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Former OpenAI And Tesla Engineer Launches New AI Education Startup
- Written by Andrea Miliani Former Tech News Expert
- Fact-Checked by Justyn Newman Former Lead Cybersecurity Editor
Computer engineer scientist Andrej Karpathy—former researcher at OpenAI and head of AI at Tesla—launched a new company, Eureka Labs, an AI-native educational platform.
Karpathy announced it on X this Tuesday and explained that Eureka Labs will be a new educational approach built with AI. In its new AI-powered platform, teachers will design their courses and AI teaching assistants will help students navigate the content, enhancing the learning experience in massive open online courses.
According to Reuters , Karpathy was one of the founding members of OpenAI, back in 2015, and was later hired by Tesla as director of AI and autopilot vision to help build driver assistance software. The computer engineer received a PhD from Stanford University and has been working on educational content of his own like teaching how to solve Rubik’s cube, and more on his YouTube channel .
“While my work in AI took me from academic research at Stanford to real-world products at Tesla and AGI research at OpenAI,” Karpathy explained in his post, “All of my work combining the two so far has only been part-time, as side quests to my “real job”, so I am quite excited to dive in and build something great, professionally and full-time.”
Karpathy shared his enthusiasm and described Eureka Labs as a project that combines two decades of this work and passion for AI and education.
The first product on the new platform will be “LLM101n”, an undergraduate-level class that will help students train their own AI models. The course products will be available online but Karpathy explained that they also hope to gather virtual and in-person groups to go through the program together.
The course description, available on GitHub, states: “We are going to build everything end-to-end from basics to a functioning web app similar to ChatGPT, from scratch in Python, C, and CUDA, and with minimal computer science prerequisites. By the end, you should have a relatively deep understanding of AI, LLMs, and deep learning more generally.”
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Investigation Reveals Apple, Nvidia, And Others Used YouTube Videos To Train AI
- Written by Andrea Miliani Former Tech News Expert
- Fact-Checked by Justyn Newman Former Lead Cybersecurity Editor
A new investigation by the nonprofit news studio Proof News and Wired revealed that major AI firms like Anthropic, Nvidia, Apple, and Salesforce used thousands of YouTube videos to train AI models despite YouTube’s policies against harvesting without permission.
Researchers with technical expertise analyzed training datasets publicly available and discovered these Silicon Valley companies and others used transcripts from 173,536 YouTube videos from over 48,000 channels.
Proof News explained that they’ve found material from YouTube stars like Mr. Beast, PewDiePie, Jacksepticeye, and Marques Brownlee as well as educational content from channels from MIT, Harvard, Khan Academy, and news publications like BBC, NPR, and Wall Street Journal. A few popular shows like “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” and “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” were also mentioned in the study as part of the collection.
YouTube Subtitles, as the dataset was called, also includes translations into languages like Arabic, German, and Japanese, and was built by EleutherAI, a nonprofit AI research group.
According to a paper published by EleutherAI, the dataset is part of a compilation called Pile which includes material from other sources as well. Apple, Nvidia, Salesforce, Bloomberg, Databricks, and Antropic—focused on “AI safety”—have confirmed to have used the Pile to train AI models through research papers and documents.
Proof News also launched yesterday a tool to help content creators, researchers, and the public find the videos used in the database. “We built a tool so you can search the data for yourself”, explained the organization through a press release, “be advised that the search tool will occasionally return false negatives for channels and videos that are in the dataset. Make sure to spell your channel or video title correctly.”
Youtubers included in the research have also expressed their concern and vexation. “It’s theft,” said Dave Wiskus, the CEO of Nebula, to Proof News and Wired after learning their content had been used to train AI models. “Will this be used to exploit and harm artists? Yes, absolutely”.
