In his recent keynote address at the UC Berkeley AI Awards Hackathon, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy advised students not to give up on their passion projects. Little did the world know that he would shortly convert his decades-old passion for AI and education into a company called Eureka Labs.
“It’s a new kind of school that is AI native, combining generative AI with traditional learning methods,” said Karpathy.
Explaining the logic behind the name, Karpathy said, “Eureka (from Ancient Greek εὕρηκα) is the awesome feeling of understanding something, of feeling it click. The goal here is to spark those moments in people’s minds,” explained Karpathy, reflecting on the name. “Labs because Eureka all by itself is taken… and I always wanted a lab.”
The former OpenAI researcher said that there is a dearth of teachers in the field, and with his new startup, Eureka Labs, he is looking to address the challenge.
“Subject matter experts who are deeply passionate, great at teaching, infinitely patient, and fluent in all of the world’s languages are also very scarce and cannot personally tutor all 8 billion of us on demand.”
He believes that generative AI will enhance the learning experience. “The teacher still designs the course materials, which are then supported, leveraged, and scaled with an AI Teaching Assistant optimised to guide the students through them,” he elaborated.
Personalised AI assistants are going to be a thing in the future. If we extend that idea to education, soon we might also get personalised AI tutors who teach students according to their requirements and understanding capabilities.
The founder of Khan Academy, Salman Khan, recently echoed similar sentiments, saying personal tutors are a necessity. “Alexander the Great had Aristotle as his personal tutor,” he added, saying generative AI will do the same for every student globally. “That’s what world-class looks like.”
Last year, Khan Academy launched Khanmigo, a personal tutor and teaching assistant powered by GPT-4. This academic year, 65,000 students and teachers piloted Khanmigo across school districts in the US.
“It acts just like Aristotle or Socrates would with their students and works across every subject that Khan Academy offers. It has all the context that the student would normally have on Khan Academy, and it also acts as a teaching assistant for teachers,” said Khan.
“It remembers the conversation you’re having. It also remembers some of the work that you’ve been doing on Khan Academy,” he added.
Khan said that the focus for Khan Academy is on how well it can provide personal support for teachers and students. “With the new generation of models such as GPT-4o, we have come up with a thesis: a tutor for every student and a teaching assistant for every teacher.”
Most recently, Khan Academy partnered with Microsoft to use Phi-3 to build AI maths tutors. Similarly, earlier this year, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Edu, a version of ChatGPT built for universities to responsibly deploy AI to students, faculty, researchers, and campus operations.
“I have a roommate who is a weak non-native English speaker. However, he needs to write and submit scientific papers in English. He uses the “pro” version of ChatGPT to improve his written English. He said it is like having a 1:1 English language tutor because he gets nearly instant feedback when trying to rewrite a sentence or paragraph,” posted a user on Hacker News.
In India, edtech startup Physics Wallah recently launched Alakh AI, featuring AI Guru—a 24/7 personalised tutor and assistant. AI Guru caters to diverse queries, from academic to non-academic, product-related, and support issues, delivering responses in text and video formats tailored to each student’s needs.
“AI could be a much more effective tutor — at a cost substantially lower than a human tutor,” posted a user on Hacker News. Personalised AI tutors will solve Bloom’s Sigma 2 problem. Bloom’s research found that students who were taught one-on-one or in small groups and received regular feedback performed 2 sigma better than their peers who received traditional classroom instruction.
Musk’s private school, Ad Astra, which he created for his children, gives a rough idea of how the future will look. It is built inside the SpaceX campus and has partnered with Synthesis, founded by Joshua Dahn. Synthesis has created an AI tutor that teaches students complex concepts of maths through personalised games and AI tools.
Is the Idea Feasible?
One of the most common challenges that an edtech startup faces is monetisation. However, Karpathy has clarified that he does want Eureka Labs to be a proper, self-sustaining business, but at the same time, he also really doesn’t want to gatekeep educational content.
“My default thinking is that the content itself is free and permissively licensed, the revenue comes from everything else, e.g., running the digital/physical cohorts working through the materials together,” he said.
Coursera, co-founded by Andrew Ng in 2012, is a good example for Karpathy to follow. It offers a wide array of courses across various subjects beyond AI and ML. It partners with universities and organisations worldwide to deliver diverse educational content.
“Coursera seems to have made a (reasonably) successful business out of it. $1B market cap and almost $200M revenue,” posted a user on HackerNews.
On the other hand, Khan Academy is a nonprofit organisation supported by several prominent billionaires and philanthropists, including Carlos Slim, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk. According to IRS Form 990, Khan Academy had a revenue of $28 million (approximately Rs 233 crore) in 2019.
It is likely that Karpathy’s venture will attract substantial donations and investments, similar to Khan Academy.
