Andrej Karpathy

QuHarrison Terry presents Andrej Karpathy with the WTF Innovators Award for his contributions to deep neural networks and computer vision, and continued research into making AI more effective for humanity.

The WTF Innovators Award recognizes excellence at the precipice of societal change, with the inaugural class focusing on AI innovators. As a memento, each of the 34 awardees are gifted a featured song by QuHarrison Terry and Genesis Renji. We present “Andrej Slide”, produced by Nimso, to Andrej Karpathy.

Karpathy is perhaps most well-known for his work at Tesla as the Senior Director of AI, leading the computer vision team that designed Tesla Autopilot. Prior, he was a research scientist and founding member of OpenAI. In early 2023, he rejoined the OpenAI team to work on a JARVIS-like project.

Andrej Karpathy is core to developing systems that allow computers to ‘see.’ His dedication to this field of research is the reason that we’re nearing autonomous self-driving cars on the road. Now that he’s back working at OpenAI on a JARVIS-like project, I imagine that he’s working on multimodal language models and imbuing GPT with vision. He gave the world Autopilot and is now working on an intelligent assistant at OpenAI, which is why he should be on everyone’s radar. – QuHarrison Terry.

While a graduate student at Stanford, Karpathy extended techniques for building convolutional neural networks (CNNs). These are systems that broadly mimic the neuron structure in the visual cortex. This research expanded the visual abilities of an AI system to recognize more than one object in an image, and thus comprehend what was happening in an entire scene. These advances were critical to the success of Tesla Autopilot, which utilizes dozens of these deep neural networks in unison.

Andrej Karpathy later created the first deep learning class at Stanford, CS231n, which still runs today and is one of the largest classes at Stanford.