What is edgi?

How it works

1. Play a Lesson. About a minute: the most surprising true thing about one idea, told as a short story, then a question or two that make you use it. Short videos from educational creators count too.
2. Claim the card. Paying real attention to an idea earns it as a card. It isn't a grade. The more you learn around the same idea, the more the card changes, from matte to foil to gold.
3. Watch it land on your Map. Every card lights a point on your Map, joined to the ideas it connects to. Follow any connection to your next Lesson. Your Map is also your profile, and it shows where your ideas overlap with other people's.

Cards also come in Sets: short, curated runs of ideas, like The Slot Machine in Your Pocket. Collect every card in a Set to seal it.

Why edgi exists

AI keeps getting better at answering questions. It can't make you want to ask them. In an age of intelligent machines, curiosity is humanity's edge, and edgi is built around it.

The biggest problem in education isn't funding or class sizes. It's that most people aren't interested in what they're being taught. School teaches that answers matter more than questions, and that being right matters more than being curious. edgi starts with what you already want to know, and measures itself by whether you enjoy learning.

Curiosity is powerful, and it's fragile. It usually strikes in the middle of something else. You're watching a video about rainbows, the narrator mentions refraction, and you want to know more. By the time you've opened a new tab and searched, the moment has passed. And when you do chase it, a single fact with nothing to connect to is gone by the next day.

edgi is built to catch that moment and keep it. A Lesson takes about a minute, so you can follow a question while you still care about it. Each Lesson becomes a card, and each card goes on your Map next to the ideas it connects to, so what you learn builds on what you already know, and the next idea is always one tap away.

Who makes edgi

Josh Shapiro started edgi. Growing up, he learned more from YouTube creators like Veritasium and Vsauce than he did in class, and he was kicked out of boarding school at 18. A video he made got him into NYU's Gallatin School. At 23 he started teaching courses he designed at NYU, and at 25 one of them was named a Star Course. In 2020 he made a TikTok explaining GPT-3 that reached 4 million views, two years before ChatGPT. He has since built learning products at Fiveable and Knowunity, and teaches AI and entrepreneurship at NYU. The company is Edgi Labs, Inc. Write to [email protected].

What's in it

• 104,000ideas, each its own card
• 44,000with a 60-second Lesson
• 296,000connections between them
• 37curated Sets

The connections between ideas are what let one Lesson lead to the next: any two are typically about seven steps apart (here's how we measured it). Browse 287 of the ideas here, each on its own page with a Lesson you can play in the browser.

Price

edgi is free: Lessons, cards and the Map. Sets unlock with coins you earn by learning. edgi Pro is optional: it opens two Sets a day without coins, raises the limits on making your own Lessons and adds offline access.

Where it runs

edgi is an iPhone app on the App Store. There's no Android app yet. On any phone or computer, the Lessons at edgi.tv/learn play in the browser without an account.

Not to be confused with

edgi, the learning app at edgi.tv, is not Edgi: Offline AI, an Android chatbot app, and not EDGI, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative.