AI has been causing problems for schools and educational institutions ever since ChatGPT first launched, but a new education startup is embracing AI rather than resisting it. Mere months after departing OpenAI, which he helped found, AI researcher Andrej Karpathy announced the launch of his new “AI+Education” startup, dubbed Eureka Labs.
Karpathy calls Eureka Labs a “new kind of school that is AI native,” with the express aim of developing a “Teacher + AI symbiosis” that will allow “anyone to learn anything.” He envisions an education system built from the ground up with AI as its core tenet, with human teachers developing lesson plans while being supplemented in the classroom by digital assistants.
⚡️ Excited to share that I am starting an AI+Education company called Eureka Labs.
The announcement:—
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
“In the case of physics, one could imagine working through very high-quality course materials together with [theoretical physicist Richard] Feynman, who is there to guide you every step of the way,” Karpathy wrote in his X post, echoing Steve Job’s sentiments from 1985.
“My hope is that, in our lifetimes,” Jobs told an undisclosed dinner party crowd at the time, “we can make a tool of a new kind, an interactive client … When the next Aristotle is alive, we can capture the underlying world view of that Aristotle in a computer. And someday a student will be able to not only read the words Aristotle wrote, but ask Aristotle a question. And get an answer.”
To accomplish this lofty goal, Eureka Labs plans to release LLM101n, an undergraduate-level course that teaches students how to build their own AI, in this case a pint-sized version of the company’s full-fledged AI Teaching Assistant. It plans to release the course online and to implement instruction cohorts, both digitally and physically, for people to take it together. There’s no word yet on what such a course could cost, when it will be available, or whether the company has yet studied the effectiveness of an AI-native teaching method. A 2022 study from Georgia State University suggests it could.
Eureka Labs is entering an already crowded field, one that has grown exponentially since ChatGPT’s initial release, and which UNESCO argues “has the potential to address some of the biggest challenges in education today, [and] innovate teaching and learning practices.”
Future AI-empowered learning aids could include AI-generated educational games, tailored specifically to each student’s learning style and needs, adaptive learning platforms, intelligent digital tutors, and automated grading and feedback systems.
Eureka Labs isn’t alone in its pursuit of AI-first education. Google announced Gemini for Classroom just last month and AI apps like Caktus are specifically designed with students in mind.
