Andrej Karpathy (born 23 October 1986) is a Slovak-Canadian researcher in Artificial intelligence, specializing in Deep learning and computer vision. He is a founding member of OpenAI, served as director of artificial intelligence at Tesla, and in 2024 founded Eureka Labs, an AI education platform. In 2026, he joined Anthropic as part of its pretraining team.
Karpathy is also a prominent educator, known for his Stanford course CS 231n and his YouTube tutorials on Neural network construction. He coined the term 'vibe coding' in 2025 to describe building software through natural language prompts.
Education and early life
Karpathy was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia), and moved with his family to Toronto when he was 15. He completed bachelor's degrees in Computer Science and Physics at the University of Toronto in 2009, and a master's degree at the University of British Columbia in 2011, where he worked on physically simulated figures.
In 2006, he began posting videos on YouTube under the channel badmephisto, gaining fame for Rubik's cube tutorials used by speedcubers such as Feliks Zemdegs. The channel had 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.
Career and research
Karpathy authored and was the primary instructor of the first deep learning course at Stanford, CS 231n: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition. The course grew from 150 students in 2015 to 750 in 2017, becoming one of the largest classes at Stanford.
He is a founding member of OpenAI, where he was a research scientist from 2015 to 2017. In June 2017, he became Tesla's director of artificial intelligence, reporting to Elon Musk. He was named one of MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35 for 2020. After a several-months-long sabbatical, he left Tesla in July 2022. As of February 2023, he makes YouTube videos on creating artificial neural networks.
On February 9, 2023, Karpathy announced his return to OpenAI. A year later, on February 13, 2024, an OpenAI spokesperson confirmed he had left. In the same year, he was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in AI. On July 16, 2024, he announced on X that he started Eureka Labs, an AI education company. Their first product was the AI course LLM101n, and he also runs the 'Zero to Hero' series on Large language model fundamentals. The company advocates for AI teaching assistants, a concept criticized for data privacy concerns and reducing 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 via X that he joined Anthropic, where the company stated he would lead a team for research in pretraining.
Teaching and public engagement
Beyond Stanford, Karpathy's educational efforts include the 'Zero to Hero' series, which covers fundamentals of Large language models. His YouTube channel, with over 9 million views, includes tutorials on building Neural networks from scratch, reaching a broad audience of aspiring AI practitioners.
Legacy and influence
Karpathy's work spans research, industry, and education. His contributions to Deep learning and computer vision, along with his role in founding OpenAI and leading AI at Tesla, have made him a notable figure in the field. His coinage of 'vibe coding' reflects a shift toward Generative AI tools in software development.
References
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