‘Education Should Feel Like Going to the Gym for Your Brain’
Eureka Labs founder Andrej Karpathy hopes that in a post-AGI world, people will go to the gym not just physically but also mentally. “I feel learning something is like going to the gym – but for the brain,” said Karpathy in a recent podcast. Earlier this year, Karpathy compared learning with going to the gym and cautioned that a lot of videos on YouTube looked like education, but were merely for entertainment. “Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn’t have to be actively not fun either, but the primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that ‘10 minute full-body’ workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym,” he posted on X. He encouraged those who truly wanted to learn, saying that unless you’re trying to master something narrow and specific, close those tabs of quick blog posts. “Close those ‘Learn XYZ in 10 minutes’ tabs,” he advised. Karpathy isn’t excited about a future where people are sidelined due to automation. “There’s a lot of activity in AI focused on replacing or displacing people and often centred around pushing people aside. However, I’m more interested in technologies that empower people, and I feel like I’m kind of on a high level like ‘Team Human’,” he added. He further revealed that the first course from his startup is designed for undergraduates, and is expected to be available by the end of the year or early next year. “I have a lot of distractions, but I am working hard to make it very, very good. It takes time to get there,” said Karpathy. Personal Tutor for 8 Billion People Karpathy believes that personal AI tutors can greatly enhance human learning capabilities. “What I find very interesting is how far a person can go if they have the perfect tutor for all subjects, and I think people could go really far if they had the perfect curriculum,” he said. Karpathy hopes to address Bloom’s Sigma 2 problem. Bloom’s research found that students who received one-on-one or small group instruction with regular feedback performed two standard deviations (2 sigma) better than their peers who had traditional classroom instruction. He said he is currently developing a course which he describes as  “the course you would go to if you want to learn AI”. “I’ve already taught courses, like I taught CS231n at Stanford, and that was the first deep learning class and was pretty successful. But the question is, how do you actually scale these classes? How do you make it so that your target audience could be 8 billion people?” he said. Karpathy believes that current models are not yet good enough to create a quality course, but he thinks they can serve as the front-end for students and interpret the courses for them. “The teacher doesn’t go to the students anymore; the teacher is not the front-end. Instead, the teacher is on the back end, designing the materials and the course, while the AI serves as the front end,” said Karpathy. The founder of Khan Academy, Salman Khan, recently echoed similar sentiments, saying personal tutors are a necessity. “Alexander the Great had Aristotle as his personal tutor,” he added, saying generative AI will do the same for every student globally. “That’s what world-class looks like.” Last year, Khan Academy launched Khanmigo, a personal tutor and teaching assistant powered by GPT-4. This academic year, 65,000 students and teachers piloted Khanmigo across school districts in the US. “It acts just like Aristotle or Socrates would with their students and works across every subject that Khan Academy offers. It has all the context that the student would normally have on Khan Academy, and it also acts as a teaching assistant for teachers,” said Khan. “It remembers the conversation you’re having. It also remembers some of the work that you’ve been doing at Khan Academy,” he added. In India, edtech unicorn PhysicsWallah recently launched Alakh AI. The suite comes with several products including AI Guru, Sahayak, and NCERT Pitara. “AI Guru is a 24/7 companion available to students, who can use it to ask about anything related to their academics, non-academic support, or more,” said Vineet Govil, the CTPO of Physics Wallah, in an exclusive interview with AIM. He added that the tool is designed to assist students by acting as a tutor, helping with coursework, and providing personalised learning experiences. It also supports teachers by handling administrative tasks, allowing them to focus more on direct student interaction. Future of Education Karpathy feels that in the future, students should focus more on subjects like physics, computer science, and maths, as they are fundamental for developing thinking skills. Moreover, he believes that while today people often learn for practical reasons, such as getting a job, this might not be the case in a post-AGI world. “In a pre-AGI society, education is useful, and I think people are motivated by that because they’re climbing up the economic ladder. In a post-AGI society, I believe education will be much more about entertainment,” concluded Karpathy, contradicting his initial statement that education is not fun and easy.
“But the payoff is immense, just like physical exercise,” says Andrej Karpathy, who plans to release his first course using generative AI by year-end.
Eureka Labs founder Andrej Karpathy hopes that in a post-AGI world, people will go to the gym not just physically but also mentally.
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Siddharth is a media graduate who loves to explore tech through journalism and putting forward ideas worth pondering about in the era of artificial intelligence.