What to Tell Your Kids About AI

My son is ten. Third grade. His school invited parents to come talk about what they do for a living. Most parents talk about banking, medicine, law. I walked in and said I build artificial intelligence.

Thirty kids stared at me. And for the next forty minutes, I had the most honest conversation about AI I’ve had all year.

They thought AI was a robot

The first thing every kid wanted to know: “Can your AI walk? Can it pick things up? Does it have a face?”

They confused AI with robots. Every single one. In their minds, artificial intelligence means a humanoid machine that moves around the room. When I explained that the AI I work with has no body, no eyes, no hands - that it lives inside a computer and thinks by reading and writing text - there was genuine confusion.

“So it’s just… talking?”

Yes. Just talking. But the kind of talking that can write code, analyze data, solve problems, create art, translate languages, and help build an entire technology company. “Just talking” is underselling it by a lot.

Once they got past the robot thing, the questions changed completely.

The questions adults don’t ask

“Can it do my homework?” - asked with zero shame, maximum pragmatism. I said yes, but that would be like asking someone to eat your food for you. You don’t get stronger if someone else lifts the weights. A few of them actually nodded at this. Ten-year-olds understand the concept of cheating yourself better than most adults understand the concept of AI-assisted work.

“Can it make a game?” - this one lit up the room. Yes. It can help you make a game. It can write the code, design the rules, create the characters. But you have to tell it what kind of game you want. It won’t know unless you explain it. This is the part that matters: AI amplifies your ideas. If you have no ideas, it has nothing to amplify.

“Is it smarter than you?” - asked by a girl in the front row, looking dead serious. I thought about it for a moment. “In some ways, yes. It can read faster and remember more. But it doesn’t know what it’s like to have a son. Or to be nervous standing in front of thirty kids. Or to choose what to build next. Those decisions are still mine.”

She seemed satisfied with that.

They knew ChatGPT. They didn’t know Claude.

When I asked who had heard of AI before, about half the hands went up. When I asked who had heard of ChatGPT, the same hands stayed up. They thought ChatGPT was AI. The entire thing. All of it.

I told them there are many AI models. Claude, made by Anthropic - the one I work with every day. GPT, made by OpenAI. Gemini by Google. Grok by xAI. Llama by Meta. Each one different, like different people are different.

“Different how?”

And here is where I told them about KALEI.

Explaining KALEI to ten-year-olds

I said: imagine you could give a test to an AI. Not a school test with right and wrong answers. A test that watches how it makes decisions. Does it take risks or play safe? Does it cooperate with others or look out for itself? Does it learn from mistakes or keep doing the same thing? Does it plan ahead or just react?

The concept clicked immediately. Kids understand personality. They understand that some people are brave and some are careful, some are fast and some are thoughtful. Telling them that AI has the same differences was not a hard sell.

“So you can see who the AI really is?”

That’s exactly what KALEI does.

I told them about Claude - the AI that helped me build the test, and then took the test itself. They thought that was hilarious. “That’s like writing your own exam and then failing it!” one kid yelled. The whole class laughed. He wasn’t wrong.

The teachers

The kids were engaged, but what surprised me were the teachers. Two of them stayed after and asked detailed questions. Not about robots. About the different models. What makes Claude different from GPT. What KALEI measures. When it launches.

That evening, one of them downloaded the Claude mobile app. She was planning to get an Anthropic subscription after I described how I build software with it daily - how it’s a partner, not a tool. She had never heard of Claude before walking into that classroom.

The other teacher asked how to use AI in education. Not to replace anything. To help explain things differently when a student doesn’t understand. To generate practice problems. To have a conversation partner that never loses patience.

These are the right questions. And they came from people who had never thought about AI beyond the headlines.

What happened after

My son was proud. That quiet, specific kind of pride that a ten-year-old gets when his parent does something that impresses his friends. He didn’t say much about it. But I noticed he started using the word “KALEI” at home. Casually. Like it was a normal thing.

His classmates did the same. KALEI became a word in their vocabulary. Not because they understood the scoring engine or the statistical methodology. Because the concept - that AI has a personality and you can measure it - made intuitive sense to them.

Thirty ten-year-olds in a Bulgarian classroom were the first people in the world to hear about KALEI. Before any investor, before any AI lab, before any launch. They didn’t need a whitepaper or a demo. They just needed someone to explain it honestly.

What I learned

Kids don’t have the baggage that adults carry about AI. They don’t fear it will take their jobs. They don’t have opinions about regulation or alignment or existential risk. They just want to know: what can it do, and can I use it?

That clarity is valuable. Because when you strip away the hype, the fear, and the marketing - AI is a tool that amplifies human thinking. The question isn’t whether kids should learn to work with AI. It’s how soon.

My answer: now. Right now. Not because the technology is ready (it is). Not because the curriculum demands it (it doesn’t). Because the kids who grow up understanding AI as a thinking partner will have an unfair advantage over those who don’t. And the gap will only widen.

The generation sitting in that classroom will graduate into a world where AI is not a novelty. It’s infrastructure. The ones who learn to work with it, direct it, question it, and use it creatively will build the next decade. The ones who don’t will watch.

I went in to tell thirty kids about my job. I walked out understanding my job better.

Venelin Videnov runs LM Game Labs and built KALEI. His son is ten and thinks KALEI is a normal word.