From OpenAI to AI Native School: Andrej's Educational Ambitions
Andrej Karpathy initially worked at OpenAI as a research scientist, focusing on areas such as deep learning, reinforcement learning, and generative models. Under his leadership, the OpenAI team achieved a series of important research results. Later, in 2017, Karpathy joined Tesla as the head of AI for Autopilot, leading research in deep learning and computer vision for self-driving cars. His work at Tesla led to significant advances in image recognition, environmental perception, and decision-making for autonomous vehicles.
Throughout his career at Tesla and OpenAI, Karpathy has also been an educator. He currently leads an online course called "Neural Networks: Zero to Hero," helping students learn to build neural networks from scratch using code. Karpathy also has a YouTube channel where he regularly posts lectures on machine learning and AI. His popular content includes a course detailing backpropagation, a rewritten minGPT library, and a complete tutorial on building GPT models from scratch. These courses and materials will serve as the foundation for Eureka Labs' first product.
Although Eureka Labs' AI and founder Andrej are equally ambitious, the company actually starts from a more traditional teaching approach, aiming to use the latest advances in generative AI to create AI teaching assistants that can guide students through course materials. The company's vision is to combine high-quality course materials with AI tutors to create an ideal learning experience. This approach aims to address the scarcity of professional human tutors while providing personalized, on-demand education at scale.
First Product Will Be a College-Level Course
As described on the official website, the team defines Eureka Labs as an "AI-native school." It addresses the current problems of monotonous, homogeneous traditional learning experiences and teacher shortages by using AI to create an ideal learning experience for each student. Unfortunately, in the real world, passionate, excellent teachers with infinite patience and expertise in all world languages are very scarce and cannot personally tutor all 8 billion people in the world on demand. However, AI technology can largely overcome this difficulty. For example, in physics, students can learn high-quality course materials with Feynman, who will guide them every step of the way.
With the latest advances in generative AI, this high-quality and customized learning experience becomes easy and can greatly reduce the burden on teachers. Teachers are still responsible for designing course materials, but these materials can be supported, utilized, and expanded by AI teaching assistants during the production process, which are optimized to help guide students through the course. This teacher + AI symbiotic relationship can run the entire course on a common platform, greatly improving teaching efficiency. If Eureka can be successfully promoted, any student can easily learn any knowledge, thus expanding the educated population and knowledge domains.
Currently, Eureka Labs is developing its first product - the AI course LLM101n. This is an undergraduate course that guides students to train their own AI, very similar to a miniature version of the AI teaching assistant itself. In this course, the company will build a Storyteller AI large language model (LLM), and teachers will be able to create, refine, and interpret short stories with AI. The course content will also start with the basics, building a runnable web application similar to ChatGPT using Python, C, and CUDA, with minimal computer science prerequisites required. By the end, each student will have a relatively in-depth understanding of AI, LLMs, and deep learning. All course materials will be available online, but Eureka Labs also plans to organize online and offline team learning.
Andrej states that "Eureka Labs is the culmination of my nearly 20 years of passion for AI and education." Meanwhile, in response to a question on X about how he plans to monetize the company, Andrej said he hopes Eureka Labs will be a "self-sustaining enterprise," but at the same time, he doesn't want to "gatekeep educational content." This indicates Eureka Labs' business model: providing basic course materials free to all users while leveraging AI to offer advanced features and personalized learning experiences.
Insights Eureka Labs Brings to AI-Education Integration
Since the explosion of generative AI, the entire education industry has been debating what the goal of AI-assisted human education should be. Andrej suggests that AI can help everyone become more knowledgeable, just as "Eureka" means in ancient Greek - the wonderful feeling of understanding or realizing something. He wrote in another reply, "Our goal is to spark these moments in people's minds." Industry analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. also responded positively, pointing out that education is a very promising use case for AI because the industry desperately needs progress.
"The world is rapidly transforming into a knowledge-based society, but the process of knowledge transfer has hardly changed since Aristotle gathered knowledge under olive trees in Greece over 2,000 years ago." In an era of rapid information and knowledge explosion, artificial intelligence can greatly integrate into education, providing humans with rapid knowledge retrieval and personalized learning services, helping humans quickly learn knowledge while inspiring inspiration. Therefore, this comprehensive effect can both help students absorb a large amount of knowledge and help teachers reduce time costs while improving the quality of teaching materials, which can be described as "killing two birds with one stone."
Mueller states that Andrej provides a good example of AI application in education, as the technology has shown great potential in creating text, images, and videos, which are widely used in educational materials. "Some of AI's more advanced multimodal capabilities are also well-suited for classroom environments. For example, AI models can teach the same course to different types of learners while ensuring these students stay focused. Therefore, it's appropriate that Eureka Labs' first educational course will be about AI itself."
Eureka Labs inspires us that instead of worrying about traditional teachers being replaced by AI tools, practitioners in the education industry should boldly embrace AI technology, integrate it into the teaching design process, and use it well as a personal assistant, inspiration engine, and expansion tool. In this way, we can maximize the combination of human wisdom, creativity, and AI's technological advantages to reduce the burden on teachers, provide "teaching according to aptitude" for students, narrow the gap in educational equity, and thus provide high-quality, personalized educational services for all humanity.