We imagine a world where your thoughts matter.

We live in an overwhelming world: breaking news is incessant, our inboxes are overflowing, and when it all feels like too much, we default to doomscrolling. Technology and global connection were supposed to empower humanity. But instead, it has trapped us, giving us too much information without enough time and space to truly process it.

The outcome was predictable, really. In a capitalist world, of course, production is king. Each technological innovation–including Artificial Intelligence–promises to revolutionize production before what society previously thought was humanly possible. The problem, though, is that society hasn’t dedicated equal amounts of interest, time, and resources to helping humans adapt to a rapidly evolving information landscape. The result? Well, how do you feel about the world we live in today?

Our backgrounds have equipped us with certain frameworks for teaching and learning that (we believe) have been immensely helpful in navigating this rapidly evolving technology landscape. With Scaffold, we hope to share this framework with others. Our goal is to turn the traditional theory behind building in AI on its head: instead of optimizing our model for answers, we have a more humble objective of guiding our model to ask interesting questions.

By “interesting questions,” we specifically mean questions that are (1) grounded in a topic that the user has identified as their focus and (2) meant to encourage users to think more about that topic than they had previously. The tone and structure of these questions reflect our philosophies towards teaching (facilitating critical thinking). But at the same time, we have taken steps to minimize the LLM’s appearance as human. In other words, we are very consciously building a digital tutor: a tutor, yes, but one that is distinctively non-human.

We appreciate that there are actors with far more resources, some of whom have already been building in this space. But we also recognize that, for these actors, critical thinking and human empowerment are not their end goals. That’s not the way that a for-profit company works. We are guided solely by a naive desire to make the world a better place. We’re former tutors and aspiring educators. We’re hoping that this perspective can get us somewhere.