Andrej Karpathy
Born 1986 · Age 39
Slovak-Canadian computer scientist specializing in deep learning and computer vision; founding member of OpenAI; former Director of AI and Autopilot Vision at Tesla; educator and founder of Eureka Labs.
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Life & Career Timeline
Born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia
Andrej Karpathy was born in Bratislava, then Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia).
Moved with family to Toronto, Canada
Karpathy and his family emigrated to Toronto when he was 15.
Started YouTube channel 'badmephisto'
Began posting Rubik's cube tutorials and other videos on the channel badmephisto; these tutorials later gained wide use among speedcubers.
Completed BSc, University of Toronto
Earned bachelor's degrees in Computer Science and Physics (double major) from University of Toronto.
Completed MSc, University of British Columbia
Completed a master's degree at UBC working on learning controllers for physically-simulated figures under adviser Michiel van de Panne.
Started PhD studies at Stanford University (approx.)
Began PhD in Computer Science at Stanford under Fei-Fei Li, focusing on convolutional/recurrent networks and vision+language.
UBC MSc project: locomotion and curriculum learning
Master's research on curriculum learning for motor skills and locomotion controllers (acrobot/quadrupeds).
Google Research internship (summer)
Summer internship at Google on large-scale unsupervised / supervised deep learning for videos (listed on his CV/timeline).
NIPS 2012 paper on unsupervised feature learning
Co-authored 'Emergence of Object-Selective Features in Unsupervised Feature Learning' (NIPS 2012).
ICRA 2013 / TACL 2013 publications
Published work on object discovery in 3D scenes (ICRA 2013) and grounded compositional semantics for image–sentence mapping (TACL 2013).
Google Research internship (summer)
Summer internship at Google on large-scale supervised deep learning for videos (Sports-1M related work).
NIPS 2014: Deep Fragment Embeddings paper
Co-authored 'Deep Fragment Embeddings for Bidirectional Image-Sentence Mapping' (NIPS 2014).
CVPR 2014: Sports-1M / large-scale video classification
Published 'Large-Scale Video Classification with Convolutional Neural Networks' (Sports-1M dataset, CVPR 2014, oral).
Launched several open-source JS deep learning libraries
Published ConvNetJS, REINFORCEjs, tsnejs and other web-ready demos/tools to bring deep learning to the browser and web demos.
Created arXiv-sanity project
Launched arxiv-sanity to help search and sort ML arXiv papers (early widely-used tool among ML researchers).
DeepMind internship (summer 2015)
Interned at DeepMind on the deep reinforcement learning team (summer internship listed on CV).
Primary instructor for Stanford CS231n (first offering)
Co-designed and was primary instructor of CS231n: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition (Stanford's first deep learning course); class launched and posted online.
PhD thesis completed: 'Connecting Images and Natural Language'
PhD work on the intersection of NLP and computer vision under adviser Fei-Fei Li; thesis titled 'Connecting Images and Natural Language' (thesis cited as 2016 in some sources, defended by 2015 timeline).
Launched arXiv-sanity publicly (widespread adoption)
arXiv-sanity became a popular tool to search, sort and curate the rapidly growing ML arXiv corpus.
Published 'Deep Visual–Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions' (CVPR 2015)
Seminal paper combining CNNs and RNNs to generate image captions and align image regions to sentence fragments (CVPR 2015, oral).
OpenAI founded / Karpathy becomes founding member
OpenAI publicly launched in December 2015; Karpathy is among founding members and began working as a research scientist.
CVPR 2016 / DenseCap & workshop talks
Oral presentations and invited talks including 'DenseCap: Fully Convolutional Localization Networks for Dense Captioning' and Deep Vision workshop appearances.
Published 'DenseCap' (CVPR 2016, oral)
Dense captioning work (Fully Convolutional Localization Networks for Dense Captioning) — efficient dense image captioning model and dataset evaluations.
CS231n course growth milestone (2016)
Stanford CS231n enrollment grew to ~330 students in 2016 (course popularity increased significantly).
CS231n enrollment milestone (2017)
Stanford CS231n grew to ~750 students by 2017, making it one of Stanford's largest classes.
OpenAI research scientist role ends (left OpenAI to join Tesla)
Karpathy left his research scientist role at OpenAI to take the Tesla position (OpenAI tenure 2015–2017).
Co-authored PixelCNN++ (ICLR 2017)
Contributed as co-author to PixelCNN++ paper (ICLR 2017) — improvements to PixelCNN generative models.
Media recognition and profiles (NYT, Wired, Verge, MIT Tech Review)
Featured in multiple prominent outlets highlighting work on image captioning, ImageNet benchmarking, and AI education influence.
Hired by Tesla as Director of AI / Autopilot Vision
Joined Tesla to lead neural networks for Autopilot and Full Self-Driving vision; reported to Elon Musk.
Keynotes and industry talks (multiple)
Spoke on building Software 2.0 stack (Spark-AI 2018), RE•WORK Summit, and other industry events; prominent industry educator and speaker.
Spoke at Tesla Autonomy Day
Presented on AI for Full-Self Driving at Tesla's Autonomy Day (Tesla event advancing its autonomy roadmap).
Named MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35
Recognized by MIT Technology Review as one of the Innovators Under 35 for 2020.
Took multi-month sabbatical from Tesla (approx.)
Took a several-months-long sabbatical from his role at Tesla (publicly noted prior to eventual departure).
Announced departure from Tesla
After returning from sabbatical, Karpathy announced he was leaving Tesla in July 2022.
Public educational content: YouTube videos on neural networks
Created and published accessible educational videos (e.g., 'Neural Networks: Zero to Hero'), continuing public educator role.
Rejoined OpenAI (second tenure)
Announced via social post that he was joining OpenAI again (reported Feb 9, 2023).
Eureka Labs advocates AI teaching assistants; criticism arises
Eureka Labs pushed for AI teaching assistants as part of its model; this drew criticism over privacy and loss of personal teacher-student connection.
Named in Time's 100 Most Influential People in AI (2024)
Included in Time Magazine's 2024 list of 100 Most Influential People in AI.
Launched Eureka Labs first product: LLM101n
Eureka Labs' initial course offering was LLM101n — an undergraduate-level AI/LLM course designed by humans with AI teaching assistants.
Public rollout: 'Zero to Hero' LLM fundamentals series
Expanded educational content with the 'Zero to Hero' series covering LLM fundamentals as part of Eureka Labs' offerings.
Profiled in TIME's feature on influential AI people
Featured in Time Magazine's AI 100 issue and related profile pieces (Sept 2024 feature cited).
Left OpenAI (second departure)
An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed Karpathy had left OpenAI on Feb 13, 2024.
Founded Eureka Labs (AI + Education startup)
Announced on X that he started Eureka Labs, an AI education company focused on AI-native curricula and AI TAs.
Coined the term 'vibe coding'
Described 'vibe coding' to characterize how AI tools enable hobbyists to build apps/websites by prompting rather than traditional coding.
YouTube channel milestone: >9 million total views (as of June 2025)
Karpathy's badmephisto / educational videos reached over 9 million cumulative views by June 2025 (source-cited metric).
Key Achievement Ages
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