Andrej Karpathy

Andrej Karpathy (born 23 October 1986^[3]) is a Slovak-Canadian computer scientist who served as the director of artificial intelligence and Autopilot Vision at Tesla. He co-founded and formerly worked at OpenAI,^[4][5][6] where he specialized in deep learning and computer vision.^[7][8][2][9]

Andrej Karpathy
Karpathy at Stanford in 2016
Born	Andrej Karpathy (1986-10-23) 23 October 1986 (age 38) Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia)
Alma mater	University of Toronto (BS) University of British Columbia (MS) Stanford University (PhD)
Awards	Innovators Under 35 (2020) TIME100 Most Influential People in AI (2024)[1]
Scientific career
Fields	Machine Learning Computer Vision Artificial intelligence[2]
Institutions	OpenAI (2015–2017, 2023-2024) Tesla, Inc. (2017–2022)
Thesis	Connecting Images and Natural Language (2016)
Doctoral advisor	Fei-Fei Li
Website	karpathy.ai

Education and early life

Karpathy was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia),^{[10][11][12][13]} and moved with his family to Toronto when he was 15.^[14] He completed his Computer Science and Physics bachelor's degrees at University of Toronto in 2009^[15] and his master's degree at University of British Columbia in 2011,^[15] where he worked on physically-simulated figures (for example, a simulated runner or a simulated person in a crowd) with his adviser Michiel van de Panne.

In 2006, Karpathy began posting videos on YouTube on his channel, badmephisto. He garnered fame by posting Rubik's cube tutorials which have been used by famous speedcubers such as Feliks Zemdegs.^[16] The channel has over 9 million views as of June 2025.

Karpathy received a PhD from Stanford University in 2015 under the supervision of Fei-Fei Li, focusing on the intersection of natural language processing and computer vision, and deep learning models suited for this task.^[17][18]

Career and research

He authored and was the primary instructor of the first deep learning course at Stanford, CS 231n: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition.^[19] It became one of the largest classes at Stanford, growing from 150 students in 2015 to 750 in 2017.^[20]

Karpathy is a founding member of the artificial intelligence research group OpenAI,^[21][22] where he was a research scientist from 2015 to 2017.^[20] In June 2017 he became Tesla's director of artificial intelligence and reported to Elon Musk.^[23][8][24] He was named one of MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35 for 2020.^[25] After taking a several-months-long sabbatical from Tesla, he announced he was leaving the company in July 2022.^[26] As of February 2023, he makes YouTube videos on how to create artificial neural networks.^[27]

It was reported on February 9, 2023, that Karpathy had announced he was returning to OpenAI.^[28]

A year later on February 13, 2024, an OpenAI spokesperson confirmed that Karpathy had left OpenAI.^[29] In the same year, he was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in AI.^[30]

On July 16, 2024, Karpathy announced on his X account that he started a new AI education company called Eureka Labs.^[31][32] Their first product was the AI course, LLM101n.^[33] He also has a broader educational effort, the "Zero to Hero" series on LLM fundamentals.^[34] The company also advocates for AI teaching assistants, a concept which has been criticized due to data privacy concerns and the removal of personal connection between teacher and student.^[35]

In February 2025, Karpathy coined the term vibe coding to describe how AI tools allow hobbyists to construct apps and websites, just by typing prompts. ^[36]