Andrej Karpathy, who directed artificial intelligence for Tesla and co-founded OpenAI, is launching startup Eureka Labs to build “a new kind of school that is AI native,” according to a July 16 social media post on the X platform.
Eureka is creating virtual teaching assistants powered by generative AI to bring top courses to vastly more students without sacrificing the personalized interactions typical of in-person learning. The startup’s ultimate goal is to bring elite educators and coursework to students throughout the world, regardless of barriers such as geography and language.
“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,” Karpathy said in the post. “However, with recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels tractable.”
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Eureka’s first product will be an undergraduate AI course called LLM101n. The course will guide students through the process of training an AI similar to the AI Teaching Assistant. Materials will be available online but will also include digital and physical cohorts, allowing students to progress through the course in small groups.
“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,” Karpathy explained.
Karpathy has extensive experience at the forefront of AI. He previously led the development of Tesla’s Autopilot autonomous driving technology before co-founding ChatGPT maker OpenAI, where he specialized in deep learning and computer vision.
“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 amount of subjects, beyond what may be possible today unassisted),” according to Karpathy.
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