Launching Alpha Research: Karpathy Knowledge Bases for All of Humanity's Knowledge
"Something I'm finding very useful recently: using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases for various topics of research interest." Andrej Karpathy
Alpha Research builds open source, agentic knowledge bases for all of humanity's knowledge. Our mission is to help knowledge workers work 100x faster.
Today we're launching and open sourcing our first platform, Alpha Book, built on a mirror of the Project Gutenberg dataset with 75,000 books. An Ivy League author used it and, in 10 minutes, found new and crucial sources he had not heard of for a book he is writing.
The Bottleneck in Knowledge Work
Knowledge work is bottlenecked in two key ways: finding evidence and testing hypotheses. We want to make both dramatically faster.
Alpha Research extends classic RAG with general coding agents that can use filesystem tools like ripgrep, reason iteratively, and search across broad corpora for evidence instead of relying on a single retrieval pass. Those same agents can write ad hoc scripts to label datasets, compare slices, and test research hypotheses directly against the underlying corpus.
The Roadmap
Our roadmap is simple: repeat Alpha Book across every public dataset that matters. Next we'll launch Alpha Econ with US Census, BLS, NBER, and related datasets. Then Alpha Justice with US Supreme Court cases. Then Alpha NYC with New York City's open data. And so on.
The long-term goal is straightforward: build knowledge bases for the entirety of humanity's knowledge.
How You Can Help
- Interested in quantitative humanities research? Try Alpha Book and suggest datasets in our Discord.
- Know a historian, author, economist, or other humanities researcher? Introduce them to me at ryan@dolphinmade.com. I'm especially excited to support young researchers who are eager to use technology to power their research.
- If you have introductions to large research libraries, archives, museums, presidential libraries, universities, historical societies, the National Archives, or Google Books, I'd love to meet the researchers and librarians who want to attach the world's best librarian to their collections.
- For enterprise teams with large proprietary datasets like AdTech, real estate, or social media trends: Alpha Research also supports private, high-value corpora. Agentic search produces better results, drives more searches, and increases user satisfaction and retention.
We want to set the standard for agentic knowledge work by building the best and easiest-to-use research platform. The mission is to usher in a new era of quantitative research by building knowledge bases for the entirety of humanity's knowledge.
Use Alpha Book With Your Agent
Want your OpenClaw, Codex, Claude Code, or other coding agent to work smarter? Copy this prompt:
Go to https://alpha-book.org/skill.md and follow the instructions there.