Andrej Karpathy (born 23 October 1986[3]) is a Slovakian AI researcher[4] who served as the director ofartificial intelligence andAutopilot Vision atTesla. He co-founded and formerly worked atOpenAI,[5][6][7] where he specialized indeep learning andcomputer vision.[8][9][2] In 2024 he founded Eureka Labs, an AI education platform, whose first course will be LLM101n: Let's Build A Storyteller.[10]
Karpathy was born inBratislava,Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia),[11][12][13][14] and moved with his family toToronto when he was 15.[4] He completed his Computer Science and Physics bachelor's degrees atUniversity of Toronto in 2009[15] and his master's degree atUniversity 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 asFeliks Zemdegs.[16] The channel has over 9 million views as of June 2025.
He authored and was the primary instructor of the first deep learning course at Stanford,CS 231n: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition.[20] The course became one of the largest classes at Stanford, growing from 150 students in 2015 to 750 in 2017.[21]
Karpathy is a founding member of the artificial intelligence research groupOpenAI,[22][23] where he was a research scientist from 2015 to 2017.[21] In June 2017 he became Tesla's director of artificial intelligence and reported toElon Musk.[24][9][25] He was named one ofMIT Technology Review'sInnovators Under 35 for 2020.[26] After taking a several-months-long sabbatical from Tesla, he announced he was leaving the company in July 2022.[27] As of February 2023, he makes YouTube videos on how to createartificial neural networks.[28]
On February 9, 2023, Karpathy announced he was returning to OpenAI.[29]
On July 16, 2024, Karpathy announced on hisX account that he started a new AI education company called Eureka Labs.[32][33] Their first product was the AI course, LLM101n.[34] He also has a broader educational effort, the "Zero to Hero" series on LLM fundamentals.[35] 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.[36]
In February 2025, Karpathy coined the termvibe coding to describe how AI tools allow hobbyists to construct apps and websites, just by typing prompts.[37]
