Ex-OpenAI co-founder launches AI school

Andrej Karpathy, who co-founded OpenAI and was previously Tesla’s Director of AI has launched Eureka Labs, an AI research startup aimed at creating “a new kind of school”, built from the ground up, using AI

What will Eureka Labs do?

According to Karpathy, Eureka will build AI-powered teaching assistants (who will be modeled on real people, namely ‘elite educators’) designed to support (rather than replace) teachers and bring personalized, interactive courses and educators to students, worldwide, regardless of geographical and language barriers.

Why is Karpathy building this?

“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 8 billion of us on demand. However, with recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels tractable.”

Karpathy is passionate about both AI and teaching, having spent the last two decades in various AI and teacher-focused roles including teaching deep learning for computer vision at  Stanford University (which he left to co-found OpenAI) and a course he currently leads, about Neural Networks. He’s a firm believer that with his new approach, “anyone can learn anything” and is focused on expanding access to education.

“If we are successful, it will be easy for anyone to learn anything, expanding education in both reach (a large number of people learning something) and extent (any one person learning a large number of subjects, beyond what may be possible today unassisted)”

When will it launch?

Despite establishing that Eureka Labs is building AI teaching assistants, its first product will be a course, called LLM101n, which will teach students how to train their own AI models, similar to the teaching assistants the lab is building.

The course isn’t yet ready, and there’s no timeline for when it will launch and no evidence that they have tested or even finished building these AI teaching assistants yet. We don’t even know if they will be part of a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) or if they will be integrated into schools. Only time will tell, and perhaps a large part of the company’s direction will be down to whether Karpathy is funding this himself, or if he has secured a big AI investor.

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