First AI tutor Manda powered by Meta’s Llama 3 and trained by UK teachers, launches for secondary students

TLC LIVE has introduced Manda, an AI tutor developed to teach key stage 3 and 4 maths and English in line with the UK national curriculum. 

Powered by Meta’s Llama 3 model, Manda was trained on over 550,000 minutes of transcribed tutoring sessions from 300 fully qualified UK teachers who work with TLC LIVE, an online tutoring company.

Manda aims to offer affordable AI tutoring to children wherever they are, with pricing set at £10 per month or £100 per year. 

TLC LIVE’s CEO, Simon Barnes, discussed the rationale behind creating Manda: “We’ve always been passionate about supporting children with tutoring delivered by actual teachers – we know, and research shows, this is the best option.”

Barnes noted that Manda is intended to complement, rather than replace, traditional tutoring. “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,” he said.

Barnes continued, “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.”

TLC LIVE employs over 200 part-time, qualified UK teachers, who collectively have tutored more than 51,000 students. This vast experience informed Manda’s development, with all session transcripts anonymised before being used to train the AI model.

Coinciding with the government’s announcement of an AI initiative to assist teachers in marking and lesson planning, the launch of Manda highlights the role of AI in educational settings. 

“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,” said Josh Blackburn, COO at TLC LIVE. “Education is a great use case for the tech, as there’s so much existing content available to train on.”

Manda is designed to be a secure tool. The AI model only generates text-based responses and does not provide interactive functions beyond text. TLC LIVE’s academic team regularly updates Manda, improving its capacity to explain questions and ensure accuracy. 

To maintain a safe environment for students, all interactions with the AI are checked against a blacklist of prohibited terms and stored in an encrypted database.

The Llama 3 model that underpins Manda was pre-trained on over 15 trillion tokens of publicly available data. To protect user privacy, neither Meta user data nor personal information from TLC LIVE sessions were used in Manda’s training, and the AI incorporates Llama Guard for additional security measures.

Speaking exclusively to ETIH, Barnes said: “While AI in education is still evolving, Manda stands out by offering real, qualified teacher-led education, not just automated or data-driven answers. Moving forward, we’ll continue to refine it, ensuring it supports and enhances the role of human teachers.