one person is completely horrible for another person, but that's just me guessing
There is not a huge market of people who actually want to learn something on their own motivation. Get some piece of paper, yes. So the huge market will only materialize if the degree granting institutions adopt something like this.
This 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.
> 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.
$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?
Coursera, the company providing the funding, also belongs to Andrew Ng
See The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
I'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/
It's funny that AI even gave us similar themes.
The hardest problem seems less like content generation and more like accurately modeling what a learner actually understands.
Hopefully 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.
"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.
I 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.
I 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.
Slow is half the point though! Memory has a very limited bandwidth.
The other half: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/15/3/345 and a plethora of others.
>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.
The idea is that focus and actually working all of your hand instead of just fingers helps learning the material more efficiently even if your own perception of it does not agree.
Maybe it works for some people, but it certainly doesn't for me. When I'm handwriting, especially in bulk, all I can think about it how much I hate it and how I can get it to end faster. I take fewer notes with more abbreviations that are later harder to decipher.
It's different if it's something like mathematical expressions, because those are never easier to type, but just regular sentences? Absolutely not.
I 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?
A roadmap showing how learners can progress from beginner to advanced level would add more structure to the learning experience.
There'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
I have a feeling you've not been around a group of teenagers for a while.
Reminds me of Karpathy's education startup. I think it had a similar premise. What happened to it?
Ive 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-Adve...
So 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 :)
The job postings being all on-site (no remote) is kind of wild.
Not 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.
Man, that's a dog of a website.
I 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.
> 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).
he has like 20 AI companies now.
deeplearning.ai context hub codream.ai OpenWorker LearnVector
This guy never stops.
sounds like mathacademy and many other alike services
100M investment from Coursera? Isn't Andrew Ng a cofounder and still chairman?
Andrew Ng's Coursera courses: https://www.coursera.org/instructor/andrewng
The Digital Maieutic: Socrates and the Art of Prompting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48342887
“Just one more AI company, I swear…” - last words of an AI-company-junkie.