Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and former Tesla AI director, has announced the launch of Eureka Labs, a new startup focused on providing generative AI-powered education courses. Eureka Labs aims to leverage AI technology to create an advanced learning platform that guides students through a comprehensive curriculum.
Karpathy’s vision for Eureka Labs stems from his extensive background in both AI and education. “My interest in education took me from YouTube tutorials on Rubik's cubes to starting CS231n at Stanford, to my more recent Zero-to-Hero AI series,” Karpathy shared on X (formerly Twitter). “While my work in AI took me from academic research at Stanford to real-world products at Tesla and AGI research at OpenAI. All of my work combining the two so far has only been part-time, as side quests to my ‘real job,’ so I am quite excited to dive in and build something great, professionally and full-time.”
Eureka Labs is described as a "new kind of school that is AI native." The startup’s flagship product, LLM101n, is poised to be "the world's best AI course" at the undergraduate level. This course will act as a smaller-scale version of the company's AI teaching assistant, offering online access and physical cohorts of students, although specific details about in-person classes have yet to be revealed.
The startup has already released two initial learner modules on its GitHub, which cover the basics of autoregressive language modeling by teaching how to build an n-gram language model.
“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),” reads Eureka Labs’ mission statement on their website.
Karpathy’s career has been marked by significant contributions to AI and education. He co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, and Ilya Sutskever, before joining Tesla in 2017 as the AI director. After leaving Tesla in July 2022 following the closure of the company’s San Mateo office, Karpathy returned briefly to OpenAI before departing again in February 2024 to focus on personal projects. His popular YouTube series, “Zero-to-Hero AI,” teaches viewers how to build neural networks from scratch.
Karpathy is now the third former OpenAI founder to launch a new AI startup within the past year. Elon Musk established xAI last summer to compete with OpenAI, and Ilya Sutskever launched Superintelligence Inc, a safety-focused AI startup, last month.
Eureka Labs aims to set a new standard in AI education, blending Karpathy’s expertise in AI and his passion for teaching to create a transformative learning experience for students worldwide.
