Andrej Karpathy
Andrej Karpathy is a Slovak-Canadian computer scientist, and AI researcher, and was also a key member of the founding team atOpenAI, Director of AI atTesla.
Andrej is currently focused on AI education through his company,Eureka Labs.Founded in 2024, Eureka Labs is dedicated to teaching AI concepts, with a focus on large language models (LLMs). Before this, Karpathy was closely involved with OpenAI, where he played a key role in building a team and improvingGPT-4 for ChatGPT.He returned to OpenAI in 2023 after an initial stint from 2015 to 2017 as a founding member and research scientist, before leaving again in 2024 to concentrate on his projects.
Karpathy is widely recognised for his work at Tesla, where he served as the Senior Director of AI from 2017 to 2022. He led the computer vision team responsible for Tesla’s Autopilot system, including in-house data labelling,neural network training, and deploying the system to Tesla's fleet. His team’s efforts focused on developing Full Self-Driving capabilities, significantly improving driver assistance and safety. Notable events where he presented this work include Tesla AI Day in 2021 and Tesla Autonomy Day in 2019, providing insights into the company’s progress in AI-driven autonomous systems.
In addition to his work in industry, Karpathy has made notable contributions to AI research and education. He is the author and primary instructor ofStanford University’sfirst deep learning course, CS 231n: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition. This course, which started in 2015, rapidly grew in popularity, becoming one of the largest classes at Stanford, with hundreds of students enrolling annually.
Karpathy’s research has produced influential publications in the field of deep learning. His works include research on deep reinforcement learning, convolutional and recurrent neural networks, and image captioning systems. Some of his most cited papers include"DenseCap: Fully Convolutional Localization Networks for Dense Captioning","PixelCNN++: A PixelCNN Implementation", and his PhD thesis,"Connecting Images and Natural Language". His work on large-scale video classification using convolutional neural networks also gained significant attention in the AI community.
Karpathy completed his PhD at Stanford University in 2015, under the supervision of Fei-Fei Li at the Stanford Vision Lab. His research focused on the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing. During his academic career, he also worked with prominent researchers such as Daphne Koller, Andrew Ng, and Sebastian Thrun. Karpathy holds a master’s degree from the University of British Columbia, where he worked on machine learning for agile robotics, and a bachelor’s degree in computer science and physics from the University of Toronto.
