Diego Salvatierra

California

AI products, a startup and a big tech classroom. San Francisco and Los Angeles, 2021 to now.

A parent guide for any YouTube video, in minutes

Patent pending · USPTO 63/929,523

Common Sense Media · 2025 to now · Inventor and product lead

YouTube and TikTok now take more than half of young kids' viewing time, far more than any team of editors can review. I invented a multimodal engine that reads a video's frames, audio and transcript against 20 years of Common Sense rubrics, then returns a parent guide with every concern timestamped.

It has gone live in the Common Sense Media app, which has 300,000 users, and I refined it through rounds of parent feedback.

"I just can't trust YouTube to have the same mind I do as a parent."Parent in our user research

Parents' Guide to YouTube: search any video or creator, an explainer on overstimulation, and trending videos with age ratings and findings. — The next version, in design: paste any YouTube link, get an age rating and what we found.

The MrBeast analysis featured in the Common Sense Media app feed. — Live in the app today.

Mobile review: target audience age 10+, a selector for your own kid's age, and findings by category with intensity bars. — Guidance adapts to your own kid's age.

High stimulation videos like Cocomelon next to low stimulation videos like Bluey, each with a chart of frame-to-frame flicker. — Attention capture: Cocomelon's frames change far faster than Bluey's.

Productized cutting-edge academic research on overstimulation for kids

Some of the most-watched kids' videos have nothing a content rubric would flag. I launched a partnership with UC Berkeley's Kidd Lab to turn their research on flicker, the brightness change between frames they link to overstimulation, into a parent-facing product.

30 millionFamilies Common Sense reaches

300,000Users of the app where the analyzer runs

Fast Features: AI-built apps, shipped safely inside a legacy site

Common Sense Media · 2026 · Architecture and product lead · See one live

AI can draft an interactive app in minutes. Getting it onto a large Drupal site with tens of millions of users used to take a full weeks-long release cycle.

I designed Fast Features to close that gap. Each app runs sandboxed in its own frame and talks to the site through one small API for sign-in, saved data and outside services. Engineers and product managers can ship an app without a Drupal release.

On top of it sits Puglet Studio, which turns a parent guide into a quiz, video, checklist or chat. Editors fix copy in Google Docs, it syncs back, Claude checks it against house rules, and it ships as a pull request.

Quizzes, videos, chat simulations and planners now ship this way, without waiting on a platform release.

commonsensemedia.orgLegacy Drupal site, 20 million visits a year

Fast FeatureAI-generated app, sandboxed in its own frame. Plain web code, no platform access.

⇄window.ff⇄

Sign-inThe user's existing session

Records and stateSaved per user and per placement

Outside APIsCalled server-side, keys never exposed

Puglet StudioParent guideAI draftCopy deck in Google DocsHouse-rule checkPull requestPublished

First Phones: is your kid ready for their first smartphone? — First Phones readiness check

Text-back simulation: reply to your kid's texts. — Practice texting your kid

What a pediatrician wants you to know about AI, a video with Dr. Jenny Radesky. — A pediatrician on AI

Captioned video with chapter chips. — Video with chapters

Two Truths and AI: spot which movie posters were made by AI. — Spot the AI poster

Family Tech Planner: choose your kid's age group. — Family Tech Planner

Say: a Scratch for language learning

Founder and CEO · 2022 to 2024 · Still live at getsay.app

Complete daily challenges to keep your streak: home screen in Chinese with streak and daily challenges.

Chat with the Buddy, your AI tutor: a German conversation with suggested replies.

Get instant pronunciation feedback: a Korean sentence scored word by word.

Save phrases for when you need them: the phrasebook, grouped by topic.

Confused? The Buddy explains: a French reply broken down word by word.

Say brings constructionist learning, the idea behind MIT's Scratch, to languages. You pick the words you want, build your own sentences, and use them in conversation with an AI Buddy.

In 2022, months before OpenAI offered a speech API, I ran Whisper on our own Google Cloud servers to score pronunciation word by word. I wrote most of the code, raised an angel round and led five contractors. Cohort analysis showed where learners dropped off; daily challenges and push notifications doubled retention.

An MCP server that puts live lessons inside Claude

Winner, CodeAI edtech hackathon · 2026 · Team of six · Try the app

Our product reads real academic standards from the Learning Commons knowledge graph over MCP, then builds lessons out of hands-on widgets.

Why we won: an MCP server of our own, built with MCP Apps. A teacher asks Claude for an activity and a live functional widget renders right in the chat, scoring what a student types against the real standard.

Our key innovation was MCP UIs within Claude and ChatGPT for these interactive activities, which themselves take in the Learning Commons MCP.

Make me a draft meter for RH.6-8.1

show_widget(standard: "RH.6-8.1", kind: "draft-meter")

Pathway builder: type a topic and grade, then build a pathway. — Type a topic, pick a grade.

A generated practice step: put the steps for comparing fractions in order. — A generated practice step.

Draw the Curve: the student's guess under the real story arc. — Draw the Curve: guess, then see the real arc.

Teaching at Snap

Snap Inc. · Los Angeles · 2022 to 2024

I co-designed and taught the Snap Engineering Academy, Snap's full-stack program at its LA headquarters that helps underrepresented developers break into tech.

I also built Lens Studio courses on augmented reality for Snap's developer community.

Chile

Innovation lead at the Ministry of Education, 2018 to 2021, and AI safety advocacy today.

Connecting schools no one could connect

Ministerio de Educación · Conectividad para la Educación 2030 · US$200M · Co-founded the innovation center and led a four-person team

For ten years, government tenders had failed to bring Internet to Chile's most remote schools. Carriers bid on the easy ones and skipped the rest. I redesigned the tender to bundle large urban schools with rural ones in the same contracts, so winning the easy schools meant connecting the hard ones too.

Working with carriers, school districts and the Telecommunications Ministry, we activated 9,000 schools in three months and reached 95% of public schools.

A cell antenna on a hill at dusk in rural Chile.

AI chatbot limits for kids, proposed in Chile's Congress

Chilean Chamber of Deputies · 2026 · Expert testimony for Common Sense Media · Bill 18246-18, vote expected 2027

Diego testifying over video to a committee of Chile's Chamber of Deputies.

I testified to the Chamber's science and technology committee and, with Common Sense Media's advocacy team, helped write limits on AI chatbots for minors into Bill 18246-18. I collaborated directly with Chilean Congressman Schalper on the bill, impacting 4 million kids in Chile.

If it passes, they will be the first such rules in Latin America, and four more countries are already debating similar bills.

Poster for the Ministry's free Google for Education teacher workshops.

Remote teaching during COVID

Trained tens of thousands of teachers in remote teaching on a shoestring budget, the Ministry's most popular online offering ever.

A small offline content server next to a laptop.

Offline Internet for rural areas

For rural schools with no connection, devices carrying Khan Academy, PhET and a digital library.

User journey of a school director adopting project-based learning.

Project-based learning program

Created a national program that helps teachers design project-based learning. More from the Ministry

China

Yale-China teaching fellow in Changsha, Hunan, 2015 to 2017.

Two years at Yali Middle School

I taught English and public policy to high schoolers at one of Hunan's top public schools. It's where I learned Mandarin and decided to work in education.

Diego with his students at Yali Middle School in Changsha.

Broad Town in Changsha: the P8 building next to the smiling pyramid.

Academia Impulsa 智行学社

I founded a summer academy for 120 high school students from rural Hunan, held at Broad Town's P8 building in Changsha. Students learned soft skills and social innovation, taught in English and Chinese.