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."

Videos & Interviews

Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AI

Karpathy discusses code agents, automated research, and the emerging loopy era of AI systems

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Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again)

Y Combinator talk on LLM-assisted coding, vibe coding, and the future of software development

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Andrej Karpathy: Tesla AI, Self-Driving, Optimus, Aliens, and AGI

Lex Fridman Podcast #333 - In-depth conversation about AI, Tesla, and the future

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Let's build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out

Educational video building GPT from the ground up - influential AI tutorial

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Connections

Fei-Fei Li

Influenced by

AI Researcher & Computer Vision Pioneer

Karpathy took his Stanford PhD under Li with a thesis on connecting images and natural language — the problem ImageNet had made tractable, and the one that would reappear, transformed, inside multimodal models a decade later. He also inherited her conviction that teaching is part of research rather than a duty beside it: CS231n, which he helped build and teach, became the on-ramp for one generation of deep-learning engineers, as his lectures and nanoGPT are for the next.

en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org

Ilya Sutskever

Collaborated

Co-founder, Safe Superintelligence Inc.

Both are named in OpenAI's December 2015 launch announcement — Sutskever as research director, Karpathy among the founding research staff — and both eventually walked out of the building they helped fill. They mark the two exits from the same room: one toward trying to control what was built, the other toward making it legible to everyone else.

techcrunch.com · en.wikipedia.org