Our manifesto

To me, the answer is simple. So many of the world’s problems are anchored in our failure to educate, and to imagine what education could mean...

Growing up, I went to a large, public US high school with a poor graduation rate. And what I remember there is a kind of constant, pervading sense of futility, that they're going through the motions of a system that doesn’t serve them. I've met intelligent, motivated, hardworking young people who feel like there's no place for them in the future.

Have we forgotten what a human being is capable of? What an individual, well-trained and well-educated, ready to learn, work, produce, grow, can become? We are wasting an unimaginable amount of human capital. As a nation, as a species, we are failing to develop our most valuable asset: human beings.

For us as a society, it's an unforgivable failure of imagination to believe that there is no value in humanity. We have a solar system to explore, a sun to harness, atoms to fuse. We need our human beings, we need them educated, we need them incentivized, we need them ready to take what may be the most magical technology ever invented and transform it into inventions we cannot even imagine.

This is why we are building Aristotle. What you see today isn’t yet the end state, but it’s a glimmer. Today, Aristotle is a personal tutor, lovingly crafted, designed to deliver knowledge in the best way humanity knows how. Thousands of students have learned from Aristotle, studying math, science, literature, and, yes, SATs.

But we're preparing for the future that we know is coming — shaping our harnesses, scaling our methods. Like any great Socratic system, our product is a question just as much as it is an answer. How will our children learn, if not in the impersonal systems of today? Can we — me, you, all of us — dream up something greater for Aristotle to become?