About Us | ScholarStack AI

Our Founding Story

ScholarStack AI started in a classroom.

Founder David Miller was teaching his usual course at Carnegie Mellon University when he noticed something off: the papers were polished, the quiz scores were nearly perfect, but class discussions had gone quiet. Students could turn in good work, but when he asked them to explain the concept behind it, the answers were shallow. Off-the-shelf, consumer AI had made it easy to produce the output of learning without doing the work of learning.

The tempting response was to fight back, which was the prevailing industry response at the time — ban the tools, use AI to find AI in papers, go back to blue books and proctored exams. But David saw a different problem underneath it: students weren't cheating him, or the university. They were quietly cheating themselves out of an education, one shortcut at a time.

At the same time, two things were going to waste: his university's library had already invested in licensed, credible content that students weren't using, and the school had already spent real money on AI access that was contributing to the shortcuts students were taking.

The idea of ScholarStack AI solves the problem of AI in education while pulling together the resources that already exist. It gives faculty the ability to design AI-guided learning experiences grounded in their own course material and their library's licensed content, while using the AI access tokens that an institution may have already purchased.