What Is Eureka Labs? All You Need to Know About Andrej Karpathy’s New EdTech Solution

AI isn’t finished shaking up traditional industries. After leaving OpenAI in February, its co-founder and ex-head of AI at Tesla, Andrej Karpathy, is building “a new kind of school that is AI-native.”

Last week, Karpathy announced the launch of Eureka Labs, an educational AI startup offering an undergraduate-level course on how to train an AI system. The course, known as LLM101n will give users access to an AI agent that teaches them how to build an AI assistant.

“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,” Karpathy said in a post on X.

While it’s still “early days,” as Karpathy says, his move to education is part of a growing trend of using AI to enhance learners’ access to training and guidance across multiple industries.

Table of Contents Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. Everything We Know About Eureka Labs So Far
3. The Long-Term Prospects for Eureka Labs
4. Why AI Assistants Are Moving Into Education?
5. The Bottom Line
6. FAQs
7. References

Show Full Guide

Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. Everything We Know About Eureka Labs So Far
3. The Long-Term Prospects for Eureka Labs
Show Full Guide
4. Why AI Assistants Are Moving Into Education?
5. The Bottom Line
6. FAQs
7. References

Everything We Know About Eureka Labs So Far

Eureka Labs was formed in July 2024, just months after Karpathy left OpenAI. As of July 22, it already had over 33,000 followers on X. What we know about LLM101n so far is relatively little because it’s still undergoing development.

The core challenge being addressed is the limited access to subject matter experts. Karpathy said:

“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.”

Karpathy explained that 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.

The company has confirmed that the course will be organized around 20 self-contained modules that users will be able to modify. The startup also noted that it will be working on LLM101n in real-time, via open/free/MIT-licensed repos on GitHub.

Beyond that, we don’t know yet what the user interface looks like, or the underlying data that the LLM101n assistant will be trained on.

The Long-Term Prospects for Eureka Labs

At this stage, without a finished end product or funding disclosed, it is difficult to know precisely what the long term prospects are for Eureka Labs, let alone what impact its going to have on the education market.

That being said, Karpathy’s OpenAI and Tesla pedigree will undoubtedly be a major selling point of the course. He’s also shown promise in promoting himself, not just on X, where he has over 1 million followers, but also on YouTube, where his tutorial-style content has generated over 500,000 subscribers and 11 million views.

The success of tutorial videos like the four-hour-long “Let’s build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out,” which has been viewed 4.5 million times, also indicates that Karpathy knows how to create educational content that learners find useful.

Considering all these factors and the massive interest in generative AI and large language models (LLMs), Karpathy is well placed to develop an educational AI assistant that gains traction in the education market, which has shown an increased appetite for such solutions.

Why AI Assistants Are Moving Into Education?

The launch of Eureka Labs comes as more educational providers are looking to incorporate AI into their operations.

In fact, according to research conducted by P&S Intelligence, the AI in education market size was valued at $5.4 billion in 2024 and will grow to $55.4 billion by 2030 as demand for personalized AI-enabled education increases.

Leading EdTech providers, including DuoLingo, CoachHub, and Riiid, are all experimenting with AI tutors and chatbots to offer learners more support.

The idea is that instead of depending on an instructor with limited hours, a user can ask questions in natural language to a chatbot that’s available 24/7. This doesn’t mean that learners can’t benefit from instructor support, but they also have another resource to fall back on if an instructor isn’t available.

The reality is that traditional instructor-led or course-led training can be significantly enhanced by using AI assistants, which increases the overall availability of training for learners.

The Bottom Line

AI has the potential to be a gamechanger in the education industry, and Eureka Lab’s efforts to teach students how to build AI assistants could contribute to training the next generation of AI researchers.

The key challenge going forward will be to make sure that the execution is perfect, and that the chatbot has the ability to respond to prompts accurately and quickly.

FAQs