Image: Andrej Karpathy website
The former Tesla executive said he wants to make it easier for anyone to learn anything using GenAI.
OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy has announced a new company called Eureka Labs that will enable students to study a wide variety of subjects through its AI platform.
The former director of AI at Tesla wrote in a post on X yesterday (16 July) that Eureka Labs will be a “new kind of school that is AI native” and where an AI teaching assistant will “help guide students” through course materials designed by real teachers.
“Unfortunately, subject matter experts who are deeply passionate, great at teaching, infinitely patient and fluent in all of the world’s languages are also very scarce and cannot personally tutor all 8bn of us on demand,” Karpathy wrote.
“However, with recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels tractable … This teacher [plus] AI symbiosis could run an entire curriculum of courses on a common platform.”
The idea is to make it easy for anyone to learn anything – expanding both reach and extent, meaning that a large number of people will be able to learn a single subject and, equally, an individual person will be able to learn a large number of subjects.
Karpathy is a computer scientist by background who founded OpenAI along with Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk and others back in 2015. Around the same time, he received a PhD in computer science from Stanford University.
Karpathy went on to lead artificial intelligence and autopilot technology at Tesla in 2017, leaving the company in 2022. He then returned to OpenAI for a year, leaving the company in February this year to work on personal projects.
He said at the time that his decision to leave the company is “not a result of any particular event, issue or drama”.
“Actually, being at OpenAI over the last year has been really great – the team is really strong, the people are wonderful, and the roadmap is very exciting, and I think we all have a lot to look forward to,” Karpathy wrote on X.
“My immediate plan is to work on my personal projects and see what happens. Those of you who’ve followed me for a while may have a sense for what that might look like.”
What that looks like is an AI course titled LLM101n that will be the first product at Eureka Labs, according to Karpathy’s latest post. LLM101n is pitched as an undergraduate-level class that guides students through training their own AI, like a smaller version of the AI teaching assistant itself.
“The course materials will be available online, but we also plan to run both digital and physical cohorts of people going through it together,” Karpathy wrote. “Today, we are heads down building LLM101n, but we look forward to a future where AI is a key technology for increasing human potential. What would you like to learn?”
Karpathy has been passionate about education and AI for a long time. He has previously made YouTube tutorials on Rubik’s cubes, started a course on deep learning at Stanford, and most recently, created a video series on building neural networks in code from scratch.
“All of my work combining the two so far has only been part time, as side quests to my ‘real job’, so I am quite excited to dive in and build something great, professionally and full time,” he wrote. “It’s still early days but I wanted to announce the company so that I can build publicly instead of keeping a secret that isn’t.”
Find out how emerging tech trends are transforming tomorrow with our new podcast, Future Human: The Series. Listen now on Spotify, on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
