Andrej Karpathy

Andrej Karpathy was born in Bratislava, moved to Toronto at 15, and first found an audience as "badmephisto," a teenager posting Rubik's cube tutorials on YouTube. After degrees at Toronto and the University of British Columbia, Karpathy did a PhD with Fei-Fei Li at Stanford on models that describe images in sentences, and created CS231n, Stanford's first deep learning course, which grew from 150 students in 2015 to 750 in 2017.

Karpathy was one of the eleven founding members of OpenAI in December 2015 and worked there as a research scientist until June 2017, when Elon Musk hired Karpathy to run AI for Tesla's Autopilot. Testifying at the Musk v. Altman trial in May 2026, Greg Brockman said Musk later came to Brockman with "an apology and a confession" about the hire, and that neither Musk nor Karpathy had warned Brockman beforehand. At Tesla, Karpathy led the computer vision team behind Autopilot and Full Self-Driving until leaving in July 2022.

Karpathy returned to OpenAI in February 2023 and left a year later, saying the departure was not the result of "drama," then founded Eureka Labs in July 2024 to build courses taught with AI assistants. The free "Zero to Hero" lectures and minimal open-source code such as nanoGPT and nanochat made Karpathy one of the field's most-followed teachers, and a February 2025 post coined "vibe coding" for building software by prompting and accepting whatever the model writes. In an October 2025 interview Karpathy called this "the decade of agents" and said the industry was over-predicting. On 19 May 2026 Karpathy joined Anthropic's pre-training team under Nick Joseph to build a group using Claude to accelerate pre-training research, writing, "I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time."