Andrej Karpathy

Andrej Karpathy was born on October 23, 1986, in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. At the age of 15, his family relocated to Toronto, Canada. He completed his Bachelor of Science with a double major in Computer Science and Physics and a minor in Mathematics at the University of Toronto in 2009. His early work included attending Geoff Hinton’s deep learning classes and reading groups. He then pursued a Master of Science at the University of British Columbia, which he completed in 2011. During his master’s, he focused on developing learning controllers for physically-simulated figures, applying machine learning to robotics within physical simulations.

Karpathy earned his PhD from Stanford University in 2015, under the supervision of Fei-Fei Li. His doctoral research concentrated on convolutional and recurrent neural networks and their applications in computer vision, natural language processing, and the intersection of these fields. During his PhD studies, he gained practical experience through internships at Google Brain in 2011 and Google Research in 2013, investigating large-scale unsupervised and supervised learning from videos. He also completed an internship at DeepMind in 2015, working with the deep reinforcement learning team. He was the primary instructor for Stanford’s first deep learning class, CS 231n: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition, which grew significantly in enrollment.

From 2015 to 2017, Karpathy was a research scientist and a founding member at OpenAI. He then transitioned to Tesla in 2017, where he served as the Senior Director of AI until 2022. In this role, he led the computer vision team for Tesla Autopilot, overseeing in-house data labeling, neural network training, and the deployment of full self-driving technology. He returned to OpenAI in 2023, where he contributed to improving GPT-4 on ChatGPT before departing in 2024 to found Eureka Labs, an AI+Education company. Parallel to his entrepreneurial endeavors, he maintains an active YouTube channel dedicated to AI education.