Andrej Karpathy, born on October 23, 1986, in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia), is a Slovak-Canadian computer scientist known for his groundbreaking work in artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning, and computer vision. At the age of 15, he moved with his family to Toronto, Canada.
He earned bachelor's degrees in Computer Science and Physics from the University of Toronto in 2009, followed by a master's degree from the University of British Columbia in 2011, where he focused on physically simulated characters. In 2015, Karpathy completed his PhD at Stanford University under the guidance of Fei-Fei Li, with a dissertation exploring the intersection of natural language processing and computer vision.
Karpathy was a founding member of OpenAI, working as a research scientist from 2015 to 2017. He then joined Tesla in June 2017 as the director of artificial intelligence and Autopilot Vision, where he led the development of the company's computer vision system for autonomous driving. He left Tesla in July 2022 after a sabbatical.
In February 2023, Karpathy rejoined OpenAI, but departed a year later in February 2024 to focus on personal projects. In July 2024, he launched Eureka Labs, a company focused on the intersection of AI and education, with the goal of creating innovative educational tools and experiences.
Karpathy has consistently contributed to education and open-source communities. He co-authored and taught Stanford’s first deep learning course, CS231n: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition, which became one of the university’s most popular classes. He also shares knowledge through open-source projects and educational content, including videos and tutorials, helping to make AI more accessible to a wider audience.
