Essential Skills for Kids in AI Era
Cultivating social-emotional skills in children as AI disrupts traditional knowledge monopolies.
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Oct 27, 2026
- Joe Liemandt Alpha treats motivation and measurable life skills as core product features. Liemandt reports that 50% of students prefer school to vacation and argues that “the key to your child’s happiness is high standards.” Third …
- The a16z Show Liemandt expects students to become major suppliers of learning software within two years. AI accelerates acquiring expertise and building products; he cites a student-built AP curriculum whose participants all scored 5. Biyani’s …
Oct 22, 2026
Sep 27, 2026
- 于红 At the peak of the AI boom, 于红 walked away from an eight-figure carry and a 15-year investing career spanning China Renaissance, GGV and Meituan Longzhu to build a children’s SEL education business, guided by the logic that “investing is about the next 10 years, while education is a model for the next 20 or 30.” The trigger was a 2023 conversation in which she was asked about her life mission and “cried uncontrollably”; she concluded that AI would …
- Her answer to what children should learn in the AI era is a framework rather than a conclusion: rank subjects by the Lindy effect—Chinese language > English > math > coding—because “coding probably won’t need to be learned.” Chinese is not just knowledge but the ability to think and understand the world, even the foundation for interacting with AI; English still …
- Her decision to build in SEL was a classic white-space-market call: homework platforms such as Zuoyebang, Yuanfudao and Sparks are already throwing thousands or tens of thousands of people at Chinese, math and English, while the lack of social-emotional ability is “already an extremely serious problem in China today”—important, and largely unaddressed. UNESCO’s statistics on non-academic competencies put SEL at two-thirds of the total; overseas systems have taught it for nearly 30 years. …
- On “good schools,” she brings contrarian data: Hengshui High School’s Tsinghua and Peking admissions fell 70% this year, which she attributes to its no-poaching rule; overseas research she cited suggests that for students with similar rankings, attending a “good school” may produce a negative long-term effect, although she admitted she had not examined the specific reasons closely. Shangdi Primary School’s strong placement rates, she says, are partly explained by high-IQ software engineers sending their children there. …