Andrej Karpathy
Founder · Eureka Labs
AI researcher and educator, founder of Eureka Labs, former Director of AI at Tesla and founding member of OpenAI.
Who Is Andrej Karpathy
Andrej Karpathy is one of the most influential figures in modern deep learning — equally known for his research and for making that research understandable to everyone else. He was a founding member of OpenAI, then led the AI and Autopilot Vision team at Tesla as Director of AI, before returning to OpenAI and later striking out on his own.
What He Built
At Tesla, Karpathy oversaw the neural networks behind Autopilot — the perception stack that turns raw camera feeds into a model of the road. At OpenAI he worked on foundational deep learning research during the lab’s early years.
In 2024 he founded Eureka Labs, an “AI-native” education company aimed at building a new kind of school where AI teaching assistants work alongside human instructors.
Why He Matters
Karpathy’s lasting impact may be educational. His Stanford course CS231n trained a generation of computer vision practitioners. His “Neural Networks: Zero to Hero” video series and projects like nanoGPT and micrograd strip large language models down to a few hundred readable lines of code, turning intimidating systems into something a motivated developer can actually understand and rebuild.
He also popularized the term “vibe coding” — describing the increasingly common workflow of building software by conversing with an AI rather than writing every line by hand.