Andrej Karpathy is an AI researcher and widely followed educator. According to his personal site, he was “a research scientist and a founding member at OpenAI” from 2015 to 2017, then served from 2017 to 2022 as “the Director of AI at Tesla,” where he led the computer vision team behind Tesla Autopilot.
His site states that he later returned to OpenAI, where he “built a new team working on midtraining and synthetic data generation,” and that he now creates educational videos on AI on his YouTube channel. Earlier, during his PhD at Stanford, he designed and was the primary instructor for CS231n, described on his page as the first deep learning class at Stanford, focused on convolutional neural networks for visual recognition.
For business readers, Karpathy is notable both for hands-on leadership of large-scale AI systems and for making the technical foundations of deep learning accessible to a broad audience.