AI 2026: Andrej Karpathy’s Next Big Project
The OpenAI cofounder and former head of Tesla's self-driving division is a skilled engineer and public communicator who is now focused on using AI to improve education and other passion projects.
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Andrej Karpathy is a computer scientist, AI researcher, and expert in computer vision who was a founding member of OpenAI and then head of Tesla’s Autopilot driver assistance and self-driving car program from 2017 to 2022, where he was responsible for building the team and technology that today powers Tesla’s autonomous driving capabilities. Self-driving vehicles promise to be one of the most immediate and consequential areas where AI progress will obsolete human labor in the physical world. Whereas Google’s Waymo and other self-driving efforts have attempted to scale up safe autonomous taxis using multiple types of redundant sensors and extensive reference mapping of the environment, Elon Musk has instead pursued a “vision-only” approach focused on achieving self-driving AI software perceptive enough to maneuver vehicles using only cameras. Karpathy was handpicked by Musk to build this technology for Tesla and largely succeeded.