Andrej Karpathy

Career

1. 
   Anthropic

   • Pretraining research team leadMay 2026 – present
2. E
   Eureka Labs

   • Founder2024–2026
3. 
   OpenAI

   • Returned for a second stint2023–2024
4. 
   Tesla

   • Director, then Senior Director of AI2017–2022
5. 
   OpenAI

   • Research scientist, founding member2015–2017

Education

• BSc, Computer Science and Physics, University of Toronto, 2009
• MSc, Computer Science, University of British Columbia, 2011
• PhD, Computer Science, Stanford University, 2016

Lesser-known facts

• Became known on YouTube first, for Rubik's cube tutorials on his channel badmephisto.
• Designed and taught CS 231n, Stanford's first deep learning class, which grew from 150 students in 2015 to 750 in 2017.
• Did his PhD under Fei-Fei Li at the Stanford Vision Lab.
• First got into deep learning at the University of Toronto, attending Geoff Hinton's class and reading groups.
• At Tesla, his team handled in-house data labeling, neural network training and deployment on Tesla's custom inference chip.
• The model cited in his original February 2025 vibe coding tweet was Anthropic's.
• In March 2026, let an AI agent tune training code unsupervised for two days. Its 700 experiments cut a larger model's training time by 11%.

Known for

• CS 231n: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition
• Connecting Images and Natural Language (2016)
• Eureka Labs / LLM101n
• "Zero to Hero" series
• Coined "vibe coding" (2025)

Honors

MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 (2020) · TIME100 Most Influential People in AI (2024)

Interviews and talks

• Sequoia Ascent fireside chat (2026)x.com