Andrej Karpathy

Co-founder & CEO, World Labs; Special Advisor on AI, Stanford

Karpathy took his Stanford PhD under Li with a thesis on connecting images and natural language — the problem ImageNet had made tractable, and the one that would reappear, transformed, inside multimodal models a decade later. He also inherited her conviction that teaching is part of research rather than a duty beside it: CS231n, which he helped build and teach, became the on-ramp for one generation of deep-learning engineers, as his lectures and nanoGPT are for the next.

en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org

Co-founder, Safe Superintelligence Inc.

Both are named in OpenAI's December 2015 launch announcement — Sutskever as research director, Karpathy among the founding research staff — and both eventually walked out of the building they helped fill. They mark the two exits from the same room: one toward trying to control what was built, the other toward making it legible to everyone else.

techcrunch.com · en.wikipedia.org

Founder, Oak Lab & Professor, University of Alberta

When Sutton told Dwarkesh Patel that LLMs are a dead end, Karpathy answered with an essay: we are not building animals that learn from the world, we are summoning ghosts distilled from humanity's text — and the ghost is a practical answer to the cold-start problem the animal has never solved. Sutton holds the pure position; Karpathy the engineer's amendment. Between them runs the field's live question: is pretraining a foundation, or a ceiling?

karpathy.bearblog.dev