---
title: Andrej Karpathy
tags: [researcher, llm, pedagogy, biography]
status: active
confidence: high
created: 2026-05-09
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orphan: false
aliases: []
---

# Andrej Karpathy

Andrej Karpathy is a Slovak-Canadian AI researcher known for his work in computer vision
and large language models, his leadership role at Tesla AI, and his widely-followed
educational content on deep learning.

## Career

**Stanford and OpenAI**  
Karpathy completed his PhD at Stanford under [[geoffrey-hinton]]'s collaborator Fei-Fei Li,
focusing on deep learning for image captioning. He was a founding member of OpenAI
(2015–2017), working on deep reinforcement learning before joining Tesla.

**Tesla Autopilot (2017–2022)**  
As Senior Director of AI at Tesla, Karpathy led the Autopilot vision team, building a
purely vision-based approach to autonomous driving at scale. He left Tesla in 2022.

**Return to OpenAI (2023)**  
Karpathy briefly rejoined OpenAI in 2023 before departing again to focus on education
and his own research.

## Educational Work

Karpathy is one of the most effective AI educators working today. His key resources:

- **CS231n** — Stanford course on Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition;
  lecture videos remain widely used
- **micrograd** — a minimal autograd engine (~100 lines of Python) that builds backprop
  from scratch, used to teach the foundations of neural networks
- **nanoGPT** — a clean, minimal implementation of a GPT-class language model; widely
  used as a reference implementation and teaching tool
- **"Let's build GPT from scratch"** — a 3-hour YouTube lecture walking through the
  full implementation of a transformer language model from first principles

## Influence on the Field

Karpathy's nanoGPT and associated lectures have become the canonical starting point for
researchers and engineers learning to build and fine-tune language models. His emphasis
on code clarity over abstraction aligns with how many practitioners prefer to learn.

## See Also

- [[transformer-architecture]] — the architecture covered in his GPT lectures
- [[large-language-models]] — the model family his educational work focuses on
- [[geoffrey-hinton]] — researcher whose group he was associated with at Stanford
