Andrej Karpathy (born October 23, 1986) is a Slovak-Canadian computer scientist and educator. He is a founding member of OpenAI, where he specialized in deep learning and computer vision, and later served as the Director of Artificial Intelligence at Tesla. In 2024, he founded Eureka Labs, an AI education platform, and in 2026 he joined Anthropic as a technical advisor. Karpathy is widely recognized for his contributions to deep learning education, including the influential Stanford course CS231n and his popular YouTube tutorials.
Karpathy's work spans both academic research and industry application, with a focus on neural networks and their practical use in education. He coined the term "vibe coding" in 2025, reflecting the growing accessibility of AI-assisted software development. His career has been marked by a series of high-profile roles at leading AI organizations, alongside a sustained commitment to making complex topics understandable to a broad audience.
Education and early life
Karpathy was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia), and moved to Toronto with his family when he was 15. He completed his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he worked on physically simulated figures. In 2009, he began his PhD at the University of British Columbia, where he worked on physically simulated figures.
In 2011, 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.
Academic career and CS231n
Karpathy authored and was the primary instructor of the first deep learning course at Stanford, CS231n: 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. The course materials, including lecture notes and assignments, were made publicly available and became a standard resource for students and practitioners worldwide.
The course emphasized practical implementation of convolutional neural networks, covering topics such as backpropagation, batch normalization, and dropout. Its success helped establish a template for subsequent deep learning courses at other institutions and contributed to the broader adoption of deep learning education.
OpenAI and early research
Karpathy was a founding member of the artificial intelligence research group OpenAI, where he was a research scientist from 2015 to 2017. During this period, he contributed to early work on generative models and reinforcement learning, including research on adversarial examples and one-shot learning. His work at OpenAI helped lay groundwork for later developments in transformer-based architectures.
His time at OpenAI coincided with the organization's transition from a nonprofit research lab to a more commercially oriented entity. Karpathy's role involved both research and engineering, and he was known for his ability to communicate complex ideas clearly, a skill that would later define his educational ventures.
Tesla and Autopilot
In June 2017, Karpathy joined Tesla as the Director of Artificial Intelligence and reported to Elon Musk. He led the Autopilot vision team, overseeing the development of neural networks for self-driving cars. His work involved training deep neural networks to process camera feeds in real time, a task that required significant advances in data augmentation and model efficiency.
Karpathy was named one of MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35 for 2020, recognizing his contributions to AI in the automotive industry. After taking a several-months-long sabbatical from Tesla, he announced he was leaving the company in July 2022. His departure marked the end of a period of rapid development for Tesla's AI capabilities, though the company continued to build on his team's work.
Return to OpenAI and Eureka Labs
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 he was starting a new AI education company called Eureka Labs.
Their first product was the course LLM101n, a "Zero to Hero" series on LLM fundamentals. The company aims to combine AI teaching assistants with a broader educational effort, creating scalable, interactive learning experiences. Karpathy coined the term "vibe coding" to describe how AI tools allow developers to construct software by typing prompts, a concept that quickly gained traction in the developer community.
Vibe coding and public engagement
In February 2025, Karpathy coined the term "vibe coding" to describe a new approach to software development where developers describe their intent in natural language and let AI tools generate the code. This concept reflected a shift toward more accessible programming paradigms, where the focus is on high-level intent rather than low-level syntax. The term quickly became popular among developers and was adopted by major tech publications.
Karpathy's public engagement has been characterized by his ability to demystify complex AI concepts for a general audience. His YouTube channel, which began with Rubik's cube tutorials, now features in-depth explanations of large language models, neural networks, and practical AI applications. He has also been active on X (formerly Twitter), where he shares insights on AI research and education.
Anthropic and future directions
In 2026, Karpathy joined Anthropic as a technical advisor, where he is expected to contribute to the company's research on AI safety and alignment. His move to Anthropic reflects a broader industry trend of researchers returning to core AI research after exploring applied domains. Karpathy's work at Anthropic is likely to influence how the company develops its next-generation models, building on his extensive experience with both OpenAI and Tesla.
Karpathy's legacy in the field of AI is defined by his dual contributions as both a researcher and an educator. His ability to translate complex technical concepts into accessible educational content has inspired a new generation of AI practitioners. As of 2026, he remains an active contributor to both research and public discourse, with his work at Anthropic likely to shape future developments in artificial intelligence.