Andrej Karpathy
Founder, Eureka Labs
Andrej Karpathy is the founder of the AI-education startup Eureka Labs, a founding member of OpenAI, and the former director of AI at Tesla. His open teaching materials and reference implementations have trained a generation of AI engineers.
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Born in Slovakia and raised in Toronto, Karpathy completed his PhD at Stanford under Fei-Fei Li, where he created CS231n, the university’s hugely popular deep learning course. He was a founding member of OpenAI in 2015 before Elon Musk recruited him in 2017 to lead Tesla’s Autopilot vision effort as director of AI.
After five years shipping neural networks into production cars, he returned to OpenAI briefly in 2023–2024, then founded Eureka Labs in 2024 to build an AI-native education company. His open-source work — including nanoGPT and the Neural Networks: Zero to Hero lecture series — is among the most influential teaching material in the field.
Karpathy’s essays and talks routinely reframe industry debates; he coined the term "vibe coding" in early 2025 to describe conversational, AI-driven software development. His independent educator-analyst position gives his assessments of model capability and cost unusual weight with developers.
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