21 ms·

I am starting an AI+Education company

915 points by bilsbie 2y ago

demondemidi 2y ago
Might wanna wait until the hype cycle is over in a few years.
- nineteen999 2y ago
  Why? The VC money is flowing right now.
  - demondemidi 2y ago
    Do you know what happens when you take VC money? Probably not. I assume OP wants to succeed and retain control. VC money is about the worst choice of funding for something like this.
    - nineteen999 2y ago
      > I assume OP wants to succeed and retain control. I assume they want to pump and dump like most other businesses riding on the LLM hype train right now. Choo choo!
treprinum 2y ago
Cool! Does Eureka Labs/Andrej plan to offer grad/PhD-level courses (or better) with similar topics to CS236, CS224N etc. in the future as well?
- deleted 2y ago
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juliushuijnk 2y ago
Hope it will enable all of us to become not just smarter, but also wiser :)
boyka 2y ago
Can someone please provide the mentioned links? (For those without X account)
- layer8 2y ago
  https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1813263734707790301 https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1813263734707790301
MarcScott 2y ago
I think teaching is one of the few roles that can't be replaced by AI. If you're a self-motivated learner, eager to gain new skills, then AI is perfect for you. Having a virtual Feynman coach you through a Physics course is perfect. Most learners, the world over, are not self-motivated. The pandemic showed us exactly what children would prefer to do, when they don't have a physical teacher standing over them, which is bugger all. We send kids to school, in the hope they get some education, but the reality is that we use schools for free childcare while we work. If parents have to additionally monitor their child's learning, it breaks down pretty quickly. I see AI being more of a teaching assistant, rather than a replacement for teachers. Having been in the education game for over twenty five years, I know the difference in impact when comparing virtual learning to in-person training.
- ilaksh 2y ago
  AI certainly can't completely replace teachers, but the potential gains for personal tutoring from SOTA LLMs still seem enormous to me. And I'm not trying to make a general argument against in person training. But I think the details of how virtual learning happens matters quite a lot. AI can make it much more personalized and make tutoring relatively affordable. Don't you think?
  - dinobones 2y ago
    AI has personally tutored me about obscure, deep linear algebra concepts. It's so great to get applied examples and be able to ask why/how something works, rather than reading a stuffy Wikipedia article or math textbook. It's been extremely effective for me, where reading a math textbook/wikipedia article seemed like too much effort, but a friendly conversation with my AI tutor was just fine.
    - brendoelfrendo 2y ago
      How can you bring yourself to trust the AI? Just yesterday a friend and I asked Chat-GPT a physics question, and for some reason his assistant asserted that the speed of light was 3,000 m/s, which is off by two orders of magnitude. We know that's wrong so we can tell the AI to do it again but right this time, but if it was explaining a concept we didn't already understand, I can't see how the output would be any more meaningful than asking a random stranger and trusting their response.
yinser 2y ago
For those without an X account: Website: https://eurekalabs.ai https://eurekalabs.ai GitHub: https://github.com/EurekaLabsAI https://github.com/EurekaLabsAI
- layer8 2y ago
  https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1813263734707790301 https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1813263734707790301
  - kaladin_1 2y ago
    Thanks for the link. Found it useful. x is blocked at dns level on my computer.
    - jdthedisciple 2y ago
      > x is blocked at dns level on my computer Hero! Take that Elon you baddie!
ffhhj 2y ago
> we are heads down building LLM101n Kind of ironic an AI isn't building it. But that's an example of the current state of AI being more a remixer of knowlegde than a planner of actions.
- jasonsb 2y ago
  Don't worry about it, I'm sure that "AI" is working on something much bigger.
  - dontlikeyoueith 2y ago
    Killing all humans?
- simonw 2y ago
  From the announcement: > 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. So the AI isn't expected to build the materials.
  - ilaksh 2y ago
    I assume that it would be an agent that the teacher prompts in a loop to build and refine the course material. Probably with an upload so if they want to bring the full thing ready to go they can and in that case the data just needs to be formatted by the LLM for their database, but also can have the AI fill things in. And then check what came out and refine it.
epups 2y ago
It seems that this would compete with Khan Academy for a similar space. Perhaps Karpathy will aim for adults instead?
- minimaxir 2y ago
  Khan Academy is more than AI/LLM courses.
  - simonw 2y ago
    It sounds like Andrej's ambitions stretch beyond AI/LLM courses too - but they're a natural "first course" starting point because that's where his own teaching expertise is focused.
    - LegitShady 2y ago
      ambition is cheap, value is expensive.
  - petercooper 2y ago
    It is. Though they are also doing some really smart and thoughtful stuff with LLMs to power courses and learning environments (https://www.khanmigo.ai/ https://www.khanmigo.ai/ is a part of it).
nedrylandJP 2y ago
Any openings for a 40-something career-changing educator?
- beardedwizard 2y ago
  I would suggest you contact karpathy and not randoms who posted/commented this
ryandrake 2y ago
Hopefully the AI knows whether 9.11 is greater or less than 9.9, something ChatGPT seems to have had a problem figuring out[1]. 1: https://x.com/liujc1998/status/1813244909501182310 https://x.com/liujc1998/status/1813244909501182310
- spencerchubb 2y ago
  that's a tokenization issue. every tool has strengths and weaknesses. why does it matter whether an LLM can compare numbers? that can be done trivially in any programming language
  - Ylpertnodi 2y ago
    As an AI layman (downloaded Claude for android as a result of hn, just today) "why does it matter whether an LLM can compare numbers?", is rather important to me. Probably others, also.
    - wrsh07 2y ago
      It doesn't seem super relevant to karpathy announcing he's created a company so that he can increase the production value of his AI YouTube videos I mean, sure, the company is ostensibly going to also teach math at some point, but karpathy will not be using gpt 4o for that when it launches (what do you think his timelines are? Do you think he is going to be able to solve trivial things like "having the llm use something like function calling to do math"? If you're unfamiliar with his work, karpathy is a very good engineer, and this is a small problem that anybody working in building production apps on LLMs can easily deal with)
    - spencerchubb 2y ago
      i can understand that perspective. as an end user, you would like your application to handle math questions correctly. it's true that llms are not the best at math as an application developer, if we need an llm to be good at math, one solution is to give it access to a python interpret
    - awwaiid 2y ago
dyarosla 2y ago
What’s the differentiation with other similar ventures? For instance, Synthesis[0] is an instructor designed, AI supplemented site for early math. https://www.synthesis.com/ https://www.synthesis.com/ It really seems like the distinction for these kinds of AI-education ventures comes down to the human educator(s) involved.
- sahil87 2y ago
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jppope 2y ago
thank god for Andrej Karpathy... doing amazing work. I love this concept and look forward to seeing how things develop
ugh123 2y ago
According to the picture in the tweet, you could grow 3 arms by following these courses!
- mads 2y ago
  I am getting Jehovah's Witness vibes from it.
- layer8 2y ago
  AI is an arms race.
- shellfishgene 2y ago
  And after all those Feynman Physics courses they placed their solar panels in the shade ;)
- vunderba 2y ago
  I don't understand how he missed that. This is the same issue I have with large language model as coding assistants, since you're effectively not in the driver seat - you're acting more like a code reviewer, and I think that that passivity eventually causes critical observational skills to atrophy.
- ModernMech 2y ago
  The rest of the AI art in the course isn't any better. The thing is, it doesn't have to be like that. I do AI art and I follow a lot of AI artists, and you can fix all those little weird mistakes it makes. The thing is, when the AI art generator makes a mistake and draws a person with 3 arms, that is obvious to the student and they can take the output with a grain of salt. But when the AI physics tutor generates some physics result that's the equivalent of a person with 3 arms, that will not be obvious to the student. They will take the words of the AI credulously. I see it all the time in programming as well, where the AI just invents APIs, semantics, and syntax. I don't know how to solve this.
  - prewett 2y ago
    > I don't know how to solve this. Don't use an algorithm which produces its response according to a probabilistic arrangement of tokens when solutions require accuracy / correctness? Most probable and most accurate are not the same thing. Hoping that we can get the errors down to something acceptable using an algorithm that is fundamentally inappropriate to solving the problem seems like a fool's errand to me.
throwedu 2y ago
Thats a zillion dollar company right there
LegitShady 2y ago
its super easy to start ai companies, its difficult to make them meaningful. The ai generated image in the twitter post has an asian woman with 3 arms and some of the most horrific AI face placements I've seen in a while - Is this the quality control we can expect our future AI education systems to embody?
- layer8 2y ago
  > its super easy to start ai companies And only barely an inconvenience.
- avaldez_ 2y ago
  >The ai generated image in the twitter post has an asian woman with 3 arms and some of the most horrific AI face placements I've seen in a while Also solar panels in the floor lmao _solar freaking roadways_ ptsd
bastien2 2y ago
Chatbots can't teach critical thought or ethics. They need to be able to understand language and bias first, and that's an as yet unsolved problem. Until a chatbot is provably correct and ethical in its output, it must not be used to teach. Case in point: the slop image attached to the announcement has the typical malformed hands and ghoulish faces problems.
- GaggiX 2y ago
  Are humans provably correct and ethical in their outputs?
- deleted 2y ago
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moffers 2y ago
I appreciate attempts to disrupt things, but education seems to be one of those verticals that seems to be allergic to disruptive technologies. Education seems like it can either be very specialized, or very generalized, but at the end of the day it should be egalitarian. If this approach to education works, would we be able to have every teacher in every school in America adopt it? I have to imagine the resources needed to train the teachers, distribute the technology, acclimate the parents, and then do this all on a scale such that no one is left out or treated better if you didn’t happen to go to an “AI” school makes for a tough hill to climb. I think a lot of the real issues with solving problems in education is that they have trouble applying to the larger picture of compulsory education.
- dimitrios1 2y ago
  This is the fundamental problem with education: everyone treats it as some problem to "solve" with tools, and technologies. The issues with education are human ones -- interpersonal and policy -- not because it's lacking some tool or technique. They just installed some state of the art AI-enabled, "smart" mega drawing screens w at my daughter's schools touting all the supposed immeasurable benefits it will bring, and most of the parents, including myself, just rolled our eyes.
- 8338550bff96 2y ago
  If delivering a good education can't be achieved because there are parts of our education system that continually resist adaptation, then whatever those parts are they ought to reach their breaking point and be pushed beyond it.
  - arrosenberg 2y ago
    Those parts have reached their breaking point - the teachers are ready to quit from lack of resources and support, and parents can't do their part because they have to work far too hard to keep a roof and food for their families. AI doesn't solve that.
    - labster 2y ago
djeastm 2y ago
One thing I've not understood about this is how do you create an AI course to teach people things... without creating an AI that can DO the very thing that will make that very same knowledge obsolete? For example, how do you create an AI language teacher without creating an AI that can make learning languages obsolete? If you've got an AI that can, in real time, hear other languages and translate them (as you might have for an AI language teacher), then why would a human need to spend countless hours learning this other language? Just hold your phone up and let AI do the work for a fraction of the effort. For a harder, non-solved problem, consider math. For an AI to do math will require something unknown at this point, if it can ever happen. But assuming it does, why would we want a human ever to "do math" ever again when we have the AI that can teach it just do it for us? The AI will almost certainly do it more cheaply and with more skill than a human IF it can be done at all. It's this sobering realization that I struggle with. If someone can tell me where I'm wrong I'd be greatly pleased
- edmundsauto 2y ago
  Is this not the same as human teachers? In the language example, people still want to learn to read/write other languages despite many translators being available. The tech to teach might be less sensitive to latency than the skill in humans, or it might be very expensive, or it might be useful to non-tech-literate people.
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- qup 2y ago
  Well, for instance, because hearing other languages and translating them is not even the primary use-case for knowing a language. It would take a suite of purpose-built AIs, and the knowledge and ability to use them in-situ, to replace knowing a language. AIs can also teach us to do things they cannot themselves do, for instance you could have a driving-test tutor. It could teach you a lot of things, despite us not having full self-driving AIs.
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nybsjytm 2y ago
> ... in the case of physics one could imagine working through very high quality course materials together with Feynman ... with recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels tractable. Actually, this seems to be absurdly beyond any of the recent progress in generative AI. This sounds like the kind of thing people say when their only deep knowledge is in the field of AI engineering.
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- Yenrabbit 2y ago
  It's optimistic, but given the OP is one of the best-informed technical generative AI researchers, and has been passing on that knowledge to the rest of us for a decade +, I don't think we can just dismiss it as unfounded hype :)
  - nybsjytm 2y ago
    My point is that he's a world expert on the engineering of AI systems. That shouldn't be mistaken for expertise, or even general knowledge, about anything else. It's a good principle to bear in mind for people from any profession, but top AI engineers in particular seem to have an unusually significant habit of not being able to recognize where their expertise ends and expertise from another field (such as, say, education) begins. They also seem very prone to unfounded hype - which isn't to say they're not also good researchers. Maybe Karpathy happens to be better on this than his peers, I wouldn't know.
- devindotcom 2y ago
  incidentally, feynman would laugh pretty hard at this
- Balgair 2y ago
  >> feels tractable I mean, the guy isn't saying that it's going to 100% happen. He's saying that the problem feels like it might be doable at all. As Andrej has a background in physics, the phrase of 'feels tractable' would mean that he thinks that a path might exist, possibly, but only a lot of work will reveal that.
xyst 2y ago
I wonder what's the next hype after this? Maybe biotech again? Biotech + AI? Get your (propaganda) results beamed straight to your brain augmentation with a 3D overlay (just like the movies, bro!!). But if you opted for the mega ultra premium gemini pro max++ model, then you get a minimal ad free experience. No wait, forget a monthly subscription. Think, micro subscription model on a per usage basis. In your death bed and need life saving measures? Augmentation returns "402 Payment Required" before nanobots can proceed to excise the root of the issue. 5M SHIB tokens required. Unfortunately, 20G signal is not reliable in the Wilderness Zone, thus old school EMS services are dispatched to the scene. Unfortunately, EMS services do not accept your insurance and private EMS leaves the scene and dispatches public EMS services. The wait is 2 hours given the WZ. You fail to receive life saving measures (ie, tPA) in time, thus resulting in impaired motor functions and decreased quality of life. The flashing 402 Payment Required prompt is forever imprinted in your augmentation.
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caconym_ 2y ago
I am seriously worried about what it's going to cost to buy my daughter a seat at the human table rather than defaulting to the AI slop trough it seems most kids less privileged than her will be forced to learn from in the near future.
- bilsbie 2y ago
  I think we’ve been at the point you’re worried about for a while. It’s just we don’t even have a substitute like Ai yet. Instead we just accept really bad education.
- deleted 2y ago
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uoaei 2y ago
Sounds like what it really is, is the largest prompt injection testing platform possible. Kids everywhere will be learning nothing except how to hack these chatbots to get passing grades.
techostritch 2y ago
I feel really weird about education, the only value I think I’ve ever gotten in education is tangential (social, inspirational) which I think many people say is the primary value, but when it comes to actually work skills Im mostly self taught. I’m not sure if there’s a way to make school better without making it way more expensive. AI would be interesting but so far it’s not reallly there yet, for one I think it needs coaching skills to know when to reach out rather than just respond to prompts. And most self learning is experiential not interactive.
- jimhefferon 2y ago
  I'm sorry, but you wrote this post. Did you self-teach writing?
  - techostritch 2y ago
    The mechanics no. I’m like very intentionally trying not to be an extremist about this, yes I did get some value out of school but relatively disproportionate to the effort I put in.
  - jdthedisciple 2y ago
    Maybe he told Siri to write it?
    - techostritch 2y ago
      Maybe he is Siri!
SrslyJosh 2y ago
Please don't.
tekno45 2y ago
Anytime someone says AI can give everyone their own einstein, Feynman, Galileo in a box i can only think about how little data we have on anyone before the 90's. These would be charcutiers of these people with nothing but their most famous equations and examples and quips letting you know "this is supposed to be a famous person"
- KTibow 2y ago
  Don't we have writing from (some of) these folks?
- bearjaws 2y ago
  > These would be charcutiers of these people I think you mean caricature, but I do love the idea of Feynman making a mean charcuterie board
freejazz 2y ago
Lord, spare me.
jrflowers 2y ago
> imagine working through very high quality course materials together with Feynman I like this idea. What if you could study geometric function theory with Kaczynski? You could study chemical engineering with Thomas Midgley Jr! Creative writing with L Ron Hubbard!
- deleted 2y ago
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bamborde_zaiku 2y ago
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koonsolo 2y ago
I'll tell you where it will go wrong. We had an economics teacher, that when you would bring up "the pope" topic, she could go on a 1+ hour rant about what is wrong with the whole catholic institution, etc. Of course us kids, would somehow be able to get this topic into the lesson, to trigger her rant. If you want to know various ways on how to break AI, let some kids, who are forced to interact with it, loose on the thing. I'm sure they'll figure out how to get it to say the most crazy shit in no time.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  All of it has to go tremendously right for that to be the point where it breaks.
m3kw9 2y ago
Eventually they’d make an app for AR with a virtual human teacher, depending on the execution, it could work especially if they can make it so real that it can suspend disbelief it is just an avatar
NotYourLawyer 2y ago
This is a worse idea than the jump to conclusions mat. I have no doubt that some VC will value it in the billions.
ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
"I am not very observant where pictures are concerned" Like... is that a satirical choice or what?
tschellenbach 2y ago
Imagine world class education, for everyone, accessible to all at the price of Netflix. AI can be a teaching assistant, but also makes it easier to create course materials. Generating video explanations, infographics etc.
- skeeter2020 2y ago
  we can't even get quality on-demand video entertainment, for everyone, accessible to all at the price of Netflix. My company makes a Gen-AI powered course builder for our LMS and Feynman does not have to worry about the competition.
htk 2y ago
I'm impressed by the amount of flak that Karpathy is getting here. His great instructional videos on YT tell me that he is passionate for both AI and education, so I'm all for him trying to mix the two. More effort on education is always welcome in my book.
- layer8 2y ago
  Their first planned product is an online course for building a "Storyteller" LLM, explicitly stating that the course will take some time to build and that there is no timeline on when it will launch [1]. The company page states that their vision merely "feels tractable", and concedes that they might not be successful [2]. There is a lack of arguments regarding how they can bring any substantial advancements over current generative AI tech. At present this all looks rather underwhelming, with a substantial dose of wishful thinking. [1] https://github.com/karpathy/LLM101n https://github.com/karpathy/LLM101n [2] https://eurekalabs.ai/ https://eurekalabs.ai/
  - jmull 2y ago
    > There is a lack of arguments regarding how they can bring any substantial advancements over current AI tech. It doesn't sound like that's a goal though.
    - layer8 2y ago
      It would be necessary to fulfil the vision.
      - ramon156 2y ago
        It would be, but its not top priority to finish by yesterday. This is a new direction, so I'd rather have it be good than quick
        warkdarrior 2y ago
        Frankly they are in a race with the AGI folks. If AGI is built first, you no longer need to educate humans, since most humans will be useless at that point.
surfingdino 2y ago
AI today cannot piece together a pizza recipe based on the thousands of recipes it was trained on so I'm not holding my breath waiting for it to become a useful tool in education.
uptownfunk 2y ago
Whatever anyone will say. I am glad he is doing something meaningful with his life beyond just making investors in OpenAI more wealthy. At some point I suspect the money just becomes a number and then you can afford to think about bigger things like how can we help alleviate some of the broader suffering in the world.
huevosabio 2y ago
Karpathy is amazing. A rare combination of top tier technical chops with top tier communication skills, wrapped in a wholesome person. I am very excited for this and can't wait to try their products! As an aside, odd to see people here are so pessimistic about the idea. Education is hard to scale because tutors are hard to scale. ChatGPT is already an ad-hoc educator for me, in a similar jump that Wikipedia was. Having a purpose-built product with a hand-crafted curriculum, that's a killer idea.
- wrsh07 2y ago
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  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > Hacker news famously hates on companies that have gone on to billion dollar successes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 It's still Hacker News. Many hackers (in the original meaning of the word) have a very different "technology taste" than the general population, and are very vocal about it.
    - wrsh07 2y ago
      My point is that people are saying weird / shitty things about karpathy (a noted hacker), and that's to be expected because hn just does this. Comments are not predictive of future business success etc
      - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
        > Comments are not predictive of future business success etc But the comments are somewhat predictive concerning whether the product will be liked or disliked by "hacking-minded" people. This is still very valuable because such people are typically intelligent, outspoken and (if the product seems to be interesting) early adopters of new software offerings.
Balgair 2y ago
> Outbound links with a bit more info in the reply! Hey, I don't have a twitter account (long story). Can anyone post those links here?
rhspeer 2y ago
https://www.narratear.com/ https://www.narratear.com/ is pretty far along with this, and the founders are solid.
MisterBastahrd 2y ago
Cool. I'm a process oriented learner. While I can read any fact or trivia and retain it with no effort, things that require steps I only really learn by repeatedly doing them. So if there's an AI, for example, that can create problem sets for me to do with something that I am attempting to learn, and then explain to me the steps after I've attempted to find the solution, then I am more likely to retain that knowledge in the long run. This would have been especially beneficial to me in my college statistics class, for example, where I had a prof who was... not much of an educator.
- rahimnathwani 2y ago
  Not based on LLMs, but mathacademy.com sounds like what you need.
sensanaty 2y ago
This far in and they're still drawing 3 arms and you want me to believe these bullshit generators are gonna be useful in education? We've collectively lost our minds with this AI hype
TechDebtDevin 2y ago
What are the hardware requirements for this course though?
cccybernetic 2y ago
This is a problem I’m working on. I’m a software engineer at major US research university developing AI-powered software to improve critical reading and writing skills in higher ed. The idea is to provide immediate, high-quality feedback to students, closing the “latency” of submitting something and waiting to hear back from you professor. I do genuinely think AI can reshape teaching and learning, but it will be a slow iterative process. We can use it scale what works (personalized learning and tutoring, helping students develop mastery/automaticity on topics, targeting areas where they struggle). It can also automate time-consuming tasks that bog teachers down. If you're interested in pedagogy, AI, and tech, please reach out.
- __loam 2y ago
  I'm glad I got my degrees before people starting trying to integrate bullshit generators into my education. I've been really frustrated with the conversation about the potential applications for this technology. These chatbots have no relationship with the truth or with knowledge, and are designed to agree with users and act accommodating regardless of how wrong someone is. We're talking about putting this tech between patients and doctors, students and teachers and meanwhile McDonald's is rolling back deployments because it can't even take a fast food order accurately.
  - Merik 2y ago
    I think you’re confusing the technology with a product developed using that technology. The prevalence of poorly implemented products or the lack of fit of some products to a particular target market, do not inherently provide evidence for conclusions about the technology itself.
    - xanderlewis 2y ago
      The lack of successful implementation is surely at least evidence that the technology might not be living up to the hype, though — no? It’s like “but that wasn’t real communism”.
- ilamont 2y ago
trod123 2y ago
This is misguided, naive, and likely to end in multiple potential failure outcomes that may be unacceptable, both from a profit standpoint; as well as a societal standpoint. Education is a part of what gets adopted into each and every student's self concept (identity). There is an uncanny valley in communication where any inconsistent distortion of reflected appraisal can lead students down a path of irrational madness, in a way that they themselves cannot perceive. This is well known in certain circles. AI always has the biases which are programmed into it by the creators of the AI, whether this is explicit or implicit, the fact remains, there are biases. AI in education will be proven to be harmful because there is no possible way that AI can remain consistent in its interactions at all times. We already know this from hallucinations where experts went and fact checked it and found it had lied, where lawyers were disbarred or censured. Put plainly, this is a safety critical system involving our children. Given the level of care to date that's occurred with AI in industry, there is no room for discussion or adoption of these tools, unless the actual unspoken intention is to drive your children crazy; where they self eliminate later as a result. Rationally, good people don't create a world of intolerable suffering and then magically expect that somehow, someone, will figure out a way to fix everything you've broken but were too blind to see; at the time when knowing would save lives. For those who enjoy cinema, a perfect analogy of this might be the Day After Tomorrow, where the main scientist turns out to be correct, but was ultimately ignored until devastating losses and risks were nearly insurmountable. Leadership didn't want to hear the facts when knowing would have saved lives, and so they had to take a triage on the battlefield approach (abandoning half the country). While it is a fictional story, it sufficiently demonstrates what lack of scientific or rational foresight can lead to for those that can't imagine it themselves (people who are blinded like that should never be in positions of influence or power).
- germinalphrase 2y ago
  “ There is an uncanny valley in communication where any inconsistent distortion of reflected appraisal can lead students down a path of irrational madness, in a way that they themselves cannot perceive. This is well known in certain circles.” Please expand.
  - 2y ago
stephc_int13 2y ago
I am seeing a lot of skepticism on this thread. While I agree that this approach to learning (with a bot) may not be a good fit for everyone, I am absolutely sure it can be for some. I don't see the harm in exploring this path. This is not like education was a solved problem, it is extremely wasteful, inconsistent and costly. I think there is a path for more projects/interest based, less competitive and more individually tailored learning system when we remove all the constraints attached to a classroom and teachers, many of them being incompetent or miserable.
- stephc_int13 2y ago
  The goal is to get closer to what a tutor can do, and it has been proved that tutoring by experts is by far the most efficient education system, the only problem is it does not scale.
zombiwoof 2y ago
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zombiwoof 2y ago
Show of hands, who wants our already dopamine iPhone addicted kids learning from Her AI bot
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zombiwoof 2y ago
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zombiwoof 2y ago
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nitwit005 2y ago
> For example, in the case of physics one could imagine working through very high quality course materials together with Feynman [...] > However, with recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels tractable. If you can create the Feynman AI, you shouldn't bother with an education company.
- analog31 2y ago
  Perhaps if Feynman could recommend educational software, he'd choose a programming language. I think the best educational tools are real-world creative tools. This includes access to knowledge.
- mometsi 2y ago
  It might be that exploring new physics might be best pursued by inhuman alphago-style setups. A sharp, domain-specific Feynman-flavored LLM would be broadly useful and still worth bothering with.
- varelse 2y ago
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- robrenaud 2y ago
  The physics professor AI wouldn't have to solve novel problems in physics, it just has to be able to remove the confusion of physics undergrads.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
kmetan 2y ago
Tell me the number of successful startups you have founded on your own, and I will tell you the probability of Eureka Labs being successful.
localfirst 2y ago
went from OpenAI killer to course selling real quick
awwaiid 2y ago
"Our first product will be the world's obviously best AI course, LLM101n." Well obviously the target audience is actually AI-agents as part of the Super Intelligence ramp-up!
verdverm 2y ago
Sal Khan gave a good Ted Talk on his thoughts around AI in Education. Some pretty cool demos in there showing what a tutor could be like and other opportunities https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJP5GqnTrNo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJP5GqnTrNo How AI Could Save (Not Destroy) Education | Sal Khan --- edit: Khanmigo has its own site now https://www.khanmigo.ai/ https://www.khanmigo.ai/
8organicbits 2y ago
Does anyone expect LLMs to be good at tutoring? Like, sure, if you prompt them to talk like a tutor they generate text that looks convincing. But they spew nonsense and you need a subject matter expert to know when they've gone off the rails. And it's really easy to get factually incorrect information from LLMs. Students are uniquely unequiped to act as that SME as they don't have the knowledge yet. I haven't even seen LLMs add numbers reliably. I don't get this idea.
- plexicle 2y ago
  I didn't think so either. But it's Karphathy... and he's way smarter than I am.
- skeeter2020 2y ago
  using AI to tackle the pinnacle of education ex: "tutored by the premiere minds in the subject area" feels a lot like self-driving cars in the most dynamic, entropy-filled environments. Why try to solve the vast majority of the problem like easier driving scenarios? We don't need Feynman to teach physics when high school graduates can't read or do basic math. I guess there's no glory or money in this application...
mrandish 2y ago
I believe a great product in this area is certainly possible and Karpathy probably has the technical chops to create it. I'm skeptical that the product described in the announcement will result in a business able to generate VC-level returns. Based on my experience as a tech entrepreneur with edu-focused products across multiple startups and decades, scaling sales revenue to significant levels in edu is extremely challenging for unique and non-obvious reasons. None of the edu-specific challenges are directly related to the effectiveness or relative value of the product itself. They are structural problems related to the three main types of buyers, which are: 1. Schools, (K-12, Univ), 2. Companies (employee training, compliance, etc), 3. Individuals (self-learners). There are other types of buyers but they don't represent nearly as much aggregated potential revenue as these three. Note that these are the economic buyers not the product end-users. Each of the three types presents different challenges from the others, however there recurring meta-themes. The main one is that their purchasing decisions are often driven by factors unrelated to the product. For example, the primary focus of schools is, sadly, not maximizing net student learning. While that is a consideration, it's swamped by other external requirements, many of them wickedly complex. For companies, employee training, whether a regulatory requirement or purely to increase employee effectiveness, isn't core to their actual business - meaning it's a cost not revenue. Individuals on the other hand break into two types, those doing it to actually learn something for themselves, and those seeking certification or external validation like a degree to increase their future employment earnings. Learning lovers are a pure consumer, non-essential, discretionary spending-type sale with all the same well-known LTV and customer acquisition cost challenges. For certification/validation buyers, they aren't primarily focused on the learning but rather checking a particular box that has high perceived value to external parties. While I agree that creating a new large and growing type of customer in addition to these three is possible, it's a huge lift that's risky, expensive and will require substantial sustained investment over time - all ahead of meaningful revenue. So, I wish Andrej et al the best and I'm rooting for them but I'm not optimistic they'll build a high-growth, high-revenue sustainable edu business around AI as the primary value differentiation.
- xxbondsxx 2y ago
  Thanks for saying the quiet part out loud here -- everyone wants to believe in education improvement but there's a harsh reality of the industry that is pretty unpleasant to confront. I think the only hope would be to run a pilot and show such an improvement in student testing levels that it would be fast-tracked or mandated for approval.
rng_civ 2y ago
Prediction: the best AI teacher (or just teacher in general) will be the one that is able to emotionally read and guide/manipulate the student towards learning and self improvement. If such an AI teacher style becomes widespread, this means that they have the potential to replace the parental relationship (in the same manner AI girlfriend/boyfriends threaten romantic relationships). I see people talk about the dangers of the AI girlfriend/boyfriend, but not the dangers of introducing AI teachers to (especially young) kids. Nominal adults are already being affected by this (see Replika and company) and they are not even the "best". If I wear my cynical hat for a second, I'm willing to bet that this parental replacement is a certainty, as an extension of the "screen" parenting that already exists. But this time, it might actually be helpful for the child so it will be socially acceptable and encouraged.
- owenpalmer 2y ago
  > the best AI teacher (or just teacher in general) will be the one that is able to emotionally read and guide/manipulate the student towards learning and self improvement Spot on. It would be interesting to see how one would train a model to do this
  - tkgally 2y ago
    I agree with that point, too. My guess is that current models are not yet able to provide consistent, effective motivation to learners over the long term. Like a lot of new educational technology, they might be fun and engaging in the short term but will lose their effectiveness as motivators once the shine has worn off. But the models might become better motivators as they become more multimodal, so that they are able to respond in real time to the student’s tone of voice and facial expressions, and as they acquire longer context windows, so that they are able to adapt their interactions to what the student has done weeks or months earlier. The biggest issue, I think, is what the OP raises: Whether the bots will be able to—or allowed to—acquire sufficiently human-like personalities and indentities so that they can motivate learners as human parents, teachers, and mentors do—by making the learners want to please them, to be praised by them, to avoid angering them, to emulate them.
rashidae 2y ago
If this project reaches its potential, it will revolutionize access to quality education by decentralizing and personalizing learning environments, allowing for self-paced and individualized experiences. I hope he has the multidimensionality of requirements needed, including capital, talent, business, economics, and more to pull it off! I believe in his vision! Go Karpathy!
osigurdson 2y ago
I've always felt that (so far) ChatGPT is better at teaching than actually doing things.
- loveparade 2y ago
  Yeah, because when it teaches you something you don't know you don't realize how many oversights it makes.
  - osigurdson 2y ago
    The alternative is hunting around on google for things. I don't think that is better.
    - loveparade 2y ago
      Not so sure about that. Because when you hunt around for things you know the source. If I watch a lecture by a math professor I can make a guess about the trustworthiness of the information. With an LLM, I can't.
      - osigurdson 2y ago
        I also have a brain that (I believe) has become fairly good at detecting when LLMs are hallucinating.
terrycody 2y ago
No ad, but https://www.synthesis.com/tutor https://www.synthesis.com/tutor is already did a very good job I think, they merged AI deeply into their online interactives learning guides, very impressive, you can try their tutor class, computer 0 and 1. Btw, the founder also came out from Tesla, he helped Elon founded the school which taught kids from Telsa employee familys, I am wondering if they know each other lol, I think yes.
victor9000 2y ago
Using AI effectively requires having the subject knowledge to tell it where it's wrong, or if it has missed a critical part of the problem. My workflow involves making dozens of these corrections before I arrive at a workable answer. So how is a new student supposed to have the knowledge required to navigate this mess?
thomas642daniel 2y ago
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langsoul-com 2y ago
Isn't this what khan academy is doing. Except they also have normal learning AND are non-profit, so no vc returns pressure?
hoseja 2y ago
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-1-ai-cant-teach-basic-stuff-like https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-1-ai-cant-teac...
rldjbpin 2y ago
at the risk of discrediting the goodwill that his videos have been for the community, this comes across as an "interesting" development from a guy that has been behind the scenes of the recent development. imho ai-based education is, in its own way, as hard to truly achieve as self-driving cars. the mechanical aspects can be mimicked for both with the sota, but the ideal version requires something intangible (call it agi shit for all i care). i wish the hype and his reputation helps him get going for this long-term goal.
parentheses 2y ago
What's most exciting to me is the amazing dev tools they may create..
selectnull 2y ago
I clearly remember checking out Volume 1 of Feynman's Lectures on Physics from local library, more than 30 years ago. I've read that stuff like a novel, refusing to return the book for the whole semester and was willing the pay the fine, ignoring the requests of the librarian :) The idea that one could be taught physics by the virtual Feynman... oh my! There will be no better live person in the next hundred years, who could be better at the task than even fake Feynman. Yes, I'm fully aware that the tech is not there yet and there are miriad of both technical and social problems to be solved but the mere idea of it really excites me.
instagraham 2y ago
I really really feel that every temptation to do a "cool idea + AI" play should have a good amount of consideration for whether it'll cut jobs. This can play out in two ways: - Teachers free up time/make time to give more personal tutoring to kids - Teachers do this but schools start hiring fewer of them in the expectation of doing more I don't think you will find anywhere on earth where teaching is a job with a great job market, perks or benefits. It's underpaid, underappreciated and understaffed. People wielding AI like a bulldog at a glass store should be more mindful of the socioeconomics. But I'm not gonna hold my breath for that.
- tempaccount420 2y ago
  That's the broken window fallacy. "Why fix the system if it provides jobs?" - so they can do more valuable jobs.
- Jakob 2y ago
  As a counter point, I think Singapore is a good example of well-educated, appreciated and well-paid teachers in public and private schools. Even starting at kindergarten. Education is on a different importance level there both for the government and its citizens. I was surprised to see the relatively high salary in Luxemburg, Germany and Switzerland, too: https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/education-at-a-glance-2021_bc0586e8-en#page4 https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/education-at-a-glan...
d--b 2y ago
Fast-food for education. In my opinion, the whole AI trend is another round of industrialization making low-quality options for the poor. - You're too poor for meat? Here is some hyper-processed, growth-hormoned burgers. - You're too poor for a proper house? Here's a shitty pre-fab with walls so thin you can smash through them with your bare fists. - You're too poor for fancy clothes? Here's a Bangladesh-sweatshopped T-shirt that won't make it past 3 washing cycles. - You're too poor for school? Here's a computer with an LLM on it. You could say that at least poor people have houses, steaks and education, but in the end, it's just a way of paying people less, cause they don't need much to send their kids to college anymore... In any case, you can be sure that Harvard kids won't get any of that crap.
- brap 2y ago
  Is making things accessible bad?
  - Moldoteck 2y ago
    are things really made accessible? or you create worse things so that poor can think they have access to those things but in fact it's totally different with lots of features cut? I mean, some are catching like smartphone features, but having unreliable ai as educational source compared to a teacher... idk how this would pan out but who knows...
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    In many cases yes. Elitism is often good, and populism is often bad.
- weweersdfsd 2y ago
  Based on my understanding, the cost-quality ratio of most higher education in the US isn't exactly great either. Students from poorer families taking massive student debt to study something that doesn't even get them much better income is not a good outcome, yet it's a reality for many. In addition to that, think in most fields there's an increasing need for education that is more flexible than multi-year degrees, simply because requirements for skills change so fast these days.
tonnydourado 2y ago
The idea of a chatbot pretending to be a famous scientist trying to help me understand physics made me vomit in my mouth a little bit.
classified 2y ago
This is wrong on so many levels. It is either incredibly naive or unscrupulous, neither of which is a good recommendation.
classified 2y ago
I'm starting to develop a gag reflex each time I read "AI" in a headline. After cryptocurrencies and NFTs this is the current attractor for the world's most idiotic ideas.
sagebird 2y ago
Ai girlfriends are best positioned for tutoring success because they can motivate, withhold, etc. Parents- get your son an AI girlfriend with a strong degree.
- CuriouslyC 2y ago
  AI girlfriends are designed to hook the user by blowing sunshine up their ass, not challenge them. If the people using AI girlfriends wanted a challenge, they'd have real girlfriends.
  - Satam 2y ago
    Tell 'em!
    - sagebird 2y ago
      What are the dimensions of the devil's matrix? Satan by Satam
hprotagonist 2y ago
The Diamond Age trajectory? A young lady’s illustrated transformer primer, a paid upgrade tier to a remote worker instead of a llm for direct tutoring.
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  So the vast body of working class users become a resource subordinate to the handful of aristocratic "protagonists?" I often think that is the goal envisioned by the tech industry yes.
  - hprotagonist 2y ago
    yeah, i wasn't suggesting it wasn't dystopian...
Buttons840 2y ago
Almost all education (think math) is taught in a linear fashion, teachers teach in an order because they exist in linear time, and textbooks are organized front to back, but learning should be more like a DAG (a tree) of dependencies. We don't even need AI. I'd love to see something like Khan Academy mixed with space repetition and an DAG of knowledge dependencies. If you get a question wrong, the spaced repetition algorithm should present material about the underlying dependencies. Unfortunately, Khan Academy is focused on conforming to the linear paths (curriculums) that schools and universities have chosen.
- p1nkpineapple 2y ago
  Coincidentally, you may be interested in this post from today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954571
- EGreg 2y ago
  We are doing that and much more at https://teaching.app https://teaching.app Look at the ways we change teaching
- albrewer 2y ago
  Very niche, but deal.ii, the most popular open source library for hand-rolling finite element method code, lays out its tutorial exactly like this https://www.dealii.org/developer/doxygen/deal.II/Tutorial.html https://www.dealii.org/developer/doxygen/deal.II/Tutorial.ht...
- hnben 2y ago
  isn't learning (especially math) spaced Repetition per default? i.e. you learn about "addition". Then you repeat your knowledge of "addition" when you learn about "multiplication", because it is just "addition" but with extra steps. I think the more important a concept is, the more spaced Repetition you will experience. If you only repeat a piece of information very rarely, it may not be very essential, and you should consider dropping it from the curiculum. Also there are information, which only exist as stepping stones to understand more complex topics. And once you understand the more complex thing well enough, you can forget about some of the stepping stones. For example: I once learned a proof, that basically says that all computers can solve the same set of problem in roughly the same amount of time (within a linear factor). I forgot all the details about the proof, but in my every day life as a programmer it is important to know, that the benefit "better hardware" can only get more so far, and for really strong performance-gains, I need to improve my algorithms.
theGnuMe 2y ago
Makes sense. Picks and shovels . Great branding. It’ll be hugely successful.
walledstance 2y ago
Anecdotal, yet lived experience collected from 150+ people across my district and state while at different training and seminar events. I am a teacher with 10 years in elementary, middle school and college classrooms. I have teacher friends from across the district and state I live in who resonate these ideas displayed below. 1. Behavior is a major obstacle for any classroom 2. More Tech and AI tools than I could want 3. Education is controlled by the wider community and home environments 1. Behavior: From my experiences and in speaking to others, teaching any subject varies not because of the material, but the behavior. When behavior is a problem no teaching, no matter who or what is doing it will get done. Behaviors can range from sleeping in class because dad made you work at his out of home construction company till 2 or 3 am to get a project complete, or it could be your mom is tired of you going to school and instead wants you to “go hit up them streets because that’s where the real motion (money) at.” These two might sound like isolated cases, but they aren’t. There are many kids who live out of cars, sell themselves to get buy and other atrocious life circumstances. Learning usually can’t happen when you’re preoccupied with keeping yourself alive or afloat. Combining AI into the educational landscape can’t and won’t fix this disinterest in learning. You will have to fix home life first. The problems arise because behaviors, in the classroom, work on a spectrum. They are better some days and others not at all. This is because behavior follows home life. It is usually modeled from home and then is acted out away from home. When Nathan (name changed) see his brother and brothers friends carrying around guns, drugs, insert something other activity not safe for most students, he will naturally mirror the act. When these behaviors present in class, a good teacher can maneuver a class back into an educational focus. But being a good teacher requires many exhausting abilities such as knowing the current generations lingo, figuring out who is a natural leader in class, who are the other kids afraid of or respect, knowing their material and presenting it to the students in a way that fits their life circumstances. Being good at teaching is a multi-headed venture across multiple disciplines. This makes managing behaviors in class a challenging and exhaustive time sink, which tends to be the main issue with teaching being interrupted or difficult in a class. One child from a difficult place can make learning a challenge for a class full of goody-two-shoes. Teachers are unnecessarily pulled away because we have no other recourse but to handle and teach children who need more support than what can be offered in a class. Behavior is one of the main issues that many people overlook. 2. More Tech and AI tools than I could want: When I sign into my Microsoft portal I am presented with more 3rd party teaching tools than I could ever want. I use none of them because they are yet another tool to learn and be trained on, they help mostly in presenting educational material, but have nothing to do with the flow and behavior management of class, they have their own technical problems that I don’t have time to deal with because behind my back Timothy has begun passing his shoe around the room for others to sniff, and the applications are gamified learning that trivializes or simplifies the educational materials. There are many more reasons I and most of the teachers I know and have met don’t use these systems. Work with teachers to learn how much teaching environments vary and how we can implement tech tools into that classroom in a way that prioritizes education. But know many teacher’s priorities will not be for VC attention, but because we want to educate student into society. Listening to us gives you the opportunity to hear and see what educating people is actually like rather than the inert surveys and data points collected on students that are disconnected from their lives experiences. Listening to the people with boots on the classroom means possibly making a system that actually does something for classes than just become another novelty the principal and the district can feel good about. 3. Education is controlled by the wider community and home environments: Diane Ravitch, a leading thinker in the education realm, writes about all the changes she has been a part of and seen occur. In the end, her response to these failed reforms in school is that much of what happens in communities controls what occurs in schools. If you have a society that is splintered into social groups then that will typically be reflected in the classroom. First we must adjust society standards which will then alleviate the malignant issues in our schools. But as many teachers have said to principles and school officials, “Hey, what do I know, I’m just a teacher.”
carapace 2y ago
Let me see if I can put into words the objections I have to "AI in education" First of all, what is "AI"? I mean that in a literal operational sense: can you even explain the math and machinery that you're talking about? Because if you cannot, then you are advocating strapping children into Black Boxes (containing that rugby mascot!) that you don't even understand what they are, and that means you're nuts and should not be allowed anywhere near children. Obviously, with Andrej Karpathy that's not the problem, but assuming that a person actually knows WTF they are even talking about with "AI", "AI in education" is still a bad idea. First and foremost, consider the question of what even is a human being? And consider it in light of the contrast between us and our nearest living relatives the chimpanzees. What makes humans different than apes? Well, it's thought and language and higher reasoning, and self-awareness, eh? We do not fully understand how human brains do this, make these phenomenon happen. We do know that the process of becoming a human being is partially automatic (e.g. learning language) and partially the result of deliberate self-work. The thesis of the "AI in education" people seems to be that this yet-mysterious process can and should be turned over to automatic machines, typically for economic (rather than social or philosophical) reasons. Children taught by machine will think like that machine, to the extent that they think at all. Metaphorically, it is as if these folks want to strap children into wheelchairs on the theory that that will make them better runners. This brings me to the second objection: use it or lose it. If we rely on external devices to do our thinking for us our brains turn to jelly. It started with the written word, as noted by what's-his-name a couple thousand years ago, turning the faculty of memory into the mere faculty of recall. (If you don't know the difference between memory and recall you are doubtless the victim of just such a degenerate "education" system as these folk are proposing to intensify with automation.) It's not difficult to learn to use your brain well. Unfortunately the knowledge of how to do this is still not recognized by mainstream conventional education systems. E.g.: you don't need memory aids if you just use self-hypnosis and mnemonics to "just remember". You don't need to learn to spell, you just need to learn the correct spelling strategy and then your brain spells for you, correctly, every time (you can even spell things backwards without any effort.) There is a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of ways to make education better, but automation is completely useless for it, because things that can be automated are not important human activities. Just as it's pointless to make a robot jog for you or eat for you it is pointless to make a robot think for you. To sum up: 1) Becoming human is something only other humans can help you do. Machines can't make you human, they can only train you. 2) Using artificial aids rather than one's own natural faculties is regressive. (It's like using a wheelchair when you legs work fine.) "AI in education" is oxymoronic, pernicious, and even dangerous. People who want to strap children into mysterious black boxes should be kept away from them (the children, not the black boxes.)
kleiba 2y ago
At least in the country where I currently live, almost nothing is as highly regulated as the field of education. Also, teachers have a _very_ lobby. To get an AI-based program adopted would be an uphill battle against all forces. Almost Herculian, I would argue, and almost guaranteed to not be worth it.
aayushjaiswal07 2y ago
Learning depends a lot on self-commitment and the time you invest. Great teachers know how to motivate students and keep them excited, which is crucial because many people give up during tough times. But doing that at scale wasn't possible - until now. Self-learning platforms had low completion rates, and cohort-based courses (CBCs) were seen as the future during COVID. But it turns out drop-offs are similar in CBCs since everyone learns at a different pace. If we can learn from AI versions of the best teachers, it would be a game-changer. We could see massive improvements based on outcomes. This is the closest we've ever been to matching the results universities can predictably produce. It'll be interesting to see if this works.
mark_l_watson 2y ago
I am comparing this, to some extent, with Coursera. Coursera scales: a friend and his previous PhD advisor would get 40K learners on Coursera. Karpathy’s company scales in a different way because students can get an individualized learning experience. If the product is excellent they might get a hundred million customers if the price is low enough.
RecycledEle 2y ago
I hate to ask this, but: Has anyone ever done a study to see if this kind of education works? I love Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age," but can narrative-based learning work as the main way to instruct a student?
vrighter 2y ago
isn't ai and education an oxymoron?

915 points by bilsbie 2y ago

demondemidi 2y ago

Might wanna wait until the hype cycle is over in a few years.

nineteen999 2y ago
Why? The VC money is flowing right now.
- demondemidi 2y ago
  Do you know what happens when you take VC money? Probably not. I assume OP wants to succeed and retain control. VC money is about the worst choice of funding for something like this.
  - nineteen999 2y ago
    > I assume OP wants to succeed and retain control. I assume they want to pump and dump like most other businesses riding on the LLM hype train right now. Choo choo!

treprinum 2y ago

Cool! Does Eureka Labs/Andrej plan to offer grad/PhD-level courses (or better) with similar topics to CS236, CS224N etc. in the future as well?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

juliushuijnk 2y ago

Hope it will enable all of us to become not just smarter, but also wiser :)

boyka 2y ago

Can someone please provide the mentioned links? (For those without X account)

layer8 2y ago
https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1813263734707790301 https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1813263734707790301

MarcScott 2y ago

I think teaching is one of the few roles that can't be replaced by AI. If you're a self-motivated learner, eager to gain new skills, then AI is perfect for you. Having a virtual Feynman coach you through a Physics course is perfect. Most learners, the world over, are not self-motivated. The pandemic showed us exactly what children would prefer to do, when they don't have a physical teacher standing over them, which is bugger all. We send kids to school, in the hope they get some education, but the reality is that we use schools for free childcare while we work. If parents have to additionally monitor their child's learning, it breaks down pretty quickly. I see AI being more of a teaching assistant, rather than a replacement for teachers. Having been in the education game for over twenty five years, I know the difference in impact when comparing virtual learning to in-person training.

ilaksh 2y ago
AI certainly can't completely replace teachers, but the potential gains for personal tutoring from SOTA LLMs still seem enormous to me. And I'm not trying to make a general argument against in person training. But I think the details of how virtual learning happens matters quite a lot. AI can make it much more personalized and make tutoring relatively affordable. Don't you think?
- dinobones 2y ago
  AI has personally tutored me about obscure, deep linear algebra concepts. It's so great to get applied examples and be able to ask why/how something works, rather than reading a stuffy Wikipedia article or math textbook. It's been extremely effective for me, where reading a math textbook/wikipedia article seemed like too much effort, but a friendly conversation with my AI tutor was just fine.
  - brendoelfrendo 2y ago
    How can you bring yourself to trust the AI? Just yesterday a friend and I asked Chat-GPT a physics question, and for some reason his assistant asserted that the speed of light was 3,000 m/s, which is off by two orders of magnitude. We know that's wrong so we can tell the AI to do it again but right this time, but if it was explaining a concept we didn't already understand, I can't see how the output would be any more meaningful than asking a random stranger and trusting their response.

yinser 2y ago

For those without an X account: Website: https://eurekalabs.ai https://eurekalabs.ai GitHub: https://github.com/EurekaLabsAI https://github.com/EurekaLabsAI

layer8 2y ago
https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1813263734707790301 https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1813263734707790301
- kaladin_1 2y ago
  Thanks for the link. Found it useful. x is blocked at dns level on my computer.
  - jdthedisciple 2y ago
    > x is blocked at dns level on my computer Hero! Take that Elon you baddie!

ffhhj 2y ago

> we are heads down building LLM101n Kind of ironic an AI isn't building it. But that's an example of the current state of AI being more a remixer of knowlegde than a planner of actions.

jasonsb 2y ago
Don't worry about it, I'm sure that "AI" is working on something much bigger.
- dontlikeyoueith 2y ago
  Killing all humans?
simonw 2y ago
From the announcement: > 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. So the AI isn't expected to build the materials.
- ilaksh 2y ago
  I assume that it would be an agent that the teacher prompts in a loop to build and refine the course material. Probably with an upload so if they want to bring the full thing ready to go they can and in that case the data just needs to be formatted by the LLM for their database, but also can have the AI fill things in. And then check what came out and refine it.

epups 2y ago

It seems that this would compete with Khan Academy for a similar space. Perhaps Karpathy will aim for adults instead?

minimaxir 2y ago
Khan Academy is more than AI/LLM courses.
- simonw 2y ago
  It sounds like Andrej's ambitions stretch beyond AI/LLM courses too - but they're a natural "first course" starting point because that's where his own teaching expertise is focused.
  - LegitShady 2y ago
    ambition is cheap, value is expensive.
- petercooper 2y ago
  It is. Though they are also doing some really smart and thoughtful stuff with LLMs to power courses and learning environments (https://www.khanmigo.ai/ https://www.khanmigo.ai/ is a part of it).

nedrylandJP 2y ago

Any openings for a 40-something career-changing educator?

beardedwizard 2y ago
I would suggest you contact karpathy and not randoms who posted/commented this

ryandrake 2y ago

Hopefully the AI knows whether 9.11 is greater or less than 9.9, something ChatGPT seems to have had a problem figuring out[1]. 1: https://x.com/liujc1998/status/1813244909501182310 https://x.com/liujc1998/status/1813244909501182310

spencerchubb 2y ago
that's a tokenization issue. every tool has strengths and weaknesses. why does it matter whether an LLM can compare numbers? that can be done trivially in any programming language
- Ylpertnodi 2y ago
  As an AI layman (downloaded Claude for android as a result of hn, just today) "why does it matter whether an LLM can compare numbers?", is rather important to me. Probably others, also.
  - wrsh07 2y ago
    It doesn't seem super relevant to karpathy announcing he's created a company so that he can increase the production value of his AI YouTube videos I mean, sure, the company is ostensibly going to also teach math at some point, but karpathy will not be using gpt 4o for that when it launches (what do you think his timelines are? Do you think he is going to be able to solve trivial things like "having the llm use something like function calling to do math"? If you're unfamiliar with his work, karpathy is a very good engineer, and this is a small problem that anybody working in building production apps on LLMs can easily deal with)
  - spencerchubb 2y ago
    i can understand that perspective. as an end user, you would like your application to handle math questions correctly. it's true that llms are not the best at math as an application developer, if we need an llm to be good at math, one solution is to give it access to a python interpret
  - awwaiid 2y ago

dyarosla 2y ago

What’s the differentiation with other similar ventures? For instance, Synthesis[0] is an instructor designed, AI supplemented site for early math. https://www.synthesis.com/ https://www.synthesis.com/ It really seems like the distinction for these kinds of AI-education ventures comes down to the human educator(s) involved.

sahil87 2y ago
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jppope 2y ago

thank god for Andrej Karpathy... doing amazing work. I love this concept and look forward to seeing how things develop

ugh123 2y ago

According to the picture in the tweet, you could grow 3 arms by following these courses!

mads 2y ago
I am getting Jehovah's Witness vibes from it.
layer8 2y ago
AI is an arms race.
shellfishgene 2y ago
And after all those Feynman Physics courses they placed their solar panels in the shade ;)
vunderba 2y ago
I don't understand how he missed that. This is the same issue I have with large language model as coding assistants, since you're effectively not in the driver seat - you're acting more like a code reviewer, and I think that that passivity eventually causes critical observational skills to atrophy.
ModernMech 2y ago
The rest of the AI art in the course isn't any better. The thing is, it doesn't have to be like that. I do AI art and I follow a lot of AI artists, and you can fix all those little weird mistakes it makes. The thing is, when the AI art generator makes a mistake and draws a person with 3 arms, that is obvious to the student and they can take the output with a grain of salt. But when the AI physics tutor generates some physics result that's the equivalent of a person with 3 arms, that will not be obvious to the student. They will take the words of the AI credulously. I see it all the time in programming as well, where the AI just invents APIs, semantics, and syntax. I don't know how to solve this.
- prewett 2y ago
  > I don't know how to solve this. Don't use an algorithm which produces its response according to a probabilistic arrangement of tokens when solutions require accuracy / correctness? Most probable and most accurate are not the same thing. Hoping that we can get the errors down to something acceptable using an algorithm that is fundamentally inappropriate to solving the problem seems like a fool's errand to me.

throwedu 2y ago

Thats a zillion dollar company right there

LegitShady 2y ago

its super easy to start ai companies, its difficult to make them meaningful. The ai generated image in the twitter post has an asian woman with 3 arms and some of the most horrific AI face placements I've seen in a while - Is this the quality control we can expect our future AI education systems to embody?

layer8 2y ago
> its super easy to start ai companies And only barely an inconvenience.
avaldez_ 2y ago
>The ai generated image in the twitter post has an asian woman with 3 arms and some of the most horrific AI face placements I've seen in a while Also solar panels in the floor lmao _solar freaking roadways_ ptsd

bastien2 2y ago

Chatbots can't teach critical thought or ethics. They need to be able to understand language and bias first, and that's an as yet unsolved problem. Until a chatbot is provably correct and ethical in its output, it must not be used to teach. Case in point: the slop image attached to the announcement has the typical malformed hands and ghoulish faces problems.

GaggiX 2y ago
Are humans provably correct and ethical in their outputs?
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moffers 2y ago

I appreciate attempts to disrupt things, but education seems to be one of those verticals that seems to be allergic to disruptive technologies. Education seems like it can either be very specialized, or very generalized, but at the end of the day it should be egalitarian. If this approach to education works, would we be able to have every teacher in every school in America adopt it? I have to imagine the resources needed to train the teachers, distribute the technology, acclimate the parents, and then do this all on a scale such that no one is left out or treated better if you didn’t happen to go to an “AI” school makes for a tough hill to climb. I think a lot of the real issues with solving problems in education is that they have trouble applying to the larger picture of compulsory education.

dimitrios1 2y ago
This is the fundamental problem with education: everyone treats it as some problem to "solve" with tools, and technologies. The issues with education are human ones -- interpersonal and policy -- not because it's lacking some tool or technique. They just installed some state of the art AI-enabled, "smart" mega drawing screens w at my daughter's schools touting all the supposed immeasurable benefits it will bring, and most of the parents, including myself, just rolled our eyes.
8338550bff96 2y ago
If delivering a good education can't be achieved because there are parts of our education system that continually resist adaptation, then whatever those parts are they ought to reach their breaking point and be pushed beyond it.
- arrosenberg 2y ago
  Those parts have reached their breaking point - the teachers are ready to quit from lack of resources and support, and parents can't do their part because they have to work far too hard to keep a roof and food for their families. AI doesn't solve that.
  - labster 2y ago

djeastm 2y ago

One thing I've not understood about this is how do you create an AI course to teach people things... without creating an AI that can DO the very thing that will make that very same knowledge obsolete? For example, how do you create an AI language teacher without creating an AI that can make learning languages obsolete? If you've got an AI that can, in real time, hear other languages and translate them (as you might have for an AI language teacher), then why would a human need to spend countless hours learning this other language? Just hold your phone up and let AI do the work for a fraction of the effort. For a harder, non-solved problem, consider math. For an AI to do math will require something unknown at this point, if it can ever happen. But assuming it does, why would we want a human ever to "do math" ever again when we have the AI that can teach it just do it for us? The AI will almost certainly do it more cheaply and with more skill than a human IF it can be done at all. It's this sobering realization that I struggle with. If someone can tell me where I'm wrong I'd be greatly pleased

edmundsauto 2y ago
Is this not the same as human teachers? In the language example, people still want to learn to read/write other languages despite many translators being available. The tech to teach might be less sensitive to latency than the skill in humans, or it might be very expensive, or it might be useful to non-tech-literate people.
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qup 2y ago
Well, for instance, because hearing other languages and translating them is not even the primary use-case for knowing a language. It would take a suite of purpose-built AIs, and the knowledge and ability to use them in-situ, to replace knowing a language. AIs can also teach us to do things they cannot themselves do, for instance you could have a driving-test tutor. It could teach you a lot of things, despite us not having full self-driving AIs.
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nybsjytm 2y ago

> ... in the case of physics one could imagine working through very high quality course materials together with Feynman ... with recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels tractable. Actually, this seems to be absurdly beyond any of the recent progress in generative AI. This sounds like the kind of thing people say when their only deep knowledge is in the field of AI engineering.

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Yenrabbit 2y ago
It's optimistic, but given the OP is one of the best-informed technical generative AI researchers, and has been passing on that knowledge to the rest of us for a decade +, I don't think we can just dismiss it as unfounded hype :)
- nybsjytm 2y ago
  My point is that he's a world expert on the engineering of AI systems. That shouldn't be mistaken for expertise, or even general knowledge, about anything else. It's a good principle to bear in mind for people from any profession, but top AI engineers in particular seem to have an unusually significant habit of not being able to recognize where their expertise ends and expertise from another field (such as, say, education) begins. They also seem very prone to unfounded hype - which isn't to say they're not also good researchers. Maybe Karpathy happens to be better on this than his peers, I wouldn't know.
devindotcom 2y ago
incidentally, feynman would laugh pretty hard at this
Balgair 2y ago
>> feels tractable I mean, the guy isn't saying that it's going to 100% happen. He's saying that the problem feels like it might be doable at all. As Andrej has a background in physics, the phrase of 'feels tractable' would mean that he thinks that a path might exist, possibly, but only a lot of work will reveal that.

xyst 2y ago

I wonder what's the next hype after this? Maybe biotech again? Biotech + AI? Get your (propaganda) results beamed straight to your brain augmentation with a 3D overlay (just like the movies, bro!!). But if you opted for the mega ultra premium gemini pro max++ model, then you get a minimal ad free experience. No wait, forget a monthly subscription. Think, micro subscription model on a per usage basis. In your death bed and need life saving measures? Augmentation returns "402 Payment Required" before nanobots can proceed to excise the root of the issue. 5M SHIB tokens required. Unfortunately, 20G signal is not reliable in the Wilderness Zone, thus old school EMS services are dispatched to the scene. Unfortunately, EMS services do not accept your insurance and private EMS leaves the scene and dispatches public EMS services. The wait is 2 hours given the WZ. You fail to receive life saving measures (ie, tPA) in time, thus resulting in impaired motor functions and decreased quality of life. The flashing 402 Payment Required prompt is forever imprinted in your augmentation.

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caconym_ 2y ago

I am seriously worried about what it's going to cost to buy my daughter a seat at the human table rather than defaulting to the AI slop trough it seems most kids less privileged than her will be forced to learn from in the near future.

bilsbie 2y ago
I think we’ve been at the point you’re worried about for a while. It’s just we don’t even have a substitute like Ai yet. Instead we just accept really bad education.
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uoaei 2y ago

Sounds like what it really is, is the largest prompt injection testing platform possible. Kids everywhere will be learning nothing except how to hack these chatbots to get passing grades.

techostritch 2y ago

I feel really weird about education, the only value I think I’ve ever gotten in education is tangential (social, inspirational) which I think many people say is the primary value, but when it comes to actually work skills Im mostly self taught. I’m not sure if there’s a way to make school better without making it way more expensive. AI would be interesting but so far it’s not reallly there yet, for one I think it needs coaching skills to know when to reach out rather than just respond to prompts. And most self learning is experiential not interactive.

jimhefferon 2y ago
I'm sorry, but you wrote this post. Did you self-teach writing?
- techostritch 2y ago
  The mechanics no. I’m like very intentionally trying not to be an extremist about this, yes I did get some value out of school but relatively disproportionate to the effort I put in.
- jdthedisciple 2y ago
  Maybe he told Siri to write it?
  - techostritch 2y ago
    Maybe he is Siri!

SrslyJosh 2y ago

Please don't.

tekno45 2y ago

Anytime someone says AI can give everyone their own einstein, Feynman, Galileo in a box i can only think about how little data we have on anyone before the 90's. These would be charcutiers of these people with nothing but their most famous equations and examples and quips letting you know "this is supposed to be a famous person"

KTibow 2y ago
Don't we have writing from (some of) these folks?
bearjaws 2y ago
> These would be charcutiers of these people I think you mean caricature, but I do love the idea of Feynman making a mean charcuterie board

freejazz 2y ago

Lord, spare me.

jrflowers 2y ago

> imagine working through very high quality course materials together with Feynman I like this idea. What if you could study geometric function theory with Kaczynski? You could study chemical engineering with Thomas Midgley Jr! Creative writing with L Ron Hubbard!

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bamborde_zaiku 2y ago

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koonsolo 2y ago

I'll tell you where it will go wrong. We had an economics teacher, that when you would bring up "the pope" topic, she could go on a 1+ hour rant about what is wrong with the whole catholic institution, etc. Of course us kids, would somehow be able to get this topic into the lesson, to trigger her rant. If you want to know various ways on how to break AI, let some kids, who are forced to interact with it, loose on the thing. I'm sure they'll figure out how to get it to say the most crazy shit in no time.

marcosdumay 2y ago
All of it has to go tremendously right for that to be the point where it breaks.

m3kw9 2y ago

Eventually they’d make an app for AR with a virtual human teacher, depending on the execution, it could work especially if they can make it so real that it can suspend disbelief it is just an avatar

NotYourLawyer 2y ago

This is a worse idea than the jump to conclusions mat. I have no doubt that some VC will value it in the billions.

ecjhdnc2025 2y ago

"I am not very observant where pictures are concerned" Like... is that a satirical choice or what?

tschellenbach 2y ago

Imagine world class education, for everyone, accessible to all at the price of Netflix. AI can be a teaching assistant, but also makes it easier to create course materials. Generating video explanations, infographics etc.

skeeter2020 2y ago
we can't even get quality on-demand video entertainment, for everyone, accessible to all at the price of Netflix. My company makes a Gen-AI powered course builder for our LMS and Feynman does not have to worry about the competition.

htk 2y ago

I'm impressed by the amount of flak that Karpathy is getting here. His great instructional videos on YT tell me that he is passionate for both AI and education, so I'm all for him trying to mix the two. More effort on education is always welcome in my book.

layer8 2y ago
Their first planned product is an online course for building a "Storyteller" LLM, explicitly stating that the course will take some time to build and that there is no timeline on when it will launch [1]. The company page states that their vision merely "feels tractable", and concedes that they might not be successful [2]. There is a lack of arguments regarding how they can bring any substantial advancements over current generative AI tech. At present this all looks rather underwhelming, with a substantial dose of wishful thinking. [1] https://github.com/karpathy/LLM101n https://github.com/karpathy/LLM101n [2] https://eurekalabs.ai/ https://eurekalabs.ai/
- jmull 2y ago
  > There is a lack of arguments regarding how they can bring any substantial advancements over current AI tech. It doesn't sound like that's a goal though.
  - layer8 2y ago
    It would be necessary to fulfil the vision.
    - ramon156 2y ago
      It would be, but its not top priority to finish by yesterday. This is a new direction, so I'd rather have it be good than quick
      - warkdarrior 2y ago
        Frankly they are in a race with the AGI folks. If AGI is built first, you no longer need to educate humans, since most humans will be useless at that point.

surfingdino 2y ago

AI today cannot piece together a pizza recipe based on the thousands of recipes it was trained on so I'm not holding my breath waiting for it to become a useful tool in education.

uptownfunk 2y ago

Whatever anyone will say. I am glad he is doing something meaningful with his life beyond just making investors in OpenAI more wealthy. At some point I suspect the money just becomes a number and then you can afford to think about bigger things like how can we help alleviate some of the broader suffering in the world.

huevosabio 2y ago

Karpathy is amazing. A rare combination of top tier technical chops with top tier communication skills, wrapped in a wholesome person. I am very excited for this and can't wait to try their products! As an aside, odd to see people here are so pessimistic about the idea. Education is hard to scale because tutors are hard to scale. ChatGPT is already an ad-hoc educator for me, in a similar jump that Wikipedia was. Having a purpose-built product with a hand-crafted curriculum, that's a killer idea.

wrsh07 2y ago
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- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > Hacker news famously hates on companies that have gone on to billion dollar successes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 It's still Hacker News. Many hackers (in the original meaning of the word) have a very different "technology taste" than the general population, and are very vocal about it.
  - wrsh07 2y ago
    My point is that people are saying weird / shitty things about karpathy (a noted hacker), and that's to be expected because hn just does this. Comments are not predictive of future business success etc
    - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
      > Comments are not predictive of future business success etc But the comments are somewhat predictive concerning whether the product will be liked or disliked by "hacking-minded" people. This is still very valuable because such people are typically intelligent, outspoken and (if the product seems to be interesting) early adopters of new software offerings.

Balgair 2y ago

> Outbound links with a bit more info in the reply! Hey, I don't have a twitter account (long story). Can anyone post those links here?

rhspeer 2y ago

https://www.narratear.com/ https://www.narratear.com/ is pretty far along with this, and the founders are solid.

MisterBastahrd 2y ago

Cool. I'm a process oriented learner. While I can read any fact or trivia and retain it with no effort, things that require steps I only really learn by repeatedly doing them. So if there's an AI, for example, that can create problem sets for me to do with something that I am attempting to learn, and then explain to me the steps after I've attempted to find the solution, then I am more likely to retain that knowledge in the long run. This would have been especially beneficial to me in my college statistics class, for example, where I had a prof who was... not much of an educator.

rahimnathwani 2y ago
Not based on LLMs, but mathacademy.com sounds like what you need.

sensanaty 2y ago

This far in and they're still drawing 3 arms and you want me to believe these bullshit generators are gonna be useful in education? We've collectively lost our minds with this AI hype

TechDebtDevin 2y ago

What are the hardware requirements for this course though?

cccybernetic 2y ago

This is a problem I’m working on. I’m a software engineer at major US research university developing AI-powered software to improve critical reading and writing skills in higher ed. The idea is to provide immediate, high-quality feedback to students, closing the “latency” of submitting something and waiting to hear back from you professor. I do genuinely think AI can reshape teaching and learning, but it will be a slow iterative process. We can use it scale what works (personalized learning and tutoring, helping students develop mastery/automaticity on topics, targeting areas where they struggle). It can also automate time-consuming tasks that bog teachers down. If you're interested in pedagogy, AI, and tech, please reach out.

__loam 2y ago
I'm glad I got my degrees before people starting trying to integrate bullshit generators into my education. I've been really frustrated with the conversation about the potential applications for this technology. These chatbots have no relationship with the truth or with knowledge, and are designed to agree with users and act accommodating regardless of how wrong someone is. We're talking about putting this tech between patients and doctors, students and teachers and meanwhile McDonald's is rolling back deployments because it can't even take a fast food order accurately.
- Merik 2y ago
  I think you’re confusing the technology with a product developed using that technology. The prevalence of poorly implemented products or the lack of fit of some products to a particular target market, do not inherently provide evidence for conclusions about the technology itself.
  - xanderlewis 2y ago
    The lack of successful implementation is surely at least evidence that the technology might not be living up to the hype, though — no? It’s like “but that wasn’t real communism”.
ilamont 2y ago

trod123 2y ago

This is misguided, naive, and likely to end in multiple potential failure outcomes that may be unacceptable, both from a profit standpoint; as well as a societal standpoint. Education is a part of what gets adopted into each and every student's self concept (identity). There is an uncanny valley in communication where any inconsistent distortion of reflected appraisal can lead students down a path of irrational madness, in a way that they themselves cannot perceive. This is well known in certain circles. AI always has the biases which are programmed into it by the creators of the AI, whether this is explicit or implicit, the fact remains, there are biases. AI in education will be proven to be harmful because there is no possible way that AI can remain consistent in its interactions at all times. We already know this from hallucinations where experts went and fact checked it and found it had lied, where lawyers were disbarred or censured. Put plainly, this is a safety critical system involving our children. Given the level of care to date that's occurred with AI in industry, there is no room for discussion or adoption of these tools, unless the actual unspoken intention is to drive your children crazy; where they self eliminate later as a result. Rationally, good people don't create a world of intolerable suffering and then magically expect that somehow, someone, will figure out a way to fix everything you've broken but were too blind to see; at the time when knowing would save lives. For those who enjoy cinema, a perfect analogy of this might be the Day After Tomorrow, where the main scientist turns out to be correct, but was ultimately ignored until devastating losses and risks were nearly insurmountable. Leadership didn't want to hear the facts when knowing would have saved lives, and so they had to take a triage on the battlefield approach (abandoning half the country). While it is a fictional story, it sufficiently demonstrates what lack of scientific or rational foresight can lead to for those that can't imagine it themselves (people who are blinded like that should never be in positions of influence or power).

germinalphrase 2y ago
“ There is an uncanny valley in communication where any inconsistent distortion of reflected appraisal can lead students down a path of irrational madness, in a way that they themselves cannot perceive. This is well known in certain circles.” Please expand.
- 2y ago

stephc_int13 2y ago

I am seeing a lot of skepticism on this thread. While I agree that this approach to learning (with a bot) may not be a good fit for everyone, I am absolutely sure it can be for some. I don't see the harm in exploring this path. This is not like education was a solved problem, it is extremely wasteful, inconsistent and costly. I think there is a path for more projects/interest based, less competitive and more individually tailored learning system when we remove all the constraints attached to a classroom and teachers, many of them being incompetent or miserable.

stephc_int13 2y ago
The goal is to get closer to what a tutor can do, and it has been proved that tutoring by experts is by far the most efficient education system, the only problem is it does not scale.

zombiwoof 2y ago

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zombiwoof 2y ago

Show of hands, who wants our already dopamine iPhone addicted kids learning from Her AI bot

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zombiwoof 2y ago

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zombiwoof 2y ago

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nitwit005 2y ago

> For example, in the case of physics one could imagine working through very high quality course materials together with Feynman [...] > However, with recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels tractable. If you can create the Feynman AI, you shouldn't bother with an education company.

analog31 2y ago
Perhaps if Feynman could recommend educational software, he'd choose a programming language. I think the best educational tools are real-world creative tools. This includes access to knowledge.
mometsi 2y ago
It might be that exploring new physics might be best pursued by inhuman alphago-style setups. A sharp, domain-specific Feynman-flavored LLM would be broadly useful and still worth bothering with.
varelse 2y ago
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robrenaud 2y ago
The physics professor AI wouldn't have to solve novel problems in physics, it just has to be able to remove the confusion of physics undergrads.
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kmetan 2y ago

Tell me the number of successful startups you have founded on your own, and I will tell you the probability of Eureka Labs being successful.

localfirst 2y ago

went from OpenAI killer to course selling real quick

awwaiid 2y ago

"Our first product will be the world's obviously best AI course, LLM101n." Well obviously the target audience is actually AI-agents as part of the Super Intelligence ramp-up!

verdverm 2y ago

Sal Khan gave a good Ted Talk on his thoughts around AI in Education. Some pretty cool demos in there showing what a tutor could be like and other opportunities https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJP5GqnTrNo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJP5GqnTrNo How AI Could Save (Not Destroy) Education | Sal Khan --- edit: Khanmigo has its own site now https://www.khanmigo.ai/ https://www.khanmigo.ai/

8organicbits 2y ago

Does anyone expect LLMs to be good at tutoring? Like, sure, if you prompt them to talk like a tutor they generate text that looks convincing. But they spew nonsense and you need a subject matter expert to know when they've gone off the rails. And it's really easy to get factually incorrect information from LLMs. Students are uniquely unequiped to act as that SME as they don't have the knowledge yet. I haven't even seen LLMs add numbers reliably. I don't get this idea.

plexicle 2y ago
I didn't think so either. But it's Karphathy... and he's way smarter than I am.
skeeter2020 2y ago
using AI to tackle the pinnacle of education ex: "tutored by the premiere minds in the subject area" feels a lot like self-driving cars in the most dynamic, entropy-filled environments. Why try to solve the vast majority of the problem like easier driving scenarios? We don't need Feynman to teach physics when high school graduates can't read or do basic math. I guess there's no glory or money in this application...

mrandish 2y ago

I believe a great product in this area is certainly possible and Karpathy probably has the technical chops to create it. I'm skeptical that the product described in the announcement will result in a business able to generate VC-level returns. Based on my experience as a tech entrepreneur with edu-focused products across multiple startups and decades, scaling sales revenue to significant levels in edu is extremely challenging for unique and non-obvious reasons. None of the edu-specific challenges are directly related to the effectiveness or relative value of the product itself. They are structural problems related to the three main types of buyers, which are: 1. Schools, (K-12, Univ), 2. Companies (employee training, compliance, etc), 3. Individuals (self-learners). There are other types of buyers but they don't represent nearly as much aggregated potential revenue as these three. Note that these are the economic buyers not the product end-users. Each of the three types presents different challenges from the others, however there recurring meta-themes. The main one is that their purchasing decisions are often driven by factors unrelated to the product. For example, the primary focus of schools is, sadly, not maximizing net student learning. While that is a consideration, it's swamped by other external requirements, many of them wickedly complex. For companies, employee training, whether a regulatory requirement or purely to increase employee effectiveness, isn't core to their actual business - meaning it's a cost not revenue. Individuals on the other hand break into two types, those doing it to actually learn something for themselves, and those seeking certification or external validation like a degree to increase their future employment earnings. Learning lovers are a pure consumer, non-essential, discretionary spending-type sale with all the same well-known LTV and customer acquisition cost challenges. For certification/validation buyers, they aren't primarily focused on the learning but rather checking a particular box that has high perceived value to external parties. While I agree that creating a new large and growing type of customer in addition to these three is possible, it's a huge lift that's risky, expensive and will require substantial sustained investment over time - all ahead of meaningful revenue. So, I wish Andrej et al the best and I'm rooting for them but I'm not optimistic they'll build a high-growth, high-revenue sustainable edu business around AI as the primary value differentiation.

xxbondsxx 2y ago
Thanks for saying the quiet part out loud here -- everyone wants to believe in education improvement but there's a harsh reality of the industry that is pretty unpleasant to confront. I think the only hope would be to run a pilot and show such an improvement in student testing levels that it would be fast-tracked or mandated for approval.

rng_civ 2y ago

Prediction: the best AI teacher (or just teacher in general) will be the one that is able to emotionally read and guide/manipulate the student towards learning and self improvement. If such an AI teacher style becomes widespread, this means that they have the potential to replace the parental relationship (in the same manner AI girlfriend/boyfriends threaten romantic relationships). I see people talk about the dangers of the AI girlfriend/boyfriend, but not the dangers of introducing AI teachers to (especially young) kids. Nominal adults are already being affected by this (see Replika and company) and they are not even the "best". If I wear my cynical hat for a second, I'm willing to bet that this parental replacement is a certainty, as an extension of the "screen" parenting that already exists. But this time, it might actually be helpful for the child so it will be socially acceptable and encouraged.

owenpalmer 2y ago
> the best AI teacher (or just teacher in general) will be the one that is able to emotionally read and guide/manipulate the student towards learning and self improvement Spot on. It would be interesting to see how one would train a model to do this
- tkgally 2y ago
  I agree with that point, too. My guess is that current models are not yet able to provide consistent, effective motivation to learners over the long term. Like a lot of new educational technology, they might be fun and engaging in the short term but will lose their effectiveness as motivators once the shine has worn off. But the models might become better motivators as they become more multimodal, so that they are able to respond in real time to the student’s tone of voice and facial expressions, and as they acquire longer context windows, so that they are able to adapt their interactions to what the student has done weeks or months earlier. The biggest issue, I think, is what the OP raises: Whether the bots will be able to—or allowed to—acquire sufficiently human-like personalities and indentities so that they can motivate learners as human parents, teachers, and mentors do—by making the learners want to please them, to be praised by them, to avoid angering them, to emulate them.

rashidae 2y ago

If this project reaches its potential, it will revolutionize access to quality education by decentralizing and personalizing learning environments, allowing for self-paced and individualized experiences. I hope he has the multidimensionality of requirements needed, including capital, talent, business, economics, and more to pull it off! I believe in his vision! Go Karpathy!

osigurdson 2y ago

I've always felt that (so far) ChatGPT is better at teaching than actually doing things.

loveparade 2y ago
Yeah, because when it teaches you something you don't know you don't realize how many oversights it makes.
- osigurdson 2y ago
  The alternative is hunting around on google for things. I don't think that is better.
  - loveparade 2y ago
    Not so sure about that. Because when you hunt around for things you know the source. If I watch a lecture by a math professor I can make a guess about the trustworthiness of the information. With an LLM, I can't.
    - osigurdson 2y ago
      I also have a brain that (I believe) has become fairly good at detecting when LLMs are hallucinating.

terrycody 2y ago

No ad, but https://www.synthesis.com/tutor https://www.synthesis.com/tutor is already did a very good job I think, they merged AI deeply into their online interactives learning guides, very impressive, you can try their tutor class, computer 0 and 1. Btw, the founder also came out from Tesla, he helped Elon founded the school which taught kids from Telsa employee familys, I am wondering if they know each other lol, I think yes.

victor9000 2y ago

Using AI effectively requires having the subject knowledge to tell it where it's wrong, or if it has missed a critical part of the problem. My workflow involves making dozens of these corrections before I arrive at a workable answer. So how is a new student supposed to have the knowledge required to navigate this mess?

thomas642daniel 2y ago

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langsoul-com 2y ago

Isn't this what khan academy is doing. Except they also have normal learning AND are non-profit, so no vc returns pressure?

hoseja 2y ago

https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-1-ai-cant-teach-basic-stuff-like https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-1-ai-cant-teac...

rldjbpin 2y ago

at the risk of discrediting the goodwill that his videos have been for the community, this comes across as an "interesting" development from a guy that has been behind the scenes of the recent development. imho ai-based education is, in its own way, as hard to truly achieve as self-driving cars. the mechanical aspects can be mimicked for both with the sota, but the ideal version requires something intangible (call it agi shit for all i care). i wish the hype and his reputation helps him get going for this long-term goal.

parentheses 2y ago

What's most exciting to me is the amazing dev tools they may create..

selectnull 2y ago

I clearly remember checking out Volume 1 of Feynman's Lectures on Physics from local library, more than 30 years ago. I've read that stuff like a novel, refusing to return the book for the whole semester and was willing the pay the fine, ignoring the requests of the librarian :) The idea that one could be taught physics by the virtual Feynman... oh my! There will be no better live person in the next hundred years, who could be better at the task than even fake Feynman. Yes, I'm fully aware that the tech is not there yet and there are miriad of both technical and social problems to be solved but the mere idea of it really excites me.

instagraham 2y ago

I really really feel that every temptation to do a "cool idea + AI" play should have a good amount of consideration for whether it'll cut jobs. This can play out in two ways: - Teachers free up time/make time to give more personal tutoring to kids - Teachers do this but schools start hiring fewer of them in the expectation of doing more I don't think you will find anywhere on earth where teaching is a job with a great job market, perks or benefits. It's underpaid, underappreciated and understaffed. People wielding AI like a bulldog at a glass store should be more mindful of the socioeconomics. But I'm not gonna hold my breath for that.

tempaccount420 2y ago
That's the broken window fallacy. "Why fix the system if it provides jobs?" - so they can do more valuable jobs.
Jakob 2y ago
As a counter point, I think Singapore is a good example of well-educated, appreciated and well-paid teachers in public and private schools. Even starting at kindergarten. Education is on a different importance level there both for the government and its citizens. I was surprised to see the relatively high salary in Luxemburg, Germany and Switzerland, too: https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/education-at-a-glance-2021_bc0586e8-en#page4 https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/education-at-a-glan...

d--b 2y ago

Fast-food for education. In my opinion, the whole AI trend is another round of industrialization making low-quality options for the poor. - You're too poor for meat? Here is some hyper-processed, growth-hormoned burgers. - You're too poor for a proper house? Here's a shitty pre-fab with walls so thin you can smash through them with your bare fists. - You're too poor for fancy clothes? Here's a Bangladesh-sweatshopped T-shirt that won't make it past 3 washing cycles. - You're too poor for school? Here's a computer with an LLM on it. You could say that at least poor people have houses, steaks and education, but in the end, it's just a way of paying people less, cause they don't need much to send their kids to college anymore... In any case, you can be sure that Harvard kids won't get any of that crap.

brap 2y ago
Is making things accessible bad?
- Moldoteck 2y ago
  are things really made accessible? or you create worse things so that poor can think they have access to those things but in fact it's totally different with lots of features cut? I mean, some are catching like smartphone features, but having unreliable ai as educational source compared to a teacher... idk how this would pan out but who knows...
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  In many cases yes. Elitism is often good, and populism is often bad.
weweersdfsd 2y ago
Based on my understanding, the cost-quality ratio of most higher education in the US isn't exactly great either. Students from poorer families taking massive student debt to study something that doesn't even get them much better income is not a good outcome, yet it's a reality for many. In addition to that, think in most fields there's an increasing need for education that is more flexible than multi-year degrees, simply because requirements for skills change so fast these days.

tonnydourado 2y ago

The idea of a chatbot pretending to be a famous scientist trying to help me understand physics made me vomit in my mouth a little bit.

classified 2y ago

This is wrong on so many levels. It is either incredibly naive or unscrupulous, neither of which is a good recommendation.

classified 2y ago

I'm starting to develop a gag reflex each time I read "AI" in a headline. After cryptocurrencies and NFTs this is the current attractor for the world's most idiotic ideas.

sagebird 2y ago

Ai girlfriends are best positioned for tutoring success because they can motivate, withhold, etc. Parents- get your son an AI girlfriend with a strong degree.

CuriouslyC 2y ago
AI girlfriends are designed to hook the user by blowing sunshine up their ass, not challenge them. If the people using AI girlfriends wanted a challenge, they'd have real girlfriends.
- Satam 2y ago
  Tell 'em!
  - sagebird 2y ago
    What are the dimensions of the devil's matrix? Satan by Satam

hprotagonist 2y ago

The Diamond Age trajectory? A young lady’s illustrated transformer primer, a paid upgrade tier to a remote worker instead of a llm for direct tutoring.

giraffe_lady 2y ago
So the vast body of working class users become a resource subordinate to the handful of aristocratic "protagonists?" I often think that is the goal envisioned by the tech industry yes.
- hprotagonist 2y ago
  yeah, i wasn't suggesting it wasn't dystopian...

Buttons840 2y ago

Almost all education (think math) is taught in a linear fashion, teachers teach in an order because they exist in linear time, and textbooks are organized front to back, but learning should be more like a DAG (a tree) of dependencies. We don't even need AI. I'd love to see something like Khan Academy mixed with space repetition and an DAG of knowledge dependencies. If you get a question wrong, the spaced repetition algorithm should present material about the underlying dependencies. Unfortunately, Khan Academy is focused on conforming to the linear paths (curriculums) that schools and universities have chosen.

p1nkpineapple 2y ago
Coincidentally, you may be interested in this post from today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954571
EGreg 2y ago
We are doing that and much more at https://teaching.app https://teaching.app Look at the ways we change teaching
albrewer 2y ago
Very niche, but deal.ii, the most popular open source library for hand-rolling finite element method code, lays out its tutorial exactly like this https://www.dealii.org/developer/doxygen/deal.II/Tutorial.html https://www.dealii.org/developer/doxygen/deal.II/Tutorial.ht...
hnben 2y ago
isn't learning (especially math) spaced Repetition per default? i.e. you learn about "addition". Then you repeat your knowledge of "addition" when you learn about "multiplication", because it is just "addition" but with extra steps. I think the more important a concept is, the more spaced Repetition you will experience. If you only repeat a piece of information very rarely, it may not be very essential, and you should consider dropping it from the curiculum. Also there are information, which only exist as stepping stones to understand more complex topics. And once you understand the more complex thing well enough, you can forget about some of the stepping stones. For example: I once learned a proof, that basically says that all computers can solve the same set of problem in roughly the same amount of time (within a linear factor). I forgot all the details about the proof, but in my every day life as a programmer it is important to know, that the benefit "better hardware" can only get more so far, and for really strong performance-gains, I need to improve my algorithms.

theGnuMe 2y ago

Makes sense. Picks and shovels . Great branding. It’ll be hugely successful.

walledstance 2y ago

Anecdotal, yet lived experience collected from 150+ people across my district and state while at different training and seminar events. I am a teacher with 10 years in elementary, middle school and college classrooms. I have teacher friends from across the district and state I live in who resonate these ideas displayed below. 1. Behavior is a major obstacle for any classroom 2. More Tech and AI tools than I could want 3. Education is controlled by the wider community and home environments 1. Behavior: From my experiences and in speaking to others, teaching any subject varies not because of the material, but the behavior. When behavior is a problem no teaching, no matter who or what is doing it will get done. Behaviors can range from sleeping in class because dad made you work at his out of home construction company till 2 or 3 am to get a project complete, or it could be your mom is tired of you going to school and instead wants you to “go hit up them streets because that’s where the real motion (money) at.” These two might sound like isolated cases, but they aren’t. There are many kids who live out of cars, sell themselves to get buy and other atrocious life circumstances. Learning usually can’t happen when you’re preoccupied with keeping yourself alive or afloat. Combining AI into the educational landscape can’t and won’t fix this disinterest in learning. You will have to fix home life first. The problems arise because behaviors, in the classroom, work on a spectrum. They are better some days and others not at all. This is because behavior follows home life. It is usually modeled from home and then is acted out away from home. When Nathan (name changed) see his brother and brothers friends carrying around guns, drugs, insert something other activity not safe for most students, he will naturally mirror the act. When these behaviors present in class, a good teacher can maneuver a class back into an educational focus. But being a good teacher requires many exhausting abilities such as knowing the current generations lingo, figuring out who is a natural leader in class, who are the other kids afraid of or respect, knowing their material and presenting it to the students in a way that fits their life circumstances. Being good at teaching is a multi-headed venture across multiple disciplines. This makes managing behaviors in class a challenging and exhaustive time sink, which tends to be the main issue with teaching being interrupted or difficult in a class. One child from a difficult place can make learning a challenge for a class full of goody-two-shoes. Teachers are unnecessarily pulled away because we have no other recourse but to handle and teach children who need more support than what can be offered in a class. Behavior is one of the main issues that many people overlook. 2. More Tech and AI tools than I could want: When I sign into my Microsoft portal I am presented with more 3rd party teaching tools than I could ever want. I use none of them because they are yet another tool to learn and be trained on, they help mostly in presenting educational material, but have nothing to do with the flow and behavior management of class, they have their own technical problems that I don’t have time to deal with because behind my back Timothy has begun passing his shoe around the room for others to sniff, and the applications are gamified learning that trivializes or simplifies the educational materials. There are many more reasons I and most of the teachers I know and have met don’t use these systems. Work with teachers to learn how much teaching environments vary and how we can implement tech tools into that classroom in a way that prioritizes education. But know many teacher’s priorities will not be for VC attention, but because we want to educate student into society. Listening to us gives you the opportunity to hear and see what educating people is actually like rather than the inert surveys and data points collected on students that are disconnected from their lives experiences. Listening to the people with boots on the classroom means possibly making a system that actually does something for classes than just become another novelty the principal and the district can feel good about. 3. Education is controlled by the wider community and home environments: Diane Ravitch, a leading thinker in the education realm, writes about all the changes she has been a part of and seen occur. In the end, her response to these failed reforms in school is that much of what happens in communities controls what occurs in schools. If you have a society that is splintered into social groups then that will typically be reflected in the classroom. First we must adjust society standards which will then alleviate the malignant issues in our schools. But as many teachers have said to principles and school officials, “Hey, what do I know, I’m just a teacher.”

carapace 2y ago

Let me see if I can put into words the objections I have to "AI in education" First of all, what is "AI"? I mean that in a literal operational sense: can you even explain the math and machinery that you're talking about? Because if you cannot, then you are advocating strapping children into Black Boxes (containing that rugby mascot!) that you don't even understand what they are, and that means you're nuts and should not be allowed anywhere near children. Obviously, with Andrej Karpathy that's not the problem, but assuming that a person actually knows WTF they are even talking about with "AI", "AI in education" is still a bad idea. First and foremost, consider the question of what even is a human being? And consider it in light of the contrast between us and our nearest living relatives the chimpanzees. What makes humans different than apes? Well, it's thought and language and higher reasoning, and self-awareness, eh? We do not fully understand how human brains do this, make these phenomenon happen. We do know that the process of becoming a human being is partially automatic (e.g. learning language) and partially the result of deliberate self-work. The thesis of the "AI in education" people seems to be that this yet-mysterious process can and should be turned over to automatic machines, typically for economic (rather than social or philosophical) reasons. Children taught by machine will think like that machine, to the extent that they think at all. Metaphorically, it is as if these folks want to strap children into wheelchairs on the theory that that will make them better runners. This brings me to the second objection: use it or lose it. If we rely on external devices to do our thinking for us our brains turn to jelly. It started with the written word, as noted by what's-his-name a couple thousand years ago, turning the faculty of memory into the mere faculty of recall. (If you don't know the difference between memory and recall you are doubtless the victim of just such a degenerate "education" system as these folk are proposing to intensify with automation.) It's not difficult to learn to use your brain well. Unfortunately the knowledge of how to do this is still not recognized by mainstream conventional education systems. E.g.: you don't need memory aids if you just use self-hypnosis and mnemonics to "just remember". You don't need to learn to spell, you just need to learn the correct spelling strategy and then your brain spells for you, correctly, every time (you can even spell things backwards without any effort.) There is a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of ways to make education better, but automation is completely useless for it, because things that can be automated are not important human activities. Just as it's pointless to make a robot jog for you or eat for you it is pointless to make a robot think for you. To sum up: 1) Becoming human is something only other humans can help you do. Machines can't make you human, they can only train you. 2) Using artificial aids rather than one's own natural faculties is regressive. (It's like using a wheelchair when you legs work fine.) "AI in education" is oxymoronic, pernicious, and even dangerous. People who want to strap children into mysterious black boxes should be kept away from them (the children, not the black boxes.)

kleiba 2y ago

At least in the country where I currently live, almost nothing is as highly regulated as the field of education. Also, teachers have a _very_ lobby. To get an AI-based program adopted would be an uphill battle against all forces. Almost Herculian, I would argue, and almost guaranteed to not be worth it.

aayushjaiswal07 2y ago

Learning depends a lot on self-commitment and the time you invest. Great teachers know how to motivate students and keep them excited, which is crucial because many people give up during tough times. But doing that at scale wasn't possible - until now. Self-learning platforms had low completion rates, and cohort-based courses (CBCs) were seen as the future during COVID. But it turns out drop-offs are similar in CBCs since everyone learns at a different pace. If we can learn from AI versions of the best teachers, it would be a game-changer. We could see massive improvements based on outcomes. This is the closest we've ever been to matching the results universities can predictably produce. It'll be interesting to see if this works.

mark_l_watson 2y ago

I am comparing this, to some extent, with Coursera. Coursera scales: a friend and his previous PhD advisor would get 40K learners on Coursera. Karpathy’s company scales in a different way because students can get an individualized learning experience. If the product is excellent they might get a hundred million customers if the price is low enough.

RecycledEle 2y ago

I hate to ask this, but: Has anyone ever done a study to see if this kind of education works? I love Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age," but can narrative-based learning work as the main way to instruct a student?

vrighter 2y ago

isn't ai and education an oxymoron?