Ex-OpenAI researcher to start new company focused on AI teaching assistants

Based on Karpathy’s post on X, it appears that Eureka Labs will build AI teaching assistants that will work together with human teachers.

“The teacher still designs the course materials, but they are supported, leveraged and scaled with an AI Teaching Assistant who is optimized to help guide the students through them. This Teacher + AI symbiosis could run an entire curriculum of courses on a common platform,” Karpathy said.

⚡️ Excited to share that I am starting an AI+Education company called Eureka Labs.
The announcement:

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We are Eureka Labs and we are building a new kind of school that is AI native.

How can we approach an ideal experience for learning something new? For example, in the case… pic.twitter.com/RHPkqdjB8R

— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) July 16, 2024

He also indicated that the AI teaching assistants could be modeled on famous personalities. “For example, in the case of physics one could imagine working through very high quality course materials together with [Richard] Feynman, who is there to guide you every step of the way,” the startup founder explained.

Karpathy further revealed that Eureka Labs will be ‘AI native’, meaning that generative AI will be a core part of the education platform as opposed to one that’s retrofitted with AI features.

However, before it is able to ship AI teaching assistants to classrooms, Eureka Labs is looking to launch its first product called LLM101n. It is an undergraduate course for those interested to learn about training their own AI models and will reportedly be a small-scale version of what Eureka Labs aims to do.

Who is Andrej Karpathy?

Though Karpathy has worked at prominent tech firms such as Tesla and OpenAI, his roots lie in teaching. Until 2015, he taught deep learning for computer vision at Stanford University in the US. Later, he became a founding member of OpenAI but left the non-profit after two years to head up Tesla’s AI department. During his tenure with the autonomous car manufacturer, Karpathy led the team building computer vision for Tesla Autopilot.

In 2022, he returned to OpenAI and worked on developing ChatGPT successor GPT-4 but his second stint ended in February this year. The 37-year-old has launched an online lecture series that teaches students how to build neural networks from scratch. “Eureka Labs is the culmination of my passion in both AI and education over ~2 decades,” Karpathy said.