Andrej Karpathy, the former head of AI at Tesla and a researcher at OpenAI, is launching Eureka Labs, a “native AI” learning platform. In tech parlance, that usually means building from the ground up with AI at its core. While Eureka Labs’ AI ambitions are high, the company is starting with a more traditional approach to teaching.
San Francisco-based Eureka Labs, which Karpathy registered as a Delaware LLC on June 21, aims to leverage recent advances in generative AI to create AI teaching assistants that can guide students through course materials.
Eureka Labs envisions AI assistants or characters working with a human teacher to allow “anyone to learn anything,” according to Karpathy, who Post news on XTeachers will still be the ones designing course materials, but they will be supported by this AI assistant. The startup doesn’t appear to have built or tested the effectiveness of integrating AI assistants into the classroom. At least, one project Georgia State University Study A study found that AI teaching assistants helped some students get better grades.
Karpathy’s involvement hints at a possible future where these assistants are based on real people — similar to Meta’s weird celebrity chatbots or Character AI Personal Chatbots. Posted on X, which was mirrored on Eureka’s new simple siteIt doesn’t provide much information about this new startup, such as whether this is just an open online course with a chatbot or whether this is a product that Karpathy wants to implement, for example, in high schools.
Karpathy did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for more information.
Along with the post on X announcing the news, Karpathy included what may be an AI-generated image of a futuristic school, complete with a spaceship-like building, solar panels everywhere (even on the ground) and a smiling girl with… are those three hands?
Although he said Eureka Labs aims to build AI teaching assistants, Karpathy also noted that the new venture’s first product will be an AI training course, LLM 101Nan undergraduate-level class that will help students train their own AI. This mini-tutor will be like a smaller version of the AI teaching assistant that Eureka Labs hopes to build and expand, according to Karpathy. The AI pioneer wrote on X, Eureka’s new simple siteThe course materials will be available online, and the startup will manage digital and physical groups of people who review the materials together.
The link to this AI course leads to a GitHub repository that points to a different type of course than Eureka Labs advertises — instead of “How to Build an AI Assistant,” the link leads to “How to Build a Large Language Model for Storytelling AI (LLM).”
Hand in hand, you will be able to [to] “Create, refine, and illustrate micro-stories with AI,” the text on the page reads. The course promises to teach aspiring AI students how to “build everything from the basics to a functioning ChatGPT-like web application, from scratch in Python, C, and CUDA, with minimal computer science requirements.”
Whichever course Eureka Labs intends to offer first, neither appears to be complete. A note posted on the GitHub page says the course will take some time to build and there is no specific timeline.
It’s also unclear whether Karpathy self-funded Eureka Labs or received investor backing, and what the startup’s business model is. There have been no public filings for any investments related to Eureka Labs. The startup’s LLC filing with the California Secretary of State was signed by Karpathy alone, and he did not disclose whether he was working with other prominent leaders in the AI sector.
Karpathy noted on X that Eureka Labs is the culmination of his passion for both AI and education over the past two decades. Karpathy taught deep learning for computer vision at Stanford University until 2015, when he left to co-found OpenAI. Two years later, Karpathy moved to Tesla to head the automaker’s AI team, where he led the computer vision team for Tesla Autopilot. Autopilot is Tesla’s advanced driving assistance system that relies on cameras to take in environmental data and then perform certain driving tasks like cruise control and automatic steering.
Karpathy left Tesla in 2022 and returned to OpenAI, where he led a small team involved in ChatGPT. In February, the scientist also stepped down from his role at OpenAI. In both cases, Karpathy insisted there was no drama or fallout leading up to his decision to leave.
Throughout his career at Tesla and OpenAI, Karpathy has continued to work as a teacher. He currently leads an online course called Neural Networks: From Zero to Hero It helps students learn how to build neural networks from scratch in code. Karpathy also has YouTube channel He regularly publishes lectures on the Master of Laws and Artificial Intelligence.