First AI trained by qualified UK teachers

For the first time, an AI model has been fine-tuned to teach UK key stage 3 and 4 maths and English using national curriculum approved methods.

The 8B parameter Llama 3 model, released in April by Facebook-owned Meta, has been extensively tuned using 550,000 minutes of transcribed explanations from over 300 fully qualified UK teachers, who deliver tutoring on behalf of the online tuition company, TLC LIVE.

TLC LIVE were one of the first UK providers of online tutoring and continue to drive innovation within the tutoring space, with AI being the next step.

The model powers ‘Manda’, TLC LIVE’s AI tutor. ‘Manda’ is named after Manda Barnes, co-founder and director of TLC LIVE. It is currently undergoing testing with students.

‘Manda’ will tutor children studying the UK national curriculum wherever they are in the world and is priced at £10 a month per student (£100 for the year if they sign up for an annual account). Parents can sign up for access at tlclive.ai.

Simon Barnes, co-founder and CEO says: “We’ve always been passionate about supporting children with tutoring delivered by actual teachers – we know, and research shows, this is the best option.

“An AI will obviously never be able to replicate what a real-life teacher can deliver, and our existing work with schools across the UK will continue as usual with the same fully qualified teachers.

“But we saw an opportunity to offer high quality but relatively low-cost AI tutoring, using national curriculum approved methodologies, and decided we should build Manda to at least give parents a new option, amongst all the other AI tutors that have quickly sprung up over the last 18 months.

“We employ over 200 fully qualified UK teachers on a part time basis – they have tutored over 51,000 students and delivered almost 900,000 sessions. We removed all personal data from these session transcripts and used the explanations from our teachers to train the model.”

Josh Blackburn, COO at TLC LIVE notes: “Coincidentally we finished training Manda on the same day the government announced they were working on an AI to help teachers mark homework and produce lesson content. Education is a great use case for the tech, as there’s so much existing content available to train on.”

Manda generates text and code only and has a knowledge cut off date of March 2023. It is updated on an ongoing basis by TLC LIVE’s internal academic team, which continually improves its ability to explain questions to students. All student chats with the AI tutor are checked against a blacklist of prohibited terms and phrases and protected in an encrypted database.

Llama 3 was pretrained on over 15 trillion tokens of data from publicly available sources. Neither the pretraining nor the fine-tuning datasets include Meta user data and the model uses Llama Guard at a system level to protect users.

Barnes concludes: “Any AI can ‘tutor’, but Manda’s the first AI in the world to be trained by fully qualified UK teachers and we’re really proud of this!”