Andrej Karpathy Born: Influential AI Researcher

Summary

Andrej Karpathy is reported as having been born on October 23, 1986, in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, now Slovakia. He is a Slovak-Canadian computer scientist and AI researcher specializing in machine learning, computer vision, and deep learning. Karpathy completed a bachelor's degree in computer science and physics at the University of Toronto in 2009, a master's at the University of British Columbia in 2011, and a PhD at Stanford University in 2015 under Fei-Fei Li, with a thesis on connecting images and natural language. He co-founded OpenAI as a research scientist from 2015 to 2017, later directing artificial intelligence and Autopilot vision at Tesla from 2017 to 2022. Karpathy returned to OpenAI briefly, joined Anthropic in 2026 on its pre-training team, and founded Eureka Labs, an AI-native education company. He taught Stanford's influential CS231n course on convolutional neural networks and has created widely viewed educational content on neural networks. His work has helped shape modern AI applications in industry and academia.