OpenAI Co-Founder Andrej Karpathy Announces Eureka Labs, an AI Education Startup

Andrej Karpathy, a renowned artificial intelligence educator, former head of AI at Tesla, and founding member of OpenAI, has announced Eureka Labs, a new startup aimed at creating “a new kind of school that is AI native.” Karpathy says Eureka Labs’ first course will teach students how to create their own large language model, or LLM.

In a post on X, Karpathy wrote that one of the most enduring problems with education is that there is a dearth of “subject matter experts who are deeply passionate, great at teaching, infinitely patient and fluent in all of the world’s languages,” but then added that recent advancements in generative AI could make it possible for the world’s best teachers to massively scale up their programs.

Karpathy outlined a process that would see teachers design materials for a class, which are “supported, leveraged and scaled,” by a generative AI-powered teaching assistant that can guide students through the course. “If we are successful,” wrote Karpathy, “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).”

Karpathy is well-known for his lengthy YouTube videos in which he explains the ins and outs of how language models work and walks aspiring engineers through how to build their own language model. He also designed the first deep-learning class at Stanford University.

As such, Karpathy said that Eureka Labs’ first offering will be “the world’s obviously best AI course, LLM101n.” Karpathy described the course as an undergraduate class that guides students through the process of training their own AI. The materials will be available online, but Karpathy anticipates running in-person classes as well.

Karpathy wrote that Eureka Labs “is the culmination of my passion in both AI and education over ~2 decades.” Responding to a question about the company’s name, Karpathy said that his goal is to help everyone experience that “eureka” moment of understanding something, and he added “Labs” to the title because “Eureka all by itself is taken… and I always wanted a lab.”