OpenAI Co-Founder and Tesla AI Chief Unveil AI-Driven Education Startup

Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and former AI director at Tesla, is launching a new startup called Eureka Labs, which aims to revolutionize education through generative AI. Karpathy's vision for Eureka Labs includes an innovative AI-powered teaching assistant application designed to guide students through a comprehensive array of courses on a specialized learning platform.

"My journey in education began with YouTube tutorials on Rubik's cubes and led me to teach CS231n at Stanford," Karpathy shared on X (Twitter). "My career in AI has spanned academic research at Stanford, real-world product development at Tesla, and AGI research at OpenAI. Until now, my educational endeavors were side projects alongside my main career, but I am thrilled to commit fully to building something extraordinary."

Karpathy envisions Eureka Labs as a "new kind of school that is AI native." The startup's inaugural product, LLM101n, is positioned to be the premier AI course for undergraduate students. This course will serve as a streamlined version of the forthcoming AI teaching assistant feature. While the course will be offered online, it will also include physical cohorts of students; however, specific details about in-person classes are yet to be revealed.

Eureka Labs has already released two introductory modules on GitHub, focusing on the fundamentals of autoregressive language modeling and guiding learners on how to create an n-gram language model.

The mission of Eureka Labs is ambitious: “If we succeed, anyone will be able to learn anything,” the startup's website states. This initiative seeks to broaden education's reach, allowing a vast number of learners to engage with diverse subjects effectively.

Karpathy, who co-founded OpenAI alongside prominent figures such as Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, transitioned from OpenAI to Tesla in 2017, where he served as AI director, directly under Elon Musk. After leaving Tesla in July 2022, following the company's closure of an office and the termination of numerous data annotators focused on Tesla’s Autopilot system, he returned briefly to OpenAI. In February 2024, Karpathy departed again to dedicate time to personal projects, including launching his own series of educational AI videos titled “Zero-to-Hero AI,” where he instructs viewers on building neural networks from the ground up.

Karpathy's venture mirrors a growing trend in the AI landscape, as he is the third former OpenAI founder to establish an AI-focused startup over the past year. Following this trend, Elon Musk launched xAI to rival OpenAI last summer, while Ilya Sutskever recently introduced his own safety-focused initiative known as Superintelligence Inc.

Through Eureka Labs, Karpathy is set to make a significant impact in the field of educational technology, leveraging AI to unlock new possibilities for learners worldwide.