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 16 July 2024 Karpathy announced in his X account, that he starts a new AI+Education company called Eureka Labs.[28]