Andrej Karpathy
TL;DR: Andrej Karpathy is a leading AI researcher, educator, and engineer best known as a founding member of OpenAI, former Director of AI at Tesla, and the creator of nanoGPT and nanochat, open-source projects that make large language models accessible to everyone.
Andrej Karpathy by Sora
Andrej Karpathy is a computer scientist, educator, and entrepreneur whose work has shaped the foundations of modern artificial intelligence. Renowned for his expertise in deep learning, computer vision, and neural network training, Karpathy bridges academic research, industry innovation, and open-source education, helping define how machines learn to see, think, and communicate.
Born in Slovakia and raised in Canada, Karpathy earned his undergraduate degree in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, where he studied under Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer of deep learning. He later completed his Ph.D. at Stanford University under Fei-Fei Li, focusing on deep neural networks for image recognition and language understanding. His early research introduced key advances in convolutional and recurrent neural networks, laying the groundwork for the multimodal AI systems we see today.
Karpathy was a founding researcher at OpenAI, contributing to the organization’s early breakthroughs in large-scale neural architectures and reinforcement learning. His work emphasized making AI development transparent, safe, and widely beneficial, principles that continue to guide OpenAI’s mission.
In 2017, Karpathy joined Tesla as Director of AI, leading the company’s computer vision and autonomous driving teams. There, he spearheaded the development of advanced neural networks that powered Tesla’s self-driving technology, overseeing the transition from hand-coded logic to end-to-end machine learning systems trained on vast real-world data.
After leaving Tesla, Karpathy returned to the open-source community, focusing on making AI education and experimentation more accessible. In 2023, he released nanoGPT, a minimal, readable open-source implementation of a transformer-based generative model, a project that quickly became a global educational tool for understanding how GPT-style models are trained. Building on its success, Karpathy launched nanochat in 2025, a full-stack open-source ChatGPT-style pipeline that allows users to train, deploy, and interact with conversational AI models on a single 8×H100 node, reinforcing his mission to demystify advanced AI systems.
Karpathy’s career reflects both scientific precision and a deep commitment to openness. Through his writing, teaching, and open-source projects, he continues to inspire a generation of researchers and developers to explore AI with curiosity, creativity, and responsibility.
Founding member of OpenAI, contributing to the lab’s foundational deep learning and reinforcement learning research
Director of AI at Tesla, leading development of large-scale computer vision systems for autonomous driving
Creator of nanoGPT (2023), a compact and educational implementation of a GPT-style model
Creator of nanochat (2025), a minimal full-stack ChatGPT-style pipeline for training and deployment
Ph.D. from Stanford University, with research bridging vision, language, and neural network design
Instructor for Stanford’s CS231n course, one of the most popular and influential introductions to deep learning
Advocate for open-source AI and education, empowering developers to understand and build their own large models.
Global educator and thought leader, simplifying complex AI concepts for students, engineers, and researchers alike
