Andrej Karpathy

Karpathy was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia), and moved with his family to Toronto when he was 15. He completed his Computer Science and Physics bachelor's degrees at the University of Toronto in 2009 and his master's degree at the University of British Columbia in 2011, where he worked on physically simulated figures.

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. 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.

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

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

On February 9, 2023, Karpathy announced he was returning to OpenAI. A year later on February 13, 2024, an OpenAI spokesperson confirmed that Karpathy had left OpenAI. In the same year, he was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in AI. On July 16, 2024, Karpathy announced on his X.com account that he started a new AI education company called Eureka Labs. Their first product was the AI course, LLM101n. He also has a broader educational effort, the "Zero to Hero" series on LLM fundamentals. 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.

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. On May 19, 2026, he announced that he joined Anthropic via a statement on X.com, while the company stated that he will be leading a team for research in pretraining.