Andrej Karpathy is a world-renowned computer scientist, AI researcher, and online educator. He is a co-founder of OpenAI and formerly served as the Director of Artificial Intelligence and Autopilot Vision at Tesla. In 2024, he founded Eureka Labs, an AI-native education startup.
Stanford and Deep Learning Roots
Karpathy completed his Bachelor's at the University of Toronto and his Master's at the University of British Columbia. He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2016 under the supervision of Fei-Fei Li. At Stanford, he designed and taught CS 231n: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition, which became one of the most popular and influential deep learning courses in the world.
OpenAI and Tesla
Karpathy was one of the founding research scientists at OpenAI in 2015. In 2017, Elon Musk recruited him to join Tesla as Director of AI, where he led the computer vision team for Tesla Autopilot, transitioning the system from radar-based detection to a pure-vision neural network approach. He returned to OpenAI in 2023 to work on LLMs before departing in 2024 to launch Eureka Labs.
