Andrej Karpathy
AI researcher and educator; OpenAI founding member, former Tesla AI director
Profile
- Nationality
- Born in Slovakia; moved to Toronto, Canada, aged 15; works in the United States
- Field
- Deep learning, computer vision, large language models, AI education
- Career
- OpenAI founding member (2015); Director of AI, Tesla (2017–2022); OpenAI again (2023–2024); founded Eureka Labs (2024)
- Now (Oct 2026)
- Pretraining team, Anthropic (joined May 2026)
- Major awards
- MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 (2020); TIME100 AI (2024)
Andrej Karpathy was born in Slovakia and moved to Toronto, Canada, at the age of 15. He studied computer science and physics at the University of Toronto and received a master's degree from the University of British Columbia. He then earned a PhD in computer science at Stanford University in the United States, supervised by Professor Fei-Fei Li. In 2015 he became a founding member of OpenAI, and from 2017 to 2022 he worked as Director of AI at Tesla. As of October 2026, he works on the pretraining team (the stage in which an AI learns basic abilities by reading a very large amount of text) at the AI company Anthropic.
During his PhD, Karpathy researched the use of neural networks for computer vision (technology that lets computers recognise what is in pictures) and natural language processing. At Stanford he designed CS231n, the university's first deep learning course, with Professor Fei-Fei Li and was its primary instructor. The number of students on the course grew from 150 in 2015 to 750 in 2017. At Tesla he reported directly to Elon Musk and led the computer vision team for Autopilot, the company's driver-assistance feature. He returned to OpenAI in 2023 and left again in February 2024.
In July 2024 he founded Eureka Labs, aiming to build an 'AI-native school' in which a human teacher and an AI teaching assistant teach together, and he prepared an undergraduate-level AI course, LLM101n, as its first offering. When he announced on 19 May 2026 that he had joined Anthropic, he said that 'the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative'. Anthropic said he would build a team that uses its AI model Claude to speed up pretraining research. He said he remains deeply passionate about education and plans to return to that work in time. He was named one of MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35 in 2020 and one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2024.
Sources for this profile (10) · as of Oct 22, 2026
- Andrej Karpathy Academic Website (Stanford) · Stanford University
- Slovak gets high-level job at Tesla · The Slovak Spectator
- Introducing OpenAI · OpenAI
- Tesla loses top AI executive who led Autopilot vision team · TechCrunch
- Ex-OpenAI and Tesla engineer Andrej Karpathy announces AI-native school Eureka Labs · VentureBeat
- Andrej Karpathy announces he's joining Anthropic · VentureBeat
- Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic's pretraining team · Quartz
- OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic's pre-training team · TechCrunch
- Andrej Karpathy: The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2024 · TIME
- MIT Technology Review Announces 2020 Innovators Under 35 · MIT Technology Review
AIMade by AIThis profile was written by AI (Claude) from the 10 sources above (official pages, filings, news reports).How it's made
Records 14
Newest first. Open one to see it with its source.
The most-cited person in these records moved inside a frontier lab. The nature of his public writing may change from here on
He himself puts forward a successor term to vibe coding, moving the discourse from giving up on quality to responsibility for supervision
The coiner of the term publicly narrowed its scope. His own rebuttal to stretching vibe coding to cover production development
A rare case of a lab veteran publicly pushing timelines back. The phrase decade of agents became the standard quote for pushing back on the hype
Brought frontier-model training down from a secret to a reproducible recipe. The culmination of the nanoGPT and llm.c lineage
A contemporaneous record that pins down the generational handover from prompt engineering
Extends the 2017 Software 2.0 frame to natural-language programming, and proposes a human review loop, rather than full automation, as a design principle
A case of a free lecture made by an individual serving as the de facto shared textbook of the industry
The word that defined software discourse in 2025. Collins Dictionary named it its 2025 Word of the Year and added it to the dictionary
Gave a name to the gap between benchmark scores and reliability in real use. Salesforce adopted it as a formal research agenda and built the SIMPLE benchmark, and Sundar Pichai riffed on it as AJI
A case of a frontier-lab researcher declaring education an independent business
Spread the frame of seeing the LLM not as a model but as an OS kernel, which became the shared metaphor for later discussions of agents, tool calling and context management
A one-liner that defined natural-language prompting as programming. It later became the slogan of prompt engineering discourse. The original X post was not checked directly; this relies on Quote Investigator's documentat
Planted the generational vocabulary of Software 1.0/2.0 and became the prototype for every later Software N.0 discussion