Full disclosure, I worked briefly with Ello / Catalin some years back.
They've done a lot of work on at least two dimensions: (1) handling the nonstandard sounds and habits of speech of very early readers, who might be as young as four, and (2) connecting this to a specialized teaching system based on the science of reading, e.g. decodable readers.
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]
> San Francisco schools decided a couple of years ago that they would no longer teach Algebra in 8th grade.
This has nothing to do with this at all. We're talking about 4th grader literacy nationwide and you're talking about algebra in a single area in a different grade!?
The second point where there aren't enough teachers nationwide (10% missing workforce) is probably because teachers are terribly paid, disrespected, and subject to bad working conditions.
Maybe that's why people aren't clamoring to be teachers and the quality of work is low?
The explanation I've heard is that the national curriculum switched away from phonics and to a teaching method called "balanced literacy", and this went terribly [1]. IIRC it involved teaching kids to recognize words by their overall visual shape. I believe this is what mature readers do, but the problem is that for this to work, one first needs to have bootstrapped a robust vocabulary. And that happens via being able to sound out words, i.e. phonics.
(I'm not sure whether Cato is generally reliable, but FYI there are lots of other writeups online on the same topic. It was the first non-paywalled and reasonably complete one I found)
I've heard a lot of people argue that phonics are vastly superior to "whole word" techniques, and maybe that's true -- I'm definitely not an expert, though it is how I was taught English in Australia ~30 years ago.
However, I find it quite hard to believe that it is the most important cause of the modern literacy rate issues in the US. Why? Because "whole word" teaching was the conventional wisdom since at least the 1950s[1,2]! Most articles on the topic reference the book Why Johnny Can't Read (1955) which was written to argue in favour of phonics as a response to (perceived?) child illiteracy at the time and claims (page 1):
> Since the 1920s, most American schoolchildren have been taught to memorize the "appearance" of words, one after another, like Chinese characters, without reference to the sounds of the individual letters that make up each word.
The reintroduction of phonics in the US first started as "balanced literacy" (phonics and "whole word", ideally tailored to students) in the 1990s and "science-based reading" (basically just phonics) properly started in the 2000s[1,2], which means that the argument that phonics would improve reading scores is on quite shaky ground (most children in the US today get taught phonics and most people >40 were probably taught with "whole word" teaching).
Go back to the 18th and 19th centuries and you land back in phonics-land. The fad of whole-word and three-queuing lasted a generation and has produced terrible results. Those techniques even induce dyslexia in some cases.
I am aware of that (the articles I linked even mention it), my point was that modern fears around literacy are based on data suggesting that child literacy rates have recently declined.
If lack of phonics was solely to blame then almost all US adults alive today (not just "a generation" -- anyone born between the 1920s and 2000s, at least) would have literacy problems, but the concern is that today's children have literacy problems in contrast to previous generations -- the exact opposite of what you would expect. To be fair, people in the 1950s were also claiming that children were illiterate compared to previous generations, but I'm not sure whether those claims are really credible. Do your parents' and grandparents' generations strike you as being shockingly illiterate?
"Wow, our state institutions are struggling in ways X, Y, and Z. Rather than addressing these problems we will shuffle them to an unaccountable third party that will provide a necessarily worse substitute using the hot technology of the day."
Blooms 2 sigma, like many studies that are thrown about, is not as much of a slam dunk as people claim that it is. Have you read the paper or any efforts to replicate?
Thanks for taking time to write this. HN is showing (expected) dismissing attitude towards this idea. That tells me it might work :) ! Folks here are wildly overestimating (or ignoring!) how many adults are qualified to be good teachers and how many of them further have enough incentives (money, time, resources) to do it well. Its a _very_ small number.
In my part of the world, "become a teacher" is often a job advised to people who are not able to find other jobs or are looking for a safe way back after career break. None of them are looking forward to engaging 5 year old with life's curiosities. To add the famous quip from WorryDream/Bret Victor : most of the teachers teaching calculus etc. have never ever used it in real life.
Working parents with STEM backgrounds likely know that schools are glorified day-cares and probability of your child having access to a life changing tutor is very low.
I tried building an edtech venture frustrated precisely with these problems. Failed, but would def do it again with AI in the mix. I'm for one rooting for this to succeed!
> HN is showing (expected) dismissing attitude towards this idea. That tells me it might work :) !
I recently learned the name of this logical fallacy: Galileo gambit. It’s one of my pet peeves. Yes, we all know Dropbox was infamously dismissed by the top comment on HN. No, just because someone criticizes your project on here doesn’t mean it’ll be a big success.
Instead of fixing the education system and giving it the resources it deserves (eg paying teachers more like the other reply said) we’re going to “fix it” by ossifying a two tiered system where wealthy kids get individualized attention from well trained adults while poor kids are taught by AI.
I hear you, and I know every project being dissed here is not going to be Dropbox. Perhaps some projects deserve the reality check they get. Though I still believe that HN crowd telling that just pay teachers more or kids need to be taught by good human teachers are underestimating the scale of the problem.
Some real experience of school in my part of the world (India). My child goes to a somewhat costly private school. Still, each class has 35-40 kids. The teacher is over-worked : checking home work, prepares kids for upcoming random extra curricular activity, has to teach AI because someone suddenly thought it is important to teach it in grade 3. I know multiple teachers in that school who landed the job after doing just a 6 months course after a career break. Forget research on teaching, hardly any one of them read anything beyond curriculum. None of the teachers have enough time to give personalised attention to _any_ kid. Its a sorry state of affairs.
Personalised tutoring produced geniuses in last century but was affordable only for a wealthy few. It is my belief that AI might help democratise the idea. I know it is somewhat hard to think that a mere machine might have more patience and time to explain a concept 100 times to a student, instead of a human.
This still doesn't take away from the fact that teachers deserve to be paid more. I was a passionate for becoming a teacher, but knew I can't make enough money from it. I'm seeing a possibility in emerging markets that India / China might find it cheaper to deploy AI en masse for better educational outcomes because it will be much cheaper for the state than paying high wages (and subsequently pensions) to human teachers, however unfair it might look.
The Galileo gambit is the idea that because experts reject an idea, it must be true. HN is the furthest thing from experts when it comes to early childhood education.
-- When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
I love my parents but I don't think either of them have read a book in 50+ years now.
My mother kept a type of year book that each year I would say what I wanted to be when I grow up. I think in 5th grade I said physicist.
You know how they nurtured this curiosity? They did nothing. I don't think either of them even know what a physicist is beyond something to do with science.
I think in 6th grade I wanted a microscope that I eventually got but had no guidance on what to do , what to look at. I don't think I even knew there was this concept of "biology".
A huge number of kids have this same experience as I did right now.
What is even worse is life is ultimately a path dependent process with a huge part of the outcome based on the deterministic chaos of initial starting conditions.
No shit I would rather have my father be a particle physicist and my mother a librarian with a passion for reading non-fiction to kids.
My parents did the best they could but they are not intellectuals in the slightest and neither is the average person now. Claude would have been a god send to me in 5th grade.
That is the ideal solution. I'll tell you an incident that seems from a black humour novel. A state government in one of the highest populous state in India decided to make biometric attendance for government school teachers, to ensure they are in school. Large number of so called "teachers" started protesting against state, egged on by opportunistic opposition. Because many of them were drawing salaries from government and _not even showing up in school_. That's the ground reality of government funded education.
I'm open to the idea that market forces or reality _might_ tilt the favour in more investment in AI in education and tutoring. Think about developing economies or under developed economies of the world. The state / government has to think how should they allocate budget: on agriculture subsidies or pay teachers better or spend it on energy security in increasingly hostile multipolar world or invest it in infrastructure. There are no good answers.
> That's the ground reality of government funded education.
In India perhaps.
In Commonwealth countries such as the UK, AU, CA, NZ, etc. teachers being paid but not attending doesn't go unnoticed and would be part of an award (sick leave, paid vacation time, etc).
What I'm hearing from your anecdote is that in India the government is unable to track it's own employees.
Hello! I'm one of the main authors of the paper. Thanks for engaging with our work so thoughtfully – that's a very clear and valid question.
We didn't get around to addressing this within the paper itself – 80 pages is a lot, and deadlines, etc. But I have unpublished experiments that show that in a reasonably broad setting I'm doing some work in, verbalized probabilities are restoring a distribution that looks almost identical to the base distribution. It is not possible to demonstrate this on frontier models, since their public models are already mode-collapsed, and they don't share the base model or logprobs anyway. But I've established this to my personal satisfaction on large local models which offer base / post-trained pairs.
To share some intuition on why one might believe this is occurring: there are a bunch of tasks implicit in the pre-training corpus that encourage the model to learn this capability. Consider sentences in news and research articles like: "Scientists discover that [doing something] increases [some outcome] on [some population] by X%". It seems quite natural that the model might learn a pathway by which it can translate its base probabilities into the equivalent numeric tokens in order to "beat" the task of reducing loss on the "X%" prediction. I can even almost visualize how this works mechanically in terms of what the upper layers of an MLP would do to learn this, i.e. translating from weights into specific token slots. And this is almost certainly more parameter-efficient than constructing an entire separate emulated reality for filling in X. Although I'm not ruling out that the latter might still be happening – perhaps some future interp research might be able to validate this!
I'm actually working on a paper that packs up some of the above findings in passing. But if helpful in the meantime, this is also building on related work by Tian et al. 2023, "Just Ask for Calibration" [1] and Meister et al. 2024, "Benchmarking Distributional Alignment of LLMs" [2], that give some extra confidence here. Their findings indicate that whether or not they are rooted in the model's base probabilities, they seem to be useful for the purposes that people care about. (Oh, and you can probably set up an experiment to verify this independently with vLLM in a few Claude Code requests!)
Hope that was helpful – feel free to ping with follow-ups! (Although replies might be a little delayed, I happened to see this at a good time; having quite a crunchy week)
This is very funny to me. It took about a decade for them to receive a scientific name – because people were too busy eating them the whole time! The "note on the Bathynomus fishery" really makes the circumstances of this "discovery" quite clear.
Sadly, within the taxonomy itself the authors restrain themselves from sharing their findings on the most delicious parts and preparations of the animal. Darwin would have been disappointed [1], but at least as a species we've gotten our time down from 300 years [2].
Formal species are focused in the regions where formal biologists work. Outside of those regions, people don't care.
This paper appears to define the new species by physical characteristics, although it also remarks that differential characteristics within the new species "are regarded as intraspecific variation for the time being".
This isn't a question that people approach with any kind of rigor.
Compare the recent paper ( https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%282... ) finding that, despite obvious phenotypic differences, snail darters are "not a species but a subpopulation of the Stargazing Darter" because the authors couldn't find an obvious genetic difference.† Whatever your view of speciation is, it can't accommodate both papers.
† The claim that they must not be a "species" loosely implies that a genetic difference doesn't exist, or that what difference does exist "doesn't count". That second option is not a scientific claim. The first option is possible - it might be that, if you dropped eggs from other stargazing darters into the waters inhabited by snail darters, those eggs would develop into snail darters, with the phenotype being driven by environmental input. But I don't think that's especially likely. The phenotypic difference is more likely evidence that there is a genetic difference, and we just can't see it.
I'm quite curious, what are people doing with AI-powered browser automation at the moment?
This is such a new capability that I'm having a hard time getting a sense of interesting use cases. I'm quite sure this is more than just a shim for web services which don't expose APIs. But I also wonder whether LLMs are good enough to be trusted with more open-ended tasks at this stage.
Pretty wide variety of use cases tbh - everything from classic scraping on the very simple side to integrating with 3P services that don’t offer APIs, agentic QA testing etc
The companies we’ve seen automatic agentic workflows well typically send a bunch of context to the LLM and somewhat constrain the actions that the model can take. Actually works better than you’d expect :)
If the claim that the blogosphere is dying is true, does that imply the public intellectual commons is dying too? I suspect that while the cosyweb is more pleasant for most, this retreat might hinder vital testing and cross-pollination of ideas, and make it much harder for people to polarize into being intellectually active. For example, I've never been an active participant on ribbonfarm, but Rao's writing has made me a little smarter and inclined towards certain vectors of thought. And you can see ripples of his work in later writing by others.
What a shame it would be for this culture to be lost; while there's a lot of dross in the blogosphere, I don't know if the brightest jewels will still be possible in a future system of local, private, transient clusters of thought.
I would say it's dead. Killed by a change in cultural attitude to one that sees an opposing idea as a declaration of war. Retreat into private walled gardens seems like the only option.
Speaking as someone who went through this, running experiments with your diet is absolutely worth trying. It worked for me. There is actually a specific medical practice for this: look up "FODMAP". The idea is to temporarily cut out all likely suspects for a short period, see if that fixes things, and then gradually reintroduce them to identify the culprit. A gastroenterologist recommended this to me. It didn't help with my issues at the time as gluten is not covered by this cluster, but struck me as a very sensible approach.
In my experience the medical system is unusually useless and dismissive with digestive issues. I think this is probably related to how little it can do in this area. 10-15% of the US has IBS, and this is a disease of exclusion. That literally means that the medical system acknowledges a cluster of symptoms, but has no idea what is causing them or how to cure them. I can imagine that blaming patients is easier than the alternatives for some doctors.
Sorry, I didn't want to turn my original post into an essay, but I've already done low FODMAP and various other restricted diets for diagnostic purposes, without any noticeable shift in symptoms. Only bread and sugar seem to be correlated, and not strongly. To me it's a curious symptom rather than the root of the issue.
Have you looked into Mutaflor probiotics? It’s a beneficial E. Coli (seriously) that has research showing it can colonize the gut and clinically improve e.g. IBS symptoms. I’ve personally seen it solve (or significantly mitigate) issues for multiple people.
I wish the medical world would not consider a "syndrome" as a diagnosis. No, it's a symptom! Maybe that's all the information you have, but it's not an answer.
As for FODMAP--I've gone that route and gotten a few surprises. The origin of something can matter. The storage can matter.
Oh wow, I have the first half of this situation. I went through a period where my digestion was so bad that it was affecting my ability to function from day to day. I didn't get anything useful from my gastro; I even had a negative celiac antibody test. Eventually I started rigorously tracking everything I ate against my symptoms, and after a few months I was able to draw a strong correlation with gluten intake. From memory it was in the 0.7 range. The day I cut out gluten, a set of awful digestive symptoms completely left my life. They return any time I am glutened.
I was fortunate that over time I managed to return myself to full capacity, through reading a ton of research and running dozens of experiments like the above. But it was so damn hard. The symptoms reduced my ability to use my brain to fix myself. And if you're not a careful eater, it's not at all intuitive which foods contain gluten. This was also almost a decade ago while living in a developing country, so it wasn't even apparent that gluten might be a suspect.
I'm currently based in the US - does anyone know how one might get properly tested for chronic giardiasis, as a person who isn't themselves in microbiology? I almost certainly encountered poorly treated water in that period of my life.
Also - I can't help but suspect that a nontrivial percentage of the developing world is living below their full capacity due to something like this. Neglected tropical diseases are a horrendous category.
Note you can also check your genetic config.log to see if there was a -DALLOW_CELIAC flag in your source build.
Unfortunately your body's settings dialog is shit and does not show you whether or not that feature is set to on or off. But if you were built without that flag then you lack the code for the Celiac algorithm altogether and are good to go. (There may be other sensitivities to gluten, but at least nothing that corrupts your nutrient slurping event loop.)
For testing: As the article says, find a doctor that has experience with it and ask for an antigen test.
The below capacity thing can be very real, supposedly a different parasite in the us is responsible for people in southern us having the stereotype of lazy. In that case it could infect you through your feet from tainted soil. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-gave-the-so...
Thanks, I'm certainly going to try that. I was more asking if anyone has experience getting tests done properly in light of their low accuracy. From what I understand, an antigen test is still a stool test, meaning they are only 50% accurate. As a commenter on this post shared, managing the health system is challenging in this area. I just did a bit of googling, and found a couple of leads here:
> CDC recommends collecting three stool samples from patients over several days for accurate test results. Commercial testing products for diagnosing giardiasis are available in the United States. [1]
Perhaps running three tests is the standard of care, or if not one might advocate for this based on the CDC recommendation. And if dismissed, perhaps there are commercial products available at the consumer level.
Where I live, microbiologists work the diagnosis by examining stool through a microscope. Nowadays, though, doctors are lazy and just prescribe antiparasitaries without a diagnosis.
I was taught to suspect worms only in children and immunicompromised adults. And I never found the exception.
Depends on where you live. Parasites are utterly endemic in areas as close as a 30 minutes drive away from me. They are commonly found in patients of all ages, including otherwise normal functioning adults.
Depending on the epidemiology, testing a population is a waste of time and money. They have a very high chance of having the disease and a very high chance of reinfection even after treatment. So what happens is those patients come in every once in a while and they straight up ask for their periodic albendazole dose. And then they go back to their homes and they drink the exact same water and eat the exact same food.
For instance, a rapid covid test might have low sensitivity but high specificity. Meaning if it’s negative, you could still have the disease. But if it’s positive, you’re almost certainly sick. Ie the false negative rate is a lot higher than the false positive rate.
Technically a "rapid covid test" only detects the presence of certain viral genetic material. This usually means the patient is or recently was infected with SARS-CoV-2 (the virus) but it doesn't indicate anything about whether the patient has COVID-19 (the disease). Many infections are asymptomatic and thus not medically classified as a disease state.
This distinction might seem pedantic but it's important to be precise when discussing medical issues.
If you want to be precise… There are different types of “rapid COVID test”, the most popular of which detect antigens, not ‘viral genetic material’. PCR tests detect genetic material. Both tests seem to have differing levels of sensitivity to each variant of the virus.
I have a positive antigen test for celiac disease (I had 2 elevated antigens actually, both associated with celiac disease). The gastroenterologist told me I have celiac disease. Yet I've never experienced symptoms.
I stopped eating gluten and the associated antigens went down to normal levels. I don't feel any better or worse though.
The literature says there are false positives, and I've always wondered if might be one of them. I've searched celiac forums and I've never encountered anyone with a false positives diagnosis. Lots of false negatives or non-celiac gluten sensitivities though.
I do have the gene required for celiac disease, but most who have this gene do not have celiac disease.
... Take it from someone with celiac. You don't always feel it. I didn't for decades.
But it caught up with me. Really badly. And when I say badly, it nearly killed me. I got hypocalcima, and fuck me if it wasn't the most painful thing I ever endured. I've broken bones, etc. All that shit is child's play to every muscle in your body locking up and your body feeling like it is getting stabbed with needles all over. Thankfully once they give you calcium, it goes down. But... I was probably an hour or two away from dead, from asphyxiation.
I played with fire again, and caught it quicker the next time. But I had no concrete diagnosis. Now, I do.
Oh, as a bonus, I got the bones of an 85 year old woman with osteopenia.
Don't fuck with this shit internet stranger. Please.
Hearing this makes me want to keep on track. But I would like regular blood tests to find out if my nutrition absorption is improving. That would at least motivate me to keep eating this restricted diet.
Gluten can also trigger certain thyroid conditions, which can wreck havoc everywhere in the body, including the intestines.
IIRC, the problem is that gluten is similar to thyroid tissue, and for some people, the immune system will then attack the thyroid as well as causing trouble in the intestines where the gluten was found.
I can't speak for the US but a friend in the UK was recently diagnosed with giardiasis, not chronic though. As far as I can tell it was simply a routine check because of the symptoms. He didn't give me the impression that it was a difficult diagnosis to obtain. The medics reckoned that it came from a bag of contaminated salad leaves.
Here is a thought. If you're having difficulty finding proper testing, just have a doctor prescribe the treatment for giardiasis. After finishing it, you can test whether things are now better for you.
If you're in the US, I'm sure you can convince a doctor to help you. Since the treatment is not life threatening or a narcotic and just a course of antibiotics, you should have no problem.
>> can't help but suspect that a nontrivial percentage of the developing world is living below their full capacity due to related disease burdens, e.g. from this or other neglected tropical diseases.
WHO literally estimated 1 billion living people were infected with hookworm at some point throughout childhood. Once that happens in areas with poor food security to begin with your brain is likely fucked for life from stunted development due to childhood malnutrition.
Diminished capacity due to disease burden is definitely high.
I'd love to hear more about your experience with this platform. Is there any public information about this platform or research? How did you guys manage the bad behaviors that come with anonymity, like trolling?
I'm currently feeling out a little research project around the use of AI in improving group decision-making, specifically with the hope of improving our political systems. There are so few IRL case studies, it'd be great to have more intuition for this!
They've done a lot of work on at least two dimensions: (1) handling the nonstandard sounds and habits of speech of very early readers, who might be as young as four, and (2) connecting this to a specialized teaching system based on the science of reading, e.g. decodable readers.