Karpathy was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia)[9][10][11][12] and moved with his family to Toronto when he was 15.[13] He completed his Computer Science and Physics bachelor's degrees at University of Toronto in 2009[14] and his master's degree at University of British Columbia in 2011,[14] where he worked on physically-simulated figures (for example, a simulated runner or a simulated person in a crowd) with his adviser Michiel van de Panne.
He authored and was the primary instructor of the first deep learning course at Stanford, CS 231n: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition.[17] It became one of the largest classes at Stanford, growing from 150 students in 2015 to 750 in 2017.[18]
Karpathy is a founding member of the artificial intelligence research group OpenAI,[19][20] where he was a research scientist from 2015 to 2017.[18] In June 2017 he became Tesla's director of artificial intelligence and reported to Elon Musk.[21][7][22] He was named one of MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35 for 2020.[23] After taking a several-months-long sabbatical from Tesla, he announced he was leaving the company in July 2022.[24] As of February 2023, he makes YouTube videos on how to create artificial neural networks.[25]
It was reported on February 9, 2023, that Karpathy had announced he was returning to OpenAI.[26]
A year later on February 13, 2024, an OpenAI spokesperson confirmed that Karpathy had left OpenAI.[27]
On July 16, 2024, Karpathy announced on his X account that he started a new AI education company called Eureka Labs.[28][29] Their first product was the AI course, LLM101n.[30] He also has a broader educational effort, the "Zero to Hero" series on LLM fundamentals.[31] The company also advocates for AI teaching assistants, a concept which has been criticized due to data privacy concerns and the removal of personal connection between teacher and student.[32]
In February 2025, Karpathy coined the term vibe coding to describe how AI tools allow hobbyists to construct apps and websites, just by typing prompts. He also remarked in an X post that English is going to be the world's most famous programming language.[33]
