TLC LIVE’s new AI tutor, Manda, is now available for students studying the UK national curriculum for only £10 a month.
Manda is the first AI model to be trained 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 are 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 begin tutoring children from today 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.
Josh Blackburn, CEO of TLC LIVE says: “We are pleased to announce that Manda is now available to students across the county, and the world. By training Manda on national curriculum approved methods and content, we are confident that our AI is now the most reliable and affordable tutor on the market, as well as being the first AI in the world to be trained by fully qualified teachers.
“While AI will never replace the work of a real-life tutor or teacher, we are passionate that Manda will serve as a great learning resource for young people studying the UK national curriculum.
“The government’s announcement to introduce AI into schools to alleviate teacher admin and allow more time for teaching is in total alignment with TLC’s approach to support teachers and educators across the UK
Manda generates text and code only and has a knowledge cut-off date of March 2023, with plans already in place to introduce a Manda 2.0 later this year. 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 Amazon Bedrock Guardrails to protect users.
The fine-tuning and platform development was handled by the AI team at Definition.
