Andrej Karpathy

Andrej Karpathy is a Slovak-Canadian computer scientist known for his research in deep learning and computer vision as well as being a cofounder of OpenAI. Karpathy worked as a research scientist at OpenAI between 2015 and 2017 before becoming senior director of AI at Tesla. In February 2023, Karpathy rejoined OpenAI.

Born on October 23, 1986, in Bratislava, Slovakia, Karpathy and his family moved to Toronto, Canada, when he was fifteen. From 2005 until 2009, he studied at the University of Toronto, double-majoring in computer science and physics with a minor in math. While an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, Karpathy attended Geoffrey Hinton's class and reading groups. In 2009, he moved to the University of British Columbia for his master's, working on machine learning for robotics with Michiel van de Panne.

Between 2011 and 2015, Karpathy worked at the Stanford Vision Lab, studying for his PhD on convolutional/recurrent neural networks and their applications in computer vision and natural language processing. Working under advisor Fei-Fei Li, Karpathy submitted his thesis in August 2016. While at the University of Toronto, Karpathy designed and became the primary instructor of the first deep-learning class on Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition. He also completed three internships at:

• Google Brain (2011)—learning-scale unsupervised learning from videos
• Google Research (2013)—large-scale supervised learning on YouTube videos
• DeepMind (2015)—deep reinforcement learning team

In December 2015, Karpathy became a founding member of the artificial general intelligence (AGI) research and development company OpenAI. Karpathy worked as a research scientist at OpenAI until June 2017, when he joined Tesla as the senior director of AI. While at Tesla, Karpathy led the computer vision team of Tesla Autopilot. His work included in-house data labeling, neural network training, and deployment in production running on our custom inference chip. After leaving Tesla in July 2022, Karpathy announced his return to OpenAI in February 2023.

In 2020, Karpathy was recognised in MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35. Karpathy is known for his talks and writing on AI research and self-driving technology. He has a popular YouTube channel explaining aspects of neural networks and large language models. Karpathy is also an entrepreneur, investing in AI startups, including the following:

• Rosebud AI
• Adept AI
• Perplexity AI
• Replicate
• Class Companion
• Pika