OpenAI founding member, Tesla engineer Andrej Karpathy launches AI education startup, Eureka Labs

OpenAI founding member and former Tesla engineer Andrej Karpathy announced the launch of Eureka Labs, an AI-integrated education platform startup. This news comes just five months after Karpathy left OpenAI to “work on personal projects.”

Drawing on his extensive experience at AI powerhouse OpenAI and Tesla, Karpathy revealed in a post on X (formerly Twitter) that Eureka Labs aims to create “a new kind of school that is AI native.”

Eureka Labs‘ flagship product is LLM101n, an undergraduate-level course designed to help students train their own AI models. Karpathy describes it as “the world’s obviously best AI course,” guiding students through the process of training their own AI, akin to a scaled-down version of an AI teaching assistant. The course will be available online, with plans to offer both digital and physical cohorts.

“Eureka Labs is the culmination of my passion in both AI and education over ~2 decades,” Karpathy stated in his post. “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. My work in AI spanned academic research at Stanford, real-world products at Tesla, and AGI research at OpenAI. Combining these two passions has always been a side quest to my ‘real job,’ so I’m thrilled to finally focus on this full-time.” Karpathy said on X.

⚡️ Excited to share that I am starting an AI+Education company called Eureka Labs.
The announcement:

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We are Eureka Labs and we are building a new kind of school that is AI native.

How can we approach an ideal experience for learning something new? For example, in the case… pic.twitter.com/RHPkqdjB8R

— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) July 16, 2024

Karpathy envisions teachers using the Eureka Labs platform to design courses, with AI teaching assistants guiding students through the material. This approach leverages the surge in generative AI technology, popularized by ChatGPT since its launch in November 2022, to enhance digital learning content.

A veteran in the AI field, Karpathy was among the founding members of OpenAI in 2015. Two years later, Tesla recruited him to lead its Autopilot division, where he developed advanced driver assistance software. Karpathy, a former student of renowned Stanford AI scientist Fei-Fei Li, played a key role at Tesla before rejoining OpenAI. He has frequently discussed large language models as a new type of computer operating system.

Before his recent stint at OpenAI, Karpathy served as a senior director for AI at Tesla, contributing significantly to the company’s AI and driver assistance technology. Known for his pioneering work in AI, he has collaborated closely with Bob McGrew, OpenAI’s research chief, on various innovative projects.

Credit: Eureka Labs