PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Andrej Karpathy

Andrej Karpathy is a researcher and educator whose work connects computer vision, language models, and small software projects that readers can inspect. His Stanford doctorate and CS231n teaching with Fei-Fei Li preceded roles at OpenAI and Tesla. At Tesla from 2017 to 2022, he led computer-vision work for driving systems with the engineering team. He returned to OpenAI, then left in February 2024 for personal projects. His public work includes step-by-step neural-network lessons, the Eureka Labs education plan, nanochat, and the phrase vibe coding. In May 2026, he announced joining Anthropic to work on pretraining and AI-assisted research. He denied a departure rumor in July.

Now at
Anthropic
Works
25
Citations
56,091
h-index
19

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.

Photo of Andrej Karpathy

Timeline

  1. Stanford, 2014–2015

    Research and teaching

    Karpathy studies images and language and teaches CS231n with Fei-Fei Li.

  2. 2015–2017

    OpenAI’s early team

    He joins the lab’s founding research team.

  3. 2017–2022

    Tesla vision

    Karpathy leads computer-vision work with teams handling data, networks, and deployment.

  4. 2023–2024

    OpenAI and independent work

    He returns to OpenAI, then leaves for personal work and announces Eureka Labs.

  5. 2025

    Public models and coding

    His nanochat project and vibe-coding account provide concrete examples of teaching and experimentation.

  6. May–July 2026

    Anthropic

    Karpathy announces joining Anthropic and later denies a rumor that he left.

Sources and credits

Photo: Gladwin Analytics, via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY 3.0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.

  1. Andrej Karpathy: personal biography karpathy.ai. Checked 9 October 2026.
  2. Stanford CS231n, Winter 2015 cs231n.stanford.edu. Checked 9 October 2026.
  3. Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions cs.stanford.edu. Checked 9 October 2026.
  4. Introducing OpenAI, 11 December 2015 openai.com. Checked 9 October 2026.
  5. Karpathy's human ImageNet test, 2 September 2014 karpathy.github.io. Checked 9 October 2026.
  6. micrograd github.com. Checked 9 October 2026.
  7. Neural Networks: Zero to Hero github.com. Checked 9 October 2026.
  8. Introducing Eureka Labs, 16 July 2024 eurekalabs.ai. Checked 9 October 2026.
  9. Stanford PhD thesis record, 2016 purl.stanford.edu. Checked 9 October 2026.
  10. Karpathy announces his OpenAI return x.com. Checked 9 October 2026.
  11. Karpathy confirms his OpenAI departure x.com. Checked 9 October 2026.
  12. Tesla AI Day 2021 youtube.com. Checked 9 October 2026.
  13. Karpathy starts Eureka Labs x.com. Checked 9 October 2026.
  14. Karpathy announces joining Anthropic, 19 May 2026 x.com. Checked 10 October 2026.
  15. Nicholas Joseph welcomes Karpathy to pretraining, 19 May 2026 x.com. Checked 10 October 2026.
  16. Karpathy denies leaving Anthropic, 26 July 2026 x.com. Checked 10 October 2026.
  17. Noam Brown’s original question, March 2026 x.com. Checked 10 October 2026.
  18. No Priors episode with Karpathy, 20 March 2026 youtube.com. Checked 10 October 2026.
  19. Nathan Lambert’s excerpt of Karpathy’s answer, 21 March 2026 x.com. Checked 10 October 2026.
  20. Secondary cleaned transcript of No Priors episode gist.github.com. Checked 10 October 2026.
  21. Karpathy introduces nanochat, 13 October 2025 github.com. Checked 10 October 2026.
  22. Karpathy’s 2025 year in review karpathy.bearblog.dev. Checked 10 October 2026.
  23. Karpathy’s original vibe-coding post, February 2025 x.com. Checked 10 October 2026.