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- Hacker News
- $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?
by BobbyTables2 - See The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primerby inasio
- Coursera, the company providing the funding, also belongs to Andrew Ngby personjerry
- 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.
by wxw - This looks like another investor play to save Coursera and somehow have a vector (pun intended) to help raise its valuation.
Coursera and Udemy already offer AI learning tools, so why create a separate company and commit $100 million? It looks like the product, commercial relationship, ownership structure, IP rights are still unclear.
by root-parent - Wait, when you say one-to-one you mean AI to Human? That’s not the same, I’m sorry.by hmokiguess
- Well, hold that thought, what if one-to-one means AI to AI...by hahaker
- 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.
by Aurornis - 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)
- 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
- 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.by bonoboTP
- 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.
by dataviz1000 - 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.
by diskzero - Please, stop destroying human everyday life experience with technology and for your personal wealth.
- 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.
by abcd_f - The classroom experience cannot be replaced, but obviously Independent learning is still valuable and needed.by doginasuit
- Not sure I would consider public schools a fun experience though. At least not for the majority of pupils.by lII1lIlI11ll
- 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?
- 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.
- Is it only me or the website looks vibe coded ? the output feels like a standard claude template.by ashu1461
- 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.
by sergiotapia - /frontend-designby jondwillis
- 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 appearsby jatins
- "Conventional wisdom says AI will replace people. I believe the opposite."
So people will replace AI?
by sv123 - I'm just wondering if this is replacing, you know, teachers...by moelf
- Same here. What a confusing statement.by hahaker
- 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.
by alok-g - Yes, it's a bit of an odd h1, website also looks very Claude-generated, but regardless, probably most people understand the intent.by LawrenceKerr
- 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.
by jpadkins - Yeah, that was my first reaction to that headline too. Given a second thought, he probably means the opposite of "replace", so in this context, "maintain people." maybe? I know marketing headlines shouldn't be interpreted literally, but it tripped me up at first.by mikebelanger