Austin Way

17y/o @AlphaSchool Building the next generation of Ed-tech that will reach 1 billion kids.

[Austin Way @Austin_Way]

@ArjunK100 @nateliason Congrats!!!

[Austin Way @Austin_Way]

A new study found that ~26% of teens reported feeling happier after using social media.

The teens self-reported their happiness levels, and the results could be attributed to complete randomness.

[Reuben Runacres @ReubenRunacres]

Social media isn't necessarily bad for everyone.

Only some teens are negatively affected by social media use. Some actually benefit from using social media.

[Austin Way @Austin_Way]

$10 budget each.

Hakiu 5.5 vs GPT-6 Luna.

Prompt: "Show off your motion graphics skills and build an educational video from this [script]"

[Austin Way @Austin_Way]

Jev grades essays as well as Opus 5.5, for a tenth of the cost.

I used both models to grade 36 AP (Advanced Placement) essays from College Board.

On average, Jev's score was 0.5 points from the AP graders' score. For Opus, it was 0.6 points.

In this test, Jev compared each essay to essays that had AP scores. For each pair, Jev answered yes or no to the question "Does this essay deserve the higher score?"

Jev grades an essay in approximately 0.3 seconds. Opus takes approximately 15.

Jev costs approximately $0.002 per essay. Opus costs approximately $0.02 per essay.

[Austin Way @Austin_Way]

@AugustCastilIo 🎊 Congrats!!!

[Austin Way @Austin_Way]

@futureofautos Normal Opus 5.5 w/ eleven labs voice.

“Use and show off your motion graphic skills.”

[Austin Way @Austin_Way]

ElevenLabs v4 is invaluable for the education industry.

Gone are the days when you couldn't effectively teach science and English with just voice models.

[ElevenLabs @ElevenLabs]

Introducing Eleven v4 and Eleven v4 Turbo, our fastest and most emotive voice models yet.

Ranked #1 by Artificial Analysis.

[Austin Way @Austin_Way]

@futureofautos Yes

[Austin Way @Austin_Way]

"AI tutoring encompasses lesson planning, text-based conversational tutoring, and practice problem generation." ... "Human tutors taught one-to-one in live video calls."

Could the AI results be summed up to students simply answering more practice questions?

[Curtis G. Northcutt @cgnorthcutt]

Today we establish that AI is as good as expert human tutors for immediate GRE learning gains (p=.015, n=2,383 students, study conducted July-Sep 2026).

One hour with an expert GRE tutor: $75.
One equivalent hour with an AI tutor: 7 cents .
918x cheaper, equivalent learning (p=.044, n = 140).

In 5 of 7 academic topics, the top AI tutor beat the expert human tutors on average.

How we measured it: pre-test -> 1 hour with (AI or human or no) tutor -> post-test.
There are no LLM judges. Learning gains are post-pre. Everything is real students.

Why we did this:
> 1 trillion USD is being spent per year on machines making machines better. StudentBench shows us how to shift these resources so machines also make humans better.

Why I did this:
I grew up in rural Kentucky. My dad, grandad, and great grandad were all mailmen. Getting into a good college changed my life. Now we have done a rigorous study to help AI labs evaluate LLMs and help show how bright AI can be for students of all incomes.

I believe in good science that leads to the democratization of opportunity.

The research paper behind StudentBench: https://t.co/JfkDDllP4i
Data, code, details: in this thread

If you're wondering what I'm selling, sorry to disappoint: we released all study data for free on Hugging Face, and made https://t.co/5G9L8yAxrt free to use. Enjoy.

lots more in the video / thread!!

[August @AugustCastilIo]

My school blocked the game I was playing so I made my own

This is Banana FPS (V.1)

[Austin Way @Austin_Way]

Jev has accelerated the timeline for personalized education by years.

The biggest bottleneck in building personalized education with AI is validating the quality of the material it generates.

For the courses I’m building, generating lessons is only ~5% of the content cost.

The other ~95% is validation and improvement.

One of the biggest costs is checking whether a lesson gives a student too much information to process at once, overloading their working memory.

Running that analysis across all of our content with frontier models gets incredibly expensive.

At our current scale, even if Astra used half as many tokens as Jev, it would cost us ~$250,000.

With Jev: ~$2,000.

I built the tool we’re using for the working-memory check and made it available here:
https://t.co/uHe9ysFxMt

[QuiverAI @QuiverAI]

Introducing Arrow 2

Our latest and most advanced models for generating precise, editable vector graphics.

Higher quality. Faster outputs. Available now in App and API.

[Austin Way @Austin_Way]

@AlexBarba Better than the average* expert. (Which is really just the stuff I could find online at this level)

[Austin Way @Austin_Way]

I tried 17,000 times to get AI to write at a first-grade reading level.

It failed every time.

So I fine-tuned a Qwen model that scores near-perfectly on reading-level benchmarks.

https://t.co/8gh2jWMfbN

[Austin Way @Austin_Way]

@iansamir18 No. I believe AI can do it, but not yet*

I talk about a solution in the attached article.

[Austin Way @Austin_Way]

“Have AI tutor you” is useless advice.

I tested 255 AI models, reviewing over 20,000 chats across 10 subjects.

AI’s ability to write at the requested grade level varies significantly by subject.

Despite the variation, the models never reliably hit the target reading level.
https://t.co/CrY0oSHbnj

[Austin Way @Austin_Way]

https://t.co/ffXjdsyWv8

[Austin Way @Austin_Way]

@ijfen "Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it."

[Austin Way @Austin_Way]

https://t.co/ffXjdsyWv8

[Austin Way @Austin_Way]

@tetheredtoed1 Regardless of the algorithm, this was consistent.

I used https://t.co/aOGDIbWmvr which includes Flesch–Kincaid grade level analysis (which is the one used in the above chart)

[les @lesgreys]

This should be required reading for everyone to understand the relationship between language and learning.

More so if you operate 1 or 2 degrees from education field.

[Wendy @teachthemx3]

Just going to leave this here.