Andrej Karpathy

AI Researcher & Educator

About

Andrej Karpathy is an AI researcher and educator known for his work on computer vision and neural networks. He was a founding member of OpenAI's research team and later served as Director of AI at Tesla, leading the Autopilot vision team. Now independent, his educational content on neural networks has influenced countless developers entering the AI field.

Key Contributions

Created Stanford's CS231n course materials and later YouTube lectures that became entry points for deep learning engineers
Contributed influential computer-vision and vision-language research in the ImageNet-era deep-learning wave
Helped start OpenAI's early research group, then returned during the ChatGPT era before becoming independent again
Led Tesla's Autopilot vision team, pushing neural-network-heavy perception into a safety-critical consumer product
Popularized 'Software 2.0' and built nanoGPT, giving developers concrete code for understanding neural-network software
Coined and normalized 'vibe coding,' a useful phrase that also drew criticism for making AI-assisted software feel too casual

Notable Projects

microGPT

A complete GPT implementation in ~200 lines of Python — autograd engine, tokenizer, transformer with multi-head attention, training loop, and inference. No dependencies.

Moments Timeline View all moments

Feb 2025

Vibe Coding

Karpathy coins 'vibe coding' to describe a new paradigm where developers describe intent to AI and iterate on results rather than writing code directly.

"There's a new kind of coding I call 'vibe coding', where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists."