Andrej Karpathy

Andrej Karpathy (born 1986) is a Slovak-Canadian AI researcher with a résumé that reads like a history of the deep-learning era: a Stanford PhD under Fei-Fei Li, founding member of OpenAI in 2015, director of AI at Tesla from 2017 to 2022 where he led Autopilot vision, a return to OpenAI in 2023, and the founding of the AI-education startup Eureka Labs in 2024. His YouTube lectures on building neural networks from scratch have taught LLM internals to millions.

Naming the new era of programming

Karpathy has a knack for compressing paradigm shifts into a sentence. In 2017 he described neural networks as “Software 2.0.” In January 2023 he tweeted that the hottest new programming language is English. Then, on February 2, 2025, he fired off what he later called a throwaway shower-thought tweet describing a new kind of coding where you converse with an AI, accept its suggestions, and “forget that the code even exists.”

“Vibe coding” escaped the tweet within days. It became the banner for a wave of AI-built software — Pieter Levels shipped a viral vibe-coded flight simulator within three weeks — and Collins Dictionary named it word of the year for 2025. Karpathy himself has been characteristically precise about its limits, describing it as fine for throwaway weekend projects while professional work still demands review and understanding — a distinction writers like Simon Willison have expanded on at length.

Unlike most AI optimists, Karpathy grounds his enthusiasm in the craft itself: he builds and teaches these systems at every level of the stack, and his measured takes — bullish on AI as a tool, skeptical of agent hype on timelines — are treated as calibration points across the industry.