1986–, Computer scientist, AI educator
Andrej Karpathy is a Slovak-Canadian computer scientist who has been one of the most visible AI educators of the deep-learning era. His Stanford CS231n course on Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition (taught with Justin Johnson and Fei-Fei Li from 2015) shaped a generation of computer-vision researchers. His blog posts on backpropagation, RNNs and software engineering for AI have been read by hundreds of thousands of practitioners.
Karpathy was a founding member of OpenAI (2015), left in 2017 to lead Tesla's Autopilot AI team (training the vision and planning networks for self-driving), returned to OpenAI in 2023, and left again in early 2024 to focus on educational projects. His nanoGPT code (2022) is a widely-used minimal implementation of a GPT-style language model, and his 2024 video series Building a Neural Network from Scratch has become a canonical entry point to modern AI.
He is now founder of Eureka Labs, an AI-native education startup.
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Related people: Fei-Fei Li, Sam Altman
Discussed in:
- Chapter 1: What Is AI?, A Brief History of AI