Andrej Karpathy: OpenAI Co-Founder & Vibe Coding Creator
The AI researcher who coined 'vibe coding', led Tesla's Autopilot Vision, co-founded OpenAI, and now works at Anthropic on model pretraining.
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Andrej Karpathy is one of the world’s most influential AI educators: a founding member of OpenAI, former head of AI at Tesla, the instructor who taught Stanford convolutional networks, and the person who coined the term “vibe coding” in 2025. In May 2026, he joined Anthropic. Facts verified September 18, 2026.
| Who | AI researcher, since May 2026 on Anthropic’s model pretraining team; previously OpenAI (2015-2017 and 2023-2024), Tesla (2017-2022), Eureka Labs (2024) |
| Born | October 23, 1986, Bratislava (39 years old); moved to Toronto at age 15 |
| Education | computer science and physics at University of Toronto (2009), master’s at UBC (2011), PhD at Stanford (2015) under Fei-Fei Li |
| Known for | CS231n course at Stanford, Autopilot Vision at Tesla, “Zero to Hero” series, coining “vibe coding” (February 2025) |
| Recognition | MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 (2020), Time 100 AI (2024) |
From Rubik’s Cube to Stanford
He was born in Bratislava and moved with his family to Toronto at age 15. Before becoming a researcher, he was a YouTube star: starting in 2006, his badmephisto channel with Rubik’s Cube solving tutorials gathered over 9 million views and was used by future speedcubing champions. He studied computer science and physics in Toronto, completed his master’s at UBC, and earned his PhD at Stanford under Fei-Fei Li, combining image recognition with natural language. He created and taught Stanford’s first deep learning course, CS231n, which grew from 150 to 750 students in two years.
OpenAI, Tesla and Return
In December 2015, he was part of OpenAI’s founding team as a researcher. In June 2017, Elon Musk brought him to Tesla as director of AI and computer vision for Autopilot, where he led the team until July 2022. In February 2023, he returned to OpenAI, and a year later, in February 2024, he left again. In July 2024, he founded Eureka Labs, an education company whose first product was the LLM101n course; in parallel, he publishes the “Zero to Hero” series, where he builds language models from scratch on camera. On May 19, 2026, he announced he was joining Anthropic, where he leads the pretraining research team.
Vibe Coding and What Karpathy Says About Programming
In February 2025, he described on X a working method where “you surrender to the vibes,” describe to an agent what it should do, accept everything and don’t read the code; he called it vibe coding and the term caught on across the industry, also as a warning. He emphasized that it’s a mode for prototypes and experimentation, not for code you’re responsible for. What this looks like in practice with Cursor and Claude Code, I describe in separate articles, and the debate about whether AI will replace programmers in the article Cursor, Copilot or Windsurf if you can’t code.
Google · Your sourcesQuantslant higher in your Google - one clickAdd to preferred sources →Frequently Asked Questions
How old is Andrej Karpathy?
39. He was born October 23, 1986 in Bratislava; he holds Slovak and Canadian citizenship.
Does Karpathy still work at Tesla?
No. He left in July 2022. Since May 2026, he has worked at Anthropic.
Where should you start learning from Karpathy?
With the “Zero to Hero” series on YouTube (in English, from neural network basics to building your own GPT) and with the CS231n course materials, which Stanford makes publicly available.
Sources verified September 18, 2026: Wikipedia EN “Andrej Karpathy” with citations (Time, MIT Technology Review, Anthropic announcement from May 19, 2026), karpathy.ai.
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