A Pittsburgh ed-tech company is leaning into its 25 years of proprietary data collection to serve as the large language model behind its new generative AI-powered math tutor, which has been trained to think like the students it'll help instruct.
Carnegie Learning, based downtown, said its LiveHint AI math tutor is geared toward students taking middle school- and high school-level math classes. It's built on insights from the 5.5 million students who have worked to solve more than 1.3 billion math problems over the years.
Steve Ritter, chief scientist and one of Carnegie Learning's co-founders, led the product development efforts. He began his career as a cognitive scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, which is also where Carnegie Learning spun out as an initial research project over two decades ago.
"It's with immense pride that we introduce LiveHint AI today," Barry Malkin, CEO of Carnegie Learning, said in a statement. "Over 25 years of research and development have shown the unparalleled ability of AI to cultivate students' conceptual understanding, and I'm eagerly anticipating the role LiveHint AI can play in transforming education."
The edtech company is the latest to join a growing list of Pittsburgh-based tech firms that have used their propriety data sets to build platforms powered by generative AI — tech that can produce compelling text, images and other media following a user prompt.
Near the end of November 2023, East Liberty-based opinion analytics and polling platform CivicScience Inc. launched a new AI product for customers using its own dataset of nearly 600,000 poll questions and subsequent five billion responses.
In October 2023, Gecko Robotics Inc. unveiled its Cantilever product that allows its customers to have easier access to the information that's obtained by Gecko's infrastructure-scaling robots. Cantilever presents these customers with options on how to best prioritize repairs across a set of assets given the information it compiles from these robotic scans.
And in May 2023, Duolingo CEO and Co-Founder Luis von Ahn said on a company earnings call that the language learning platform is using AI to create educational content at a faster and cheaper pace than before. That's saving time across the company's roughly 600-person workforce, and it's leading to a better product for its users, von Ahn said.
