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Andrej Karpathy
Photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Andrej Karpathy

Founding OpenAI member, former Tesla Autopilot lead, now pretraining research at Anthropic

Teaches deep learning from first principles — his neural-network and LLM lecture series are among the clearest technical explanations available anywhere. Coined "vibe coding" in 2025.

YouTubePublishes occasionallykarpathy.ai
#AI#deep learning#LLMs#teaching#engineering

Read them in their own words

Published elsewhere, not by me — so you get real context beyond the name and the title.

PodcastDwarkesh PodcastOctober 2025

Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away

A builder's case for why the timelines you read in headlines are too short.

Key arguments & positions

  • Coined "vibe coding" (2025) to describe prompting AI models conversationally instead of writing code directly.
  • Believes near-term AI progress will keep concentrating around frontier pretraining and post-training research at major labs.

Accomplishments

  • Founding member of OpenAI (2015, returned 2023–2024).
  • Led Tesla's Autopilot Vision team, 2017–2022.
  • Taught Stanford's CS231n, growing enrollment from roughly 150 to 750 students.
  • Founded the AI-education startup Eureka Labs (2024).
  • Joined Anthropic in May 2026 to lead a pretraining research team.

Papers & key writings

Links

Jobs

What they've said in public about careers, hiring and work. Each point links to its source.

  • Career advice

    Said children should spend about 80% of their study time on math, physics, and computer science, because those subjects build a "thinking skill core" — not because the content matters, but because they teach you to reason through hard problems. Everything else can be added later.

    No Priors podcast (via report), July 2026

Timeline

  1. 2015Publishes "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks".
  2. 2017Becomes director of AI at Tesla, leading Autopilot vision.
  3. 2022Releases nanoGPT, a minimal GPT training codebase.
  4. 2023Publishes the "Let's build GPT" and Zero to Hero teaching series.
  5. 2024Founds Eureka Labs to build AI-native courses.

In the library

FreePerson to Follow
AI & Assistive Tools

Andrej Karpathy (YouTube)

Deep, from-scratch explanations of neural networks and large language models.

Why I recommend it: Start here if you want to actually understand AI rather than just use it.

#ai#ai-tools#expert#free#learning#llm#machine-learning#person-to-follow#youtube
youtube.comAdded Aug 30, 20260 opens

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