Eureka Labs is an AI-first education company.
In November last year, I wrote a post about an AI-first institution that’s designed from the ground-up with AI at the core of everything (in that post, I also explained why I don’t think universities are going to be these AI-first institutions).
I predict that we’ll soon see the launch of new types of educational institutions that position themselves as AI-first in everything. In other words, they’ll reimagine what a curriculum could be, given the existence of generative AI. They’ll make explicit choices about what value the human adds on top of AI, and hire accordingly. They’ll automate administrative tasks and accounting. And they’ll be cheap. At least, cheap compared to the cost of a 3-year degree programme at a traditional university.
And soon after that, Donald Clark listed his ideas around what an AI-first university might look like.
It’s interesting that it’s taken just over 6 months to see this development come to pass.
Here’s more from Andrej Karpathy (and the company, on X):
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 of physics one could imagine working through very high quality course materials together with Feynman, who is there to guide you every step of the way. Unfortunately, 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.
However, with recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels tractable. The teacher still designs the course materials, but they are supported, leveraged and scaled with an AI Teaching Assistant who is optimized to help guide the students through them. This Teacher + AI symbiosis could run an entire curriculum of courses on a common platform.
If we are successful, 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). Our first product will be the world’s obviously best AI course, LLM101n. This is an undergraduate-level class that guides the student through training their own AI, very similar to a smaller version of the AI Teaching Assistant itself. The course materials will be available online, but we also plan to run both digital and physical cohorts of people going through it together.
Today, we are heads down building LLM101n, but we look forward to a future where AI is a key technology for increasing human potential. What would you like to learn?