Andrej Karpathy

AI Researcher and Educator

Andrej Karpathy makes neural networks and large language models understandable through public teaching, code, and technical explanations. He was a founding member of OpenAI, led Tesla’s computer vision work as director of AI, and later returned to OpenAI. His Stanford teaching and independent educational material connect research concepts to implementation, making him a useful guide to how modern AI systems are built and used.

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Photo: Gladwin AnalyticsCC BY 3.0 · Displayed in grayscale

At a glance

Focus: AI research and education
Earlier roles: OpenAI founding member; Tesla director of AI
Education: Toronto BSc; UBC MSc; Stanford doctoral research

Sources checked 25 October 2026. Selected career background and milestones.

Career, in context.

Selected research, leadership and career milestones, newest first.

2024
Expands independent AI teaching
Karpathy’s personal timeline marks 2024 onward with educational videos, including technical neural-network lessons and general-audience explanations of language models and their practical use.
Source: Andrej Karpathy ↗
2023
Returns to OpenAI
Karpathy returned to OpenAI and built a team working on midtraining and synthetic data generation, according to the career timeline on his personal website.
Source: Andrej Karpathy ↗
2017
Becomes Tesla director of AI
Karpathy began leading computer vision at Tesla, covering data labeling, neural-network training, and deployment for Autopilot during a tenure that continued until 2022.
Source: Andrej Karpathy ↗
Dec
2015
Joins OpenAI’s founding team
OpenAI’s launch announcement named Karpathy among its founding research engineers and scientists, placing him in the original team assembled to pursue broadly beneficial artificial intelligence.
Source: OpenAI ↗
Jun
2015
Studies recurrent network behavior
Karpathy, Justin Johnson, and Fei-Fei Li investigated recurrent network representations and prediction errors, examining how character-level language models capture structure and where they fail.
Source: arXiv / paper authors ↗
Jan
2015
Teaches Stanford CS231n
Stanford’s winter 2015 CS231n course listed Karpathy and Fei-Fei Li as instructors, teaching convolutional networks for visual recognition through lectures, assignments, and projects.
Source: Stanford University ↗
2011
Begins doctoral research at Stanford
Karpathy began doctoral research at Stanford with Fei-Fei Li, studying neural networks and applications spanning computer vision, natural language processing, and the relationship between them.
Source: Stanford Computer Vision Lab ↗
2009
Completes Toronto undergraduate degree
Karpathy completed a bachelor’s degree at the University of Toronto, with majors in computer science and physics, before moving into graduate research in machine learning.
Source: Andrej Karpathy / Stanford slides ↗