Former OpenAI And Tesla Engineer Launches New AI Education Startup

Computer engineer scientist Andrej Karpathy—former researcher at OpenAI and head of AI at Tesla—launched a new company, Eureka Labs, an AI-native educational platform.

Karpathy announced it on X this Tuesday and explained that Eureka Labs will be a new educational approach built with AI. In its new AI-powered platform, teachers will design their courses and AI teaching assistants will help students navigate the content, enhancing the learning experience in massive open online courses.

According to Reuters, Karpathy was one of the founding members of OpenAI, back in 2015, and was later hired by Tesla as director of AI and autopilot vision to help build driver assistance software. The computer engineer received a PhD from Stanford University and has been working on educational content of his own like teaching how to solve Rubik’s cube, and more on his YouTube channel.

“While my work in AI took me from academic research at Stanford to real-world products at Tesla and AGI research at OpenAI,” Karpathy explained in his post, “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.”

Karpathy shared his enthusiasm and described Eureka Labs as a project that combines two decades of this work and passion for AI and education.

The first product on the new platform will be “LLM101n”, an undergraduate-level class that will help students train their own AI models. The course products will be available online but Karpathy explained that they also hope to gather virtual and in-person groups to go through the program together.

The course description, available on GitHub, states: “We are going to build everything end-to-end from basics to a functioning web app similar to ChatGPT, from scratch in Python, C, and CUDA, and with minimal computer science prerequisites. By the end, you should have a relatively deep understanding of AI, LLMs, and deep learning more generally.”